Latest / But We Had A Plan | A Disaster Nomad Podcast / Ep 05: The key to localisation - Just shut up and listen
Transcript
- Jessica van Schalkwyk: Hey, hi, hello, and welcome back to But We Had a Plan. My name is Jess, and I'm going to be your host for today. And we're going to be digging into a concept that is incredibly topical at the moment. And that is localization and co-creation. Now, to get this started, I want to share something I have shared on a previous episode and with a few of my colleagues in the past. And that is a piece of advice that I received very early in my career that Has stayed with me ever since. Now, it was not a particularly sophisticated piece of advice, and it definitely wasn't wrapped up in a pretty bow or a leadership framework. And I am pretty certain that you are not going to find this one written down in any humanitarian competency models. And that advice was just shut up Which admittedly is slightly awkward advice for someone who now has a podcast. But the point wasn't that I should never speak. The point was that I needed to learn how to listen before assuming that I had the answer. And the longer I've worked in disaster management and humanitarian response, the more important that lesson has become. Because we are working in an increasingly Complicated risk environment. We're dealing with things like climate change, rapid urbanization, inequality and conflict. We've got environmental degradation and these fragile systems that are all then interacting in ways that make disasters so much harder to anticipate and manage and recover from. And we also have increasingly sophisticated technology that we are Having to learn and having to implement. And then there are these global frameworks, and we have risk models and international coordination mechanisms, and then you've got consultants and experts and an astonishing number of acronyms. And yet, one of the most important things that I've learned is that there is one thing that is Remarkably simple in helping us get it right. And that is the people closest to the risks are often closest to the solutions. And that's not because technical expertise don't matter. Of course, they do, but it's because people living with risk understand things about their communities that somebody arriving from the outside just cannot Understand in the same way. They understand relationships and the history of the area and those informal systems that allow for things to get done. They know where the tension points are and they know the shortcuts that need to be taken. They know the workarounds and they know the places that people actually go when there is a fire, Rather than that evacuation point that someone drew on a map and hopes that people listen to. They also know the people that everyone in the community trusts and the the people that can be used in issuing warnings and that people are going to actually listen to. They also know what kinds of warnings work and what kinds don't. And sometimes the most Technically impressive thing that we can do at the beginning of an intervention really is to just shut up and listen. There are two examples that have stuck with me over the years and bring me back to this concept time and time again. So the first one is a story about ants. And I had a colleague that I used to work with and he shared a story about how his grandmother knew that there was a drought coming before the meteorologists said there was a drought coming. Now we all looked at him like you are crazy. and then we realized actually, let's pay attention to the story. Now he had shared a story about how his grandmother had been taught that when the ants disappear, it means that there is drought coming. And that was because the ants were going deeper into the ground to areas that were cooler and there was more moisture in the ground. And so they were preparing for that drought before we had our normal signals of hey, a drought is coming. The other story that I come back to is the one where when we were working the US Virgin Islands after hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria, we saw that A of the islands had been devastated. But there were a number of homes on the islands that were these round-shaped buildings that looked like a traditional African rondavel. Now, US Virgin Islands has got a very complicated history, and I am not going to proclaim to be an expert on it because I don't know that community that well. But what I did learn there was that There is a lot of history around slave trade and people being brought from Africa to the US Virgin Islands. And with that, they brought their knowledge and their learnings from their communities. And one of the things was to build in these round structures. And what that allowed was when these hurricanes came through, there were no corners on the buildings. And so, what that meant is that the wind went around instead of tearing things off. And that knowledge and that insight had just been passed down between community members, but they knew that was going to be such a good way for them to build in an area that is impacted by these severe wind events and these severe wind storms, these hurricanes. And so that information being shared and listened to is such a prime example of when we tap into communities and listen to what communities have to say, we can find solutions that are going to be so much better than if we come in with this outsider's perspective. And the same goes for things that may seem almost insignificant from the outside. Things like ant behavior, you know, changes in animals and water and wind and vegetation, where we position buildings, knowledge about where flooding has happened historically. It's the knowledge passed down from one generation to another that I think today we would probably describe as that indigenous knowledge or traditional knowledge or sometimes even local knowledge. And I don't think we can have a meaningful conversation about localization without acknowledging its value. Because one of the mistakes our sector can make is assuming that knowledge becomes legitimate only once someone turns it into a data set. That it's scientific knowledge that matters or technical modeling that matters. But does Experiential knowledge not carry more weight than that. The real opportunity isn't to decide which one is superior. I think