Interview with Nils Carstensen

Words like ‘localisation’, ‘local’ and ‘global’ depend very much on your own point of departure, so could you start by telling us where you are seeing this from?

Nils: As we speak, I’m looking across the open space office of a Northern European-based NGO. This is an NGO which grew out of solidarity and collaborations between like-minded churches in Europe between the two world wars. Now, nearly a century later, it is a small/medium-sized international NGO working in development and humanitarian aid across the world. At first, it worked entirely through supporting local and national partner organizations, but from the mid-1990s onwards, it increasingly began asserting its own presence and built up a sizeable direct implementation in several countries.

Local2Gobal Protection (L2GP), where I work, is a small, semi-independent research and innovation initiative beholden to numerous stakeholders. But it is hosted by this international NGO and that is also where I (professionally speaking) grew up. So that’s where I’m talking from today: looking across a room full of colleagues straddling, and at times battling it out across the many dilemmas, opportunities, and challenges inherent to the current practise and debate around localisation. Observing how they try to balance what may feel like ‘the obvious and the right thing to do’ with demands such as conflicting perceptions of how best to act quickly and effectively, individual and institutional self-interests and donor opportunities and requirements.

So from that perspective – what does ‘localisation’ mean to you?

Let me start by stressing a basic but often overlooked fact: for as long as mankind has been faced with crises, people have been responding, whether as individuals, family members, community groups, local authorities or private businesses. So, when we now use the term ‘localisation’ as a catchphrase for a renewed emphasis on local and national institutionalised aid, we risk missing a crucial point: local response, in the general sense of the word, is very much NOT something new…. It is very much NOT something that suddenly appeared around the World Humanitarian Summit in 2016 or the associated Grand Bargain.

Affected individuals and their immediate surroundings usually are the first, the last – and often the most important – responders to a crisis. This is true in times of earthquakes, hurricanes, escalation of armed conflict, major outbreaks of diseases – or a slow onset drought. If this was not abundantly clear already, the response to the COVID-19 crisis has brought this fact to the fore again – with force¹.

Still, it seems that most professional aid actors have remained strangely blind to the value and importance of such spontaneous volunteerism and self-help – sometimes also referred to as solidarity, mutual aid or ‘response communitas’². Even if many of us probably know deep down that spontaneous mutual aid is as important for most crisis affected individuals’ survival, protection, and possible recovery as any outside assistance, we somehow can’t bring that knowledge into the planning and design of our responses. As professional aid workers, we often seem to be so preoccupied with our own proposals, interventions and reporting that almost anything that falls outside the scope of our Logical Frameworks/Theories of Change or proposals and reporting formats somehow just disappears from our field of vision.

Allow me to quickly point to a rather humbling fact here: according to the 2021 Global Humanitarian Assistance report³, on average, professional humanitarian actors only had USD 127 available for each individual in need – for an entire year. That figure includes the rather sizeable amounts which stay in our own systems for salaries, admin, security, quality assurance, compliance, reporting, overheads, etc. Even when recognizing that such an average figure is a crude and clumsy analytical tool, it still points to the fact that crisis-affected individuals’ own resources – along with those of their neighbours, communities and local authorities – appear to be instrumental to ensure basic survival – as has also been pointed out in research by ODI HPG⁴.

This just to remind us all – again and again – that local self-help of many different kinds have always been around and remain crucial in times of crisis. And, fortunately, whatever we say and do as professional aid workers, such spontaneous local response will always happen – whether we notice and appreciate it or not.

That said, the term ‘localisation’ rose to a newfound prominence around 2014 -16 – very much in the run up to, during and after the World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul. Since then, it has moved from being a bit of a sideshow to become part of mainstream humanitarian discourse and policy making – even if not yet incorporated in practice to nearly the same level.

As I see it today, ‘localisation’ is often used as shorthand to describe a move towards: 1) recognizing the importance and the added value of local and national actors and their response in a crisis, 2) increasing the amount and the quality of funding along with a greater role in leadership and decision-making around humanitarian responses for local and national actors. The latter was probably most noticeably captured in the Grand Bargain and Charter4Change ‘localisation’ commitments including among them to transfer 25% of all humanitarian funding as directly as possible to local/national actors.

Now – how well this has worked out in practice, despite all the global level commitments, conferences and promises, remains an entirely different story. Suffice it to say that if you track funding, quality of sub-granting agreements and real participation, the actual measurable progress towards these Grand Bargain commitments has been very modest – to the extent that you can measure it at all⁵.

So, if we go with the above understanding of ‘localisation’ – what is the difference between ‘localisation’ and terms like ‘locally-led responses’?

At L2GP, we began using the term ‘locally-led’ some eight years back in order to stress and distinguish a way of working (survivor- and community-led crises responses) where the majority of decision-making, funding and implementation is left to self-help groups formed among a given crises-affected population (protection groups, women’s associations, faith groups, etc.). We began using the term ‘locally-led’ because we saw that words like ‘participation’ or ‘community-based’, had become so diluted, that we felt it often did not translate to anything like meaningful ‘participation’ on the part of crisis-affected individuals⁶.

