Introduction to Special Issue: Localization and the Aid Industry

The first two articles in this special issue provide an overview of the localization debates and detail the inherent power dynamics that make localization challenging for peacebuilders and humanitarian negotiators.

Our first article, by Thania Paffenholz, Philip Poppelreuter, and Nicholas Ross, from the Association for Inclusive Peace, details the history of the localization debate through the last two “local turns.” They demonstrate that the debate continues to get stuck at criticisms of the liberal peace and give a detailed overview of what we know about why most bilateral and multilateral efforts at localization are not successful. Their work highlights the most salient ideas put forward by the scholarly literature, as well as from practitioners from the Global South, for a productive way forward to overcoming the obstacles to localization. The authors underscore the persistent power asymmetries between the Global North and the Global South, which stem from colonization. Their contribution opens a path toward a “third local turn in peacebuilding,” one that acknowledges inherent power asymmetries to concentrate on mitigation strategies that acknowledge the need to decolonialize international aid. This means a radical turn that involves more than technical steps to achieve localization, but also includes attention to wider structural and power dynamics among donors and beneficiaries. The article calls for courageous and creative efforts in pushing for radical behavioral and institutional changes to the way aid is currently structured and administered. The authors argue that for real change in this third local turn, donors must stand up to the challenge of attending to these embedded and systematic power imbalances and colonial structures that limit efforts at localization.

Alain Lempereur, a negotiation and conflict resolution scholar‐practitioner at Brandeis University and the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, contributes a unique analysis on the power dynamics across various stakeholders in complex humanitarian negotiations. His article explores how humanitarian frontliners can leverage the power of getting things done with additional urgency to support people in need, furthering academic understandings of responsible negotiation power, as well as negotiation practice. He asks what the various access points are for humanitarian negotiators to deal with diverse stakeholders in international organizations, national elites, and local communities. Lempereur explores the various principles and practical examples of how to develop and leverage each of these relationships, which leads to effective negotiated outcomes for humanitarian support in conflict‐affected areas. He calls out three areas where sources of power can be considered: in relationships, in problem‐solving approaches, and in process facilitation. In particular, he highlights how local knowledge and cultural sensitivity are key approaches to successful negotiations, and how negotiation practice and strategies are anchored in each context, instead of generalized theory and template approaches.

Our next two articles dive into the challenges of accountability and its impact on monitoring and evaluation (M&E) practices in international aid programming that further impede localization efforts.

Eliza Urwin, Aisalkyn Botoeva, Rosario Arias, Oscar Vargas, and Pamina Firchow, from Search for Common Ground and Everyday Peace Indicators, co‐authored our third article, which unpacks the current prioritization of technocratic knowledge in M&E practice and suggests an alternative approach to indicator generation. As a group of practitioners and researchers, they take on a key challenge within the localization debate related to the concept of accountability, which is driven by donor institutional, bureaucratic, and legal obligations. Current M&E practices tend toward top‐down and technocratic approaches at measurement that speak almost exclusively to donors. The authors argue that the consequence is the systematic exclusion of the voices of communities affected by violence and conflict. Within this context of the international aid industry, they propose the Grounded Accountability Model (GAM), an approach that can be used by civil society organizations for guiding the design and monitoring of interventions. GAM facilitates accountability for both donors and civil society organizations by co‐creating indicators based on the lived experiences of everyday people in the communities that are being served by international aid. The article explores how GAM can be operationalized at different levels of national organizations that align with activist principles derived from the communities, as well as in larger international NGOs that may grapple more with the complexities of donor funding frameworks set by multilateral and bilateral donors. The authors conclude that GAM offers diverse stakeholders—including civil society organizations, program developers, policymakers, government agencies, and communities—indicators that can be acted upon and can transform the way accountability is understood in the international peacebuilding system.

Along similar lines, but focused more on evaluation, Landon Hancock, a professor in the School of Peace and Conflict Studies at Kent State University, contributes insightful reflections on the concept of accountability by diving into a case study about the strengths and weaknesses of large donor agency interactions and local peacebuilding initiatives. He brings in his experience as the Local Peacebuilding Advisor to the United Nations Peacebuilding Fund's Monitoring and Evaluation Team (UNPBF), where he focused on designing accountability loops with a broader range of stakeholders not included in the UNBPF's current evaluation methodologies. Hancock provides an overview of concepts such as accountability, local ownership, and human motivation as lenses through which to analyze current evaluation methodologies for peacebuilding initiatives. He then presents the community‐based monitoring and evaluation (CBM&E) approach that he developed for the UNPBF, which encourages and facilitates agency among peacebuilding beneficiaries and addresses the dearth of rich data and understanding about how peacebuilding interventions are perceived by conflict‐affected beneficiaries. Hancock leaves us with key questions about the possibilities for piloting this approach while cautioning us of several challenges, including the need for key perspective changes of those who sit in positions of power. A positive end result of a successful CBM&E process would be a shift from being responsible for outputs to being responsible for inclusive processes, and to trusting that those processes will provide the kinds of positive results that satisfy both the beneficiary community and donors in northern capitals.

The next article provides us with a rich analysis of the relationship between time and power and how these affect donor organizations and localization efforts. Aaron Stanley of the City University of New York and Lesley Connolly of the Life & Peace Institute start with a simple question: If international aid wants to localize, why isn't more money being distributed directly to locally based organizations? The authors posit that the failure of donors to reform their organizational and operational processes prevents the localization effort from taking true form. Part of the reason for this lack of reform relates to the role of time in funding cycles and the value donors place on productivity, efficiency, keeping to deadlines, and quick decision‐making. Stanley and Connolly demonstrate that in many cases the concentration on time has entrenched power dynamics, resulting in an aid system focused on short‐term grants that deliver quantitatively measurable results (as defined by the donor) as quickly as possible. They propose some solutions based on their experience working in the sector and that are rooted in different social processes and organizational and behavioral changes that can reduce friction or change individual incentives.

The final two articles focus on regional perspectives of the localization debate with a