what we need to be asking is what happens when we put them together. Because resilience becomes far more powerful when scientific knowledge and then technical capabilities and lived experience Are allowed to inform one another. So what is that? And what are we going to talk about today? Well, what I want to get into is how local people are frequently the first to act when something happens. They are also the people who remain when emergency deployments end and those funding cycles close and then people have moved away. But despite decades of conversations about quote unquote empowerment and participation and localization, we are still too often positioned towards the end of the decision making process rather than at the beginning of it. And communities are consulted and they're surveyed and they're invited to workshops and they're asked to validate findings, but sometimes that intervention or funding model or The indicators have already been decided before the community even walks into the room. And consultation after the decision has been made is not localization or co-creation. And so in this episode, I want to unpack what localization actually means, why there is growing discomfort around that word itself, and why community leadership matters to resilience. I also want to look at why, despite the years of commitments, the humanitarian sector still struggles to genuinely shift this dynamic and what meaningful localization might actually look like in practice. Because I don't think there is only a moral conversation. I think it's actually an operational one that we need to be having. Now, the world humanitarian localization agenda has gained significant momentum since 2016, and that was because of the World Humanitarian Summit, particularly through the Grand Bargain. One of the commitments was an ambition to provide at least 25% of humanitarian funding to local and national responders as directly as possible, alongside broader commitments to strengthen the role of local actors and improve participation by crisis affected people. At its simplest, localization is about shifting power and resources and decision making and leadership closer to the people and organizations that are operating within crisis affected context. And this includes local government and local NGOs, community-based organizations, traditional structures, faith-based organizations, local responders and volunteer networks and Crucially, communities themselves. And there is a phrase frequently associated with the localization agenda, and that is making it as local as possible and as international as necessary. And I think the intention behind that is important. It doesn't say international organizations have no role, because it's very clear that they do. But international organizations can bring funding and surge capacity, And technical expertise and resources that would be incredibly difficult for one community or organization to generate alone. And so when we pair that with communities being the leaders, we create a much stronger approach in the space. And the question is not should we be going with international or local? It's much more about what role should each actor play and who should be leading when decisions need to be made and who should be leading which decisions. I think we need to address something that is important in this conversation, and that is whether the word localization is even the right word. And this is where it gets a little bit interesting and sometimes a little bit tricky and uncomfortable because there is an increasingly important debate around the term localization itself. And if we think about the word for a moment, if something needs to be localized, Where do we assume the center is? It's not just semantics, the language can unintentionally preserve the hierarchy we are supposedly trying to change. And it can imply that legitimacy and expertise and authority begin somewhere international and they need to be transferred outward to something called the local. And that still positions international institutions as the original holders of power and local actors as these kind of recipients. And that does raise an uncomfortable question about why are we talking about transferring power to people who may have had legitimate authority in their own communities long before we arrive. And that is one reason we're seeing increasing use of language such as locally led humanitarian action or community-led response, co-leadership and co-creation. And different contexts use different language and even recent localization research has deliberately adapted terminology based on what local partners themselves find meaningful. I personally like co-creation because I think co-creation changes that starting assumption. It isn't I have the solution, how do I involve you? But it's rather looking at we each know things the other doesn't. So What can we build together? And that implies a sharing of design, decisions, accountability, and ideally ownership as well. But I think our sector can become so absorbed in finding the perfect terminology that we forget to change the actual practice. And that's why I'm still going to use the term localization throughout the conversation today. And maybe a year from now we will collectively use something different. And that's okay because words do matter, but my greater concern is what those words represent. And meaningful localization is not handing responsibility to local organizations without handing them resources. And it's not asking communities for their opinions after we have actually already decided on a program and the projects and what that's going to look like. And it's not Hiring a local organization to implement somebody else's agenda, and then we say, it's local leadership. It's also definitely not putting a local logo next to an international logo on a report and declaring that the system is transformed. It's about how much more practical can we be with this? Who speaks, who decides, whose knowledge counts, who controls the resources, Who takes the risks and who still owns the outcome when everybody else leaves? Now, there's an example that I have used a lot. So if you know me and we've spent time talking about this, I will have shared this before. And I think this is one of the simplest ways to explain the problem. So imagine you go to a doctor, you