Paper details

Paper authors	Veronique Barbelet
In panel on	What is holding us back? Humanitarian Reform and the Shift to Locally-Led Response
Paper presenter(s) will be presenting	In-Person / Online

Abstract

The UN Secretary General’s statement in his report for the World Humanitarian Summit called for humanitarian action to be as local as possible, as international as necessary in a complementary manner. This call has triggered a whirlwind of initiatives, processes and debates among the humanitarian community. While on principle the humanitarian sector as adopted this call, the localisation agenda has created somewhat differing interpretations and understandings. Among others, a common discourse has emphasised that international humanitarian action in most instances remains necessary because local capacity is lacking. In this paper, we take a critical look at this discourse arguing that in fact defining capacity and assessing capacity is not a technical exercise and is subject to both trust and power dynamics making it a rather subjective process; we also argue that issues of capacity and capacity strengthening initiatives are not new to the humanitarian sector and yet have not necessarily resulted in more locally-led humanitarian action; finally, we propose that perhaps more than an issue of capacity, it is the interaction between local and international capacities that require further examination to identify those factors that support more complementarity between local and international actors and those that undermine complementarity.

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