'Localisation' — Are We Using the Right Word?

There is a word that has dominated humanitarian and development discourse for well over a decade. It appears in donor strategies, conference agendas, and funding frameworks. It is held up as the answer to the long-standing critique that aid is too distant, too foreign, too disconnected from the communities it is meant to serve. That word is localisation.

And in the past year, as the international development sector has been shaken to its foundations - USAID dismantled, global Official Development Assistance falling by a historic 23% in 2025, humanitarian funding down by over a third[1] - that word has found a new and urgent lease of life: Do more with less, get closer to communities, cut out the expensive intermediaries. Localisation, we are now told with renewed conviction, is the future.

I have spent close to three decades working alongside refugee communities, and the longer I do this work, the more I find myself pausing at the word localisation. The aspiration behind it is correct, but the language itself, and the practice that has grown around it, falls short in ways that matter enormously, both for the communities we serve and for the integrity of the change we claim to be pursuing.

When we set up CALLS Network, the choice of those two Ls in CALLS was intentional. They stand for Locally-Led humanitarian action. Locally-led is not a synonym for localisation. In our minds, it is a deliberate correction of it.

The Inclusion Problem

Let us start with the most fundamental flaw in the localisation agenda, one that rarely gets the attention it deserves: the language itself excludes refugees.

When the sector talks about "local organisations" and "local leadership," the implicit reference is to host-country governments, local authorities, civil society (national NGOs, community associations). The refugees are not part of the locals. In the countries where they have sought protection, they are, at best, guests. They may speak a different language, practise a different faith, and hold a legal status that restricts their right to work, organise, and lead.

Refugee-led organisations occupy an almost invisible space in the localisation debate. They are neither the international actors that localisation seeks to move away from, nor the local actors it seeks to empower. They fall through the gap entirely.

When donors commit to localisation targets, that oft-cited but rarely met goal of channelling 25% of humanitarian funding to local and national actors,[2] refugee-led organisations are frequently not even counted in the denominator. UNHCR's own data gives us a revealing picture of the scale of this gap: “In 2024, UNHCR’ local and national actors received $694 million – 58% of all partnership funding and 24% of total programme expenditure. UNHCR expanded its Grant Agreement modality, supporting 285 partners [led by forcibly displaced and stateless persons]”.[3] With a ceiling of $12,000 per agreement, the mathematics of localisation speak for themselves. Even for the UN Refugee Agency, localisation largely means partnerships with host-country national authorities and organisations, not with the displaced communities themselves.

The localisation agenda, as currently constructed, can strengthen host-country civil society while leaving refugee-led organisations precisely where they have always been: under-resourced, under-recognised, and on the margins of decisions made by others about their own futures.

The Power Problem

The independent review of the Grand Bargain by the Humanitarian Policy Group (HPG) concluded that “in terms of increasing the actual influence that affected people have in the design, planning and delivery of aid at country level, there is as yet no evidence of a substantive shift in practice on the ground to deliver ‘an accountable humanitarian response, where decision-making power is in the hands of those affected by crisis’ as asserted by the IASC.”[4]

Localisation has made headways on the what - more funding commitments, more partnership frameworks, more policy language - while the who decides has remained largely undisturbed. Ten years on, localisation is still not the transformation that the humanitarian system requires.

What "Locally-Led" Actually Demands

Locally-led means something categorically different. It cannot be merely reduced to where implementation happens; it is about where agency sits.

A locally-led approach, as CALLS Network understands and practises it, means that the communities most affected by a problem are the ones who define what that problem is. The problem definition belongs to the people living it. From there, locally-led means that solutions, implementation, and the metrics of success all emerge from and remain accountable to those communities. It also means that we work in equitable partnerships where refugee-led partners set the agenda and see in CALLS Network a trusted partner to exchange openly and in confidence with.

For refugee-led organisations, this distinction is fundamental. These organisations exist because refugees themselves identified gaps that no one else could fill, in the ways to mobilise communities, empower women, build youth leadership and support refugees with disabilities, in how to deliver mental health and psycho-social support when formal clinical services are inexistent, in the most effective ways to prevent and respond to gender-based violence, as well as in livelihoods to reduce dependency on assistance, and  in the simple dignity of being served by someone who has lived what you are living. They built the response with whatever was available to them, long before any donor arrived – and have continued doing so after so many humanitarian actors closed down their offices and left last year.

It also demands something different from donors in how they give. Multi-year commitments, so that refugee-led organisations can plan and retain staff rather than lurching from one short funding cycle to the next. Unrestricted and core funding, so that organisations can invest in the infrastructure that makes them effective (governance, financial systems, leadership development) rather than chasing project-specific grants that leave no room to grow. Due diligence frameworks designed with emerging and informal organisations in mind. At CALLS Network, wherever we can, we work to connect refugee-led partners directly to donors, rather than positioning ourselves as an intermediary.

Investing in strengthening refugee-led organisations and the communities they are rooted in, is what it means to invest in locally-led. It is a fundamentally different posture.

This is not a fringe position. Across the sector, a growing number of funding frameworks and donor networks are converging on the same conclusion: that proximity to communities is not enough, and that genuine agency must be the measure. The Australian International Development network (AIDN) Better Giving Framework, for instance, places Invest in Local Leadership as its first principle, a deliberate choice of language that CALLS recognises far more readily than the standard localisation framing.[5]

A Better Architecture

None of this is to suggest that international actors — UN agencies, international NGOs, technical assistance providers — have no role to play. They do, and an important one. The international protection, humanitarian, development and peace systems that refugee communities and their leaders navigate are complex. They require access to and understanding of governmental structures, diplomatic engagement, international and national legal frameworks, large-scale emergency logistics, as well as highly sophisticated expertise in legal protection, health, education, entrepreneurship and social and economic inclusion. These are areas where technical expertise, institutional capacity and access genuinely matter. No single party has all the answers. A functional complementarity – rather than tension - between the various actors in the humanitarian ecosystem is necessary for a better architecture.

What CALLS Network advocates for is an equitable and trust-based relationship, in which refugee-led organisations are recognised as essential actors with the infrastructure, the funding, and the decision-making authority to lead where they are best placed to lead.

Rebuilding a humanitarian system that was not designed with refugees as participants, let alone as leaders, is genuinely complex. The two Ls in CALLS represent a commitment to that complexity as a space to be navigated together, with refugee-led organisations finally holding real agency within it.

Notes

[1] See: OECD, A Historic Decline in Foreign Aid: Preliminary 2025 ODA Data, April 2026. Global ODA fell by 23.1% in 2025, with humanitarian assistance declining by 35.8%. See also: Andrew Sherriff, The Consequences of International Aid Cuts, ECDPM, April 2026.

[2] The "25% by 2020" commitment was made at the World Humanitarian Summit in 2016 under the Grand Bargain, a compact between major humanitarian donors and agencies. Progress has remained well below target. See: Grand Bargain Annual Independent Report, IASC, 2023.

[3] See: UNHCR Global Report 2024.

[4] See: Metcalfe-Hough, V., Fenton, W. and Manji, F. (2023) The Grand Bargain in 2022: An Independent Review. HPG commissioned report. London: ODI. Available at: odi.org/en/publications/the-grand-bargain-in-2022-an-independent-review

[5] See: Australian International Development Network (AIDN), Better Giving Framework, Principle 1: Invest in Local Leadership. See: aidn.org.au/better-giving.