walk into the consultation and you sit down, and before you have even said a thing, the doctor hands you a prescription. And you say, Sorry, I I haven't actually told you what's wrong yet, but he or she turns around and says, No problem, I've treated lots of people before. We would think that is utterly absurd. You haven't described the pain. They haven't asked about your symptoms or your medical history or the circumstances or anything about the situation. And yet, humanitarian and development interventions can sometimes do something very similar. We arrive with the program and the funding conditions and the indicators and the implementation model and everything laid out and sometimes even What we are going to define as success, and then we ask the community what they think about it. that isn't diagnosis, that's validation, and consultation after the diagnosis is definitely not co-creation. But why? Why local leadership? Why does local leadership matter? Well, localization is often framed as an issue of justice. And to a large extent, it is. People have a fundamental right to have agency over decisions that affect their own lives. But I don't think we should stop there because localization is also about. Effectiveness and there is growing evidence around the benefits of local and community leadership, particularly around contextual knowledge and access and trust and locally appropriate decision making. But I want to be intellectually honest here. The humanitarian system is still better at measuring whether localization activities Happened than actually measuring what difference localization made for affected communities. And that evidence gap is increasingly being recognized in current research. And I actually think that's important Because the answer isn't, well, we don't have perfect evidence, And so therefore localization doesn't work. I think the answer is we need to get much better at measuring what community leadership changes. Recent work on community-led response makes a particularly interesting point because most traditional humanitarian impact frameworks ask, what did The humanitarian organization achieved for the community. But newer approaches are starting to ask: what did communities achieve themselves and what role did formal actors play in enabling that? That sounds like a subtle shift, but it isn't. It actually completely changes where agency sits. Because suddenly the community isn't merely the endpoint of our theory of change. They're an actor within it. And there are several reasons the operational logic is so strong when we have local leadership. First, it's speed. Local actors don't need to fly in, they don't need to Have an induction into the community. There isn't a need for somebody to explain the geography. And they are already there. And that matters because disasters don't wait for coordination structures to become operational. The second is contextual relevance. And solutions that are technically sound But don't make sense locally is still a bad solution. But communities understand livelihood patterns and social networks that might never appear in a formal assessment. Third is trust. During disasters, trust becomes operational infrastructure. A technically Perfect warning that somebody receives but does not trust is not an effective warning. Information often travels through relationships a lot long time before it travels through these formal systems. And an incredible example is from the recent Nepal floods, where a school headmaster received WhatsApp messages or SMSs from people who were upstream telling him that there is this flood coming and he needs to get kids out of the way. And he managed to save over a thousand people doing that. Now, in that example, it may not have been trust because I know there were issues with the systems actually breaking down. But what it does show is he never received a formal warning, but he trusted the people who issued him a community warning and that allowed for decisions to be made. It was that informal system based on trust that allowed for people to be moved out the way. The fourth point is continuity. Now, external responders will deploy into a community and they're there for a short time. They carry out their responsibilities and then they leave. But community members remain and they are there for the long haul. And they also remember what has happened in their community time and time again. So They know what happened last time. They know what worked and what failed and what was missed. And they can use that in helping to change things before the next incident occurs. And that makes such a difference in the continuity of skill and knowledge and also in resilience building. The fifth piece is capability. If responses consistently bypass local systems, then we may actually unintentionally weaken the systems that need to cope when the next event happens. But when responses build capability locally, every crisis can potentially strengthen preparedness for the next one. The last thing is ownership. And when people help design something and they understand why it exists and then see themselves reflected in it, they are far more likely to sustain it. And that is a very big difference between delivering a project and helping something actually take root. This brings me to a question that I am still grappling with. And it's if it makes so much sense to localize our operations, why are we still struggling with it? And this is it's a really uncomfortable thing to wrestle with because nearly a decade after the World Humanitarian Summit, the system is still grappling with localization. And why? I think there are these barriers that we know about, and there's some that are probably still unknown. But the first biggest one for me is follow the money. At the heart of localization sits a very basic question, and that is who controls the resources? And the answer isn't particularly encouraging. The latest traceable data shows that funding reaching local and national actors remained well below the ambitions that we set at the Grand Bargain. And development initiatives have estimated that all independently trackable, direct and indirect humanitarian funding to local and national actors represents about eight point four percent of trackable humanitarian flows Or six point seven percent when available UNHCR partner data is