So, what we mean by ‘locally-led’ when we use it at L2GP, is that the majority of the funding, design and implementation is left to affected individuals and community groups to decide. For us, it was about tightening up the language and trying to make sure that when we, for instance, use the term ‘community-led’, we mean exactly what the words say – community led – rather than the kind of ‘participation’ where aid professionals allow for limited user participation and then proceed to call this a ‘community-based’ response. Rather, we reserve the term ‘community led’ for situations where a majority of the ownership and the decision-making on how a grant is spent rests, with adequate support and mentoring, with affected individuals and self-help groups.

What are some inspiring ways, for the aid sector, to support mutual aid and local solidarity initiatives, without changing their nature?

Over the last ten years we have worked with communities, CBOs and NGOs in a number of countries to develop a way of working whereby external actors can support spontaneous self-help efforts (mutual aid, local solidarity, etc.) by individuals and groups living through a crisis. We call this way of working ‘survivor- and community-led crisis response’ (sclr). On our website you can find papers and videos explaining how this is done – including numerous concrete examples of how this has worked out in countries like Sudan, Myanmar, Haiti, Palestine, the Philippines and Kenya. Many of these key resources, including the recent ODI HPN #84 and a brand new video tutorial on sclr, are available in Arabic, English, French, and Spanish.

I could list a multitude of concrete examples of how this approach works, but instead I’ll refer readers to our website – and here just mention a couple of quotes from users of the approach. A female member of a protection group in a small Bedouin village in the Palestinian West Bank saw a clear difference between the new and the old ways of working: “Previous NGOs behaved with village members as if they were teaching third-graders dictation”. She went on to explain how the new approach feels different: “It is like we all gather with the NGO staff to form our own grammar rules”. Users of sclr in Agusan (Mindanao) in the Philippines had this to say: “We feel in charge of our own interventions; it always feels good. Through meetings, we were able to determine if any project is destructive to our community”.

In Kenya, Darare Gonche, who leads a local CBO (Iremo), described her experience working in a community-led manner in this way: “If you give a stick to someone, it means they’ve been given power. Empowerment means letting them make decisions, giving them resources. Why do we hold on to the power? Release it! Let them use it!”

‘Survivor- and community-led crisis response’ is a practical, tested and proven way for aid actors to support spontaneous or more organised self-help initiatives by citizens, activists and groups. It does this by: 1) primarily supporting activities for the common good (collective needs and opportunities), while leaving it to household cash grants, etc. to target individual needs; 2) not destroying the positive aspects of self-help by trying to force such initiatives into becoming ‘mini-NGOs’; 3) helping to initiate changes in power dynamics around gender and also between individuals, communities, local authorities and aid actors, and; 4) recognising and supporting the importance and potential of spontaneous mutual aid, self-help, solidarity and community cohesion.
At the same time, this way of working makes it possible for external aid actors to comply with accepted humanitarian principles, standards and (donor) regulations.

In conclusion, at L2GP we believe that survivor- and community-led crisis response is a practical way for external aid actors to support people’s and small groups’ own responses as a crucial complement to other more traditional programming which remains important in many situations. For us, it’s not about either externally-led or locally-led ways of working. It is all about seeking complementary and mutually reinforcing ways of working – while being extremely cautious that ‘localisation’ does not become yet another vehicle for international actors to enforce their priorities, values and requirements on local actors.

‘Survivor- and community-led crisis response’ has evolved from the experience and perspective that a successful humanitarian response must recognise the importance of all relevant actors. It is about a response system which is designed and executed in a manner which recognizes and allows for all to contribute to their maximum at any stage of a response. That, in many ways, is what ‘localisation’ is about for me. Recalibrating the humanitarian system such that it does not only favour and privilege the big international agencies and INGOs at the expense of national, local and community-led responses. Instead, we must open up the system and significantly increase access to humanitarian funding and decision-making for local actors, including the contributions affected individuals and self-help groups have to offer in any given context.

For more details, practical experience & methodology please visit: www.local2global.info

1. Nils Carstensen, Mandeep Mudhar and Freja Schurman Munksgaard (2021/2022) ‘Let communities do their work – the role of community mutual aid and self-help groups in the Covid-19 pandemic response’ for upcoming issue of Disasters Magazine (Jan. 2022) – https://doi.org/10.1111/disa.12515
2. Matthewman, S. and S. Uekusa (2021) ‘Theorizing disaster communitas’. Theory and Society. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-021-09442-4
3. The Global Humanitarian Assistance Report 2021 – https://devinit.org/resources/global-humanitarian-assistance-report-2021/
4. Barnaby Willitts-King, Lydia Poole and John Bryant (2018), ‘Measuring the iceberg’, ODI HPG Working Paper – https://cdn.odi.org/media/documents/12540.pdf
5. Christian Els and Henrik Fröjmark, ‘Local funding flows and leadership: recent trends in 10 major humanitarian responses’, ODI HPN, Humanitarian Exchange number 79, May 2021 – https://odihpn.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/HE-79_Localisation_WEB-1.pdf
6. Justin Corbett, Nils Carstensen and Simone Di Vicenz, ‘Survivor- and community-led crisis response: Practical experience and learning’ ODI HPN #84, May 2021 – https://odihpn.org/resources/survivor-and-community-led-crisis-response-practical-experience-and-learning/