Why localisation may require funders to change their own rules.
PositiveMinds | Positive Stories | Edition 081
Keeping paper records could put aid workers in Myanmar at risk. Yet a local organisation was required to retain them for at least five years, even after an audit. Its leaders asked whether the international funding agency would store the documents instead.
According to Anne Décobert and colleagues, the agency was afraid to accept them. It then agreed that digital copies would be sufficient.
What stayed with me was the local organisation’s challenge. A requirement became negotiable when the institution imposing it was asked to bear its consequences.
In The Paradox of Embedded Agency, I explored how institutions shape the people trying to change them. This account raises a more specific question. Could some approaches to localisation reproduce an institutional model by requiring local organisations to adapt to it?
Who does the adapting?
Imagine a national organisation receiving a larger grant. It can employ more people and undertake work it previously lacked the resources to support. To qualify, it adopts the funder’s planning tools and reporting procedures. Its staff learn how to meet the new requirements.
The gains are real. Shared procedures may also make the work easier. Yet most of the adjustment has happened on one side of the agreement.
This concern is not new. Drawing on fourteen months of work with a Ugandan NGO, Emanuela Girei examined how established management practices could narrow its scope for social change while reinforcing Western donors’ influence.
In a study of Cordaid’s Just Future partnerships, Dirk-Jan Koch and Axel Rooden identified a related risk. Drawing on literature and interviews, they found that localisation could favour larger national organisations able to meet donor requirements, at the expense of community-based groups.
These studies cannot establish a sector-wide pattern. They do suggest a question that funding totals alone cannot answer: are organisations gaining freedom to act, or gaining access on terms that require them to become more like the institutions funding them?
My concern is that we may be changing who can participate faster than we are changing the conditions of participation.
An inconvenient form is not evidence of colonial practice. The deeper concern is the hierarchy described in the Myanmar research:
International methods are treated as authoritative, while local knowledge must prove its worth against them.
Localisation can challenge that hierarchy. It can also carry it into more organisations.
What happens when local judgement challenges the rules?
A national organisation may choose the same accounting system as its international partner because it works well. Clear standards can protect a smaller organisation against arbitrary decisions. But insisting that local independence must look different from international practice would be another imposition.
The more revealing moment comes when the organisations disagree.
Suppose a partner proposes another way to account for its spending. It can explain how the method provides assurance while reducing danger to staff. Does that judgement change the agreement? Or does the partner receive another explanation of why the original requirement must remain?
I recognise the reassurance of a familiar procedure. As an institutional leader, I carry responsibilities for decisions whose consequences I cannot always see. But the duty to account for public money does not settle every question about how that duty should be met.
HelpAge Tanzania offers a useful counterexample to the idea that localisation merely reproduces existing arrangements. In a 2024 account of its transition from an international country office to an independent national organisation, its leader described challenging proposals that did not suit the context and gaining control over project decisions.
The same account described the work of establishing a local board and developing organisational policies. Independence involved building formal systems and contesting external control.
This was an account published by the organisation during its transition, not an independent assessment of lasting results. Still, it challenges a simple picture of localisation and decolonisation advancing at different speeds. Their relationship may depend on what happens when local judgement conflicts with international expectations.
For me, a useful test is whether that judgement can change a consequential decision, without putting the funding relationship at risk.
That cannot mean every local claim prevails. Communities also need ways to challenge their own organisations. Local authority can exclude people, and respect for difference cannot excuse discrimination or abuse.
What are we prepared to change?
This question goes beyond simplifying a form. It may concern who approves a programme, or whether an international intermediary is needed at all. Local leadership could require a different role for our own institution.
I would like to know which requirements we have revised because partners challenged them. More importantly, did the change survive the particular relationship? Or must the next organisation negotiate the same exception?
One possibility worth testing is a protected right to contest a requirement, with a reviewer agreed by both organisations and a clear route for changing the decision. Where the condition comes from a donor, the international organisation would take the challenge to that donor. It would need to explain what is legally required and what reflects its own preference.
Such an arrangement could fail. A formal right means little if using it threatens the next grant. Partners would need to judge whether they could use the process safely and whether its decisions carried weight.
The literature also challenges the limits of my argument. Surbhi Kesar and Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven’s work for Bond examines how development interventions can address apparent local deficiencies while leaving intact the economic processes producing poverty and exclusion.
A better partnership agreement cannot, by itself, undo those relationships. I would not want a useful administrative reform to become evidence that an institution had somehow completed decolonisation.
But we can plan to change our conduct without prescribing somebody else’s future. That plan could contain specific commitments about the authority we retain, with partners assessing whether those commitments give them greater freedom to decide.
I would also need to accept evidence that unsettles my own view. Partners may find greater independence through shared systems I have assumed to be restrictive. What matters is whether they have a real choice, including the ability to challenge those systems when they no longer serve the work.
My working view is that localisation is more likely to challenge colonial practices when international institutions become answerable to local judgement about their own conduct. A larger share of local funding may help. It cannot tell us whether that relationship has changed.
I return to the records in Myanmar. The local organisation had identified a problem and challenged the agency imposing it. The account does not establish whether the revised requirement became normal practice for others.
That is the question I would carry into the next partnership review:
When a local organisation changes our mind, what changes in our institution?
References
Décobert, A., Maung, P. P., Scott, A., & Wells, T. (2025). Compliance and coloniality: Aid bureaucracy and the failures of ‘localisation’ in Myanmar’s complex emergency. Disasters, 49(4), e70002.
Girei, E. (2016). NGOs, Management and Development: Harnessing Counter-Hegemonic Possibilities. Organization Studies, 37(2), 193–212.
Koch, D.-J., & Rooden, A. (2024). Understanding and addressing the unintended effects of aid localisation. Development in Practice, 34(3), 351–363.
HelpAge International. (27 March 2024). Account of HelpAge Tanzania’s transition to an independent national organisation.
Kesar, S., & Kvangraven, I. H. (2024). Decolonising economic development: The role of development sector. Bond.