excluded for comparison The numbers become even more complicated depending on how direct and indirect funding are defined and what organizations self-report, which also highlights another problem. Nearly 10 years into the localization agenda, we still struggle to answer with complete confidence how much humanitarian money ultimately reaches local actors and under whose control. And that is not an accounting footnote. It is fundamentally about power because whoever controls the funding usually retains enormous influence over things like priorities and indicators and risk tolerance and ultimately what is then deemed a success. The second area that I think is a blocker is risk aversion. And international organizations and donors will often say we support localization, but we need accountability. And accountability is huge. We are most definitely not arguing against that. But we have to examine whether the standard is being applied equally. Because sometimes local organizations are required to prove capacity, financial controls, and institutional maturity to a level that international organizations have taken decades to develop. And there's a big contradiction here. We can trust local responders to enter dangerous environments and we trust them to navigate communities and identify vulnerable people. And we trust them enough to save lives. But when the conversation moves to money or decision making authority suddenly we become very nervous. And that's something that we really need to reflect on. The third one is short project cycles. And this comes down to time. Trust takes time. Institutional capacity takes time. Relationships take time to build. But humanitarian funding frequently rewards short implementation cycles and visible outputs. How many shelters? How many people trained? How many food parcels? These are important measures, but resilience often develops through things that are so much harder to count. And that is the pieces like relationships, confidence, trust, institutional memory, local leadership, social cohesion. And those things are very, very rarely Going to fit within a 12-month funding cycle. And so we do have to ask are we designing programs around the time resilience requires or around the time our funding system actually allows? Now there is another piece in here, and that is whose expertise count. And this is a knowledge problem. Our sector still sometimes carries and It carries a big hierarchy when we look at expertise. Technical modeling becomes evidence. Community experience becomes quote unquote anecdotal. International expertise becomes capacity. Local knowledge becomes something we capture. And again, think about those rondavels. Think about the ants. Local knowledge isn't infallible, but neither is international expertise. The strongest systems are the ones that are combining both. The next item I want to look at is our operating models. And many humanitarian organizations were built around deployment. So a disaster happens, external teams mobilize, they bring people, resources, and expertise. And in a major emergency, that surge capacity can be life-saving. But the problem isn't deployment itself. The problem is when external leadership becomes the default operating model. Because then communities can become participants in somebody else's response rather than leaders within their own. And some organizations are actively changing this. And the fundamental shift is not necessarily international actors disappearing, but rather international actors increasingly asking how they can amplify local capacity and capability rather than replacing it. And that's a very, very different role. If we look at localization in practice from delivery through to enablement, for decades humanitarian success has often been measured by delivery. So, how much did we deliver? How quickly, how many? But resilience requires us to look at what remains capable once we leave. Meaningful localization requires us to move from doing things for communities towards doing things with communities and ideally supporting communities and things that they are already doing for themselves. There are a few principles I think really do matter here. And the first is community-defined priorities. So starting with how people themselves experience risk. Not the problem as the project proposal defined it. And so we need to look at questions like what is worrying you? what happens here? what makes you feel unsafe? What is already working? and crucially, what does resilience look like to you? Because a community might define successful resilience completely differently to a donor framework. It's also investing in local systems. So during an emergency it can be incredibly tempting for us to Create parallel structures because they're faster. And sometimes temporarily that's necessary. But every time we bypass these existing local structures, we should be asking what happens to that system when we leave. Because efficiency that we see today should not be creating a dependency going forward. There's also resourcing of local institutions, and we cannot keep saying you should lead, but we keep the resources somewhere else. Authority without resources is not power. All it is is responsibility. And there is a very big difference between those two. The next thing is treating knowledge as partnership, scientific knowledge, local knowledge, indigenous knowledge, historical knowledge. technical expertise, lived experience. These don't need to compete. One of my favorite examples of this comes from Kenya. And it was a participatory scenario planning that's been used in Kenya to bring together communities, meteorological services, government, and other actors to interpret seasonal climate forecasts and understand what those forecasts actually mean for people's livelihoods and decisions. So instead of scientists simply producing information and sending it outward, the process creates a space where scientific Climate information and local experience are interpreted together. And the approach became mainstreamed as a seasonal decision-making platform across all 47 Kenyan counties. And I love this example because nobody has to choose between science and community knowledge. The value comes from putting them in conversation with one another. And that is co-creation. Vanuatu gives us another important lesson. It was among the early countries to establish a national localization baseline, examining where decisions were made, how partnerships worked, how funding flowed, and how much influence local actors actually held. And a progress review published in 2026 looked at how localization had evolved since 2019 and the baseline that was set. And what I find Useful about that work isn't that it doesn't present localization as a neat success story. It looks at progress and at the systemic constraints that remain. Because localization is not binary. You don't wake up one morning And announce, congratulations everyone, we are now localized. It's it's ongoing. You continually have to ask where does that power sit? Whose voice is shaping decisions? Who controls funding? And what has actually changed for communities? So, what actually needs to change? If we're serious about localization, I think there are five shifts that we need to make. And these are deliberately simple. One, follow the money. If we want local leadership, we need to change how money moves. And that means more direct funding pathways, more flexible funding, more multi-year support, and more local influence over how funding is allocated. The second is share the table. representation is not the same as power. Inviting somebody into a meeting doesn't mean. They influence the decision. So look at your steering committees, your program boards, your coordination structures, your design committees, and ask who has an actual vote. Who is controlling the agenda? Community engagement should not begin once the strategy has already been written. Third, stop treating capacity as one-directional. We talk endlessly about building local capacity. And sometimes local organizations absolutely do need support in finance and governance, reporting and safeguarding or in in technical systems. But localization also requires international organizations to build capacity, capacity to listen, capacity to partner differently, capacity to work across cultures. What if every capacity building program asked, what do we need to learn from the community? That's mutual capacity. Fourth, measure what communities value. And this is really a big one for me. We love our indicators. But resilience can't only be defined as what is easiest to count. A community might see improved resilience in stronger relationships, in leadership confidence, or improved access to information. And recent work on community-led response is starting to explicitly recognize the outcomes communities generate through their own collective action rather than measuring what formal organizations deliver to them. So maybe one of our most important monitoring questions could be as simple as: how will you know that your community is more resilient? And then Are we measuring that? Fifth is get comfortable giving up control. And this is, I think, going to be the hardest one because localization isn't primarily technical, it's cultural. It's about mindset and moving from saviorism to solidarity, from this idea of beneficiaries to participants, and actually rather from participants to leaders. And it's going to require a lot of humility. And it requires organizations to accept that meaningful participation might change the thing they originally intended to do. And that is the test. If consultation can never change the outcome, it isn't really consultation. Meaningful localization involves a degree of uncertainty because shared power means that you cannot completely control the answer. And this really is not about international actors disappearing. I want to emphasize this. Localization is not about international organizations packing up and going home. That is a wildly oversimplistic view of it. There are crises that overwhelm national and local capacity. There are specialist capabilities, communities can never be expected to magically possess. And there are resources that require international mobilization. So this isn't looking at the situation and saying international bad, local good. That's not even remotely useful. It is what is the most appropriate role for each actor and can international organizations Move from being the automatic center of the response to being one part of a larger ecosystem. Localization isn't about us stepping back and you know, handing the script to someone and saying, well, figure it out yourself. It's about us creating space for local leadership. And the bigger shift is from Delivery to co-creation. So let me come back to where I started. The best advice I received early in my career: just shut up. At first, that sounded like advice about listening, and it was. But I think now that I've spent a few years in the sector, I understand that it was also advice about power. Because you can't genuinely listen While simultaneously assuming that you're the person with the answer. The future of disaster governance depends on our ability to rebalance power, center the lived experience, and build. with communities rather than simply for them. And this isn't only about doing the morally right thing. It is about effectiveness, sustainability, and building systems capable of responding to an increasingly complex risk environment. Resilience grows from agency, ownership, capability, relationships, trust, and dignity. Localization is not charity and it's not symbolism, and it cannot mean handing communities more responsibility while keeping the authority and the resources and the decision making somewhere else. Communities do not necessarily lack capacity. Often what they lack is access to the power and platforms and resources that they require. And our job isn't to arrive and build resilience for communities, it is to help create the conditions in which communities can strengthen and adapt and lead the systems they already rely on. Because when communities lead, there is a significant shift. Knowledge remains in the community. Capability remains. Relationships remain. And resilience has a much better chance of outliving the project that funded it. So for me, that question isn't should we localize? It's are we actually willing to do what meaningful localization asks of us to listen, to share, to question whose expertise we privilege. To give up some control, to build trust, to create space, and sometimes to remember one of the simplest pieces of advice I've ever been given. Just shut up and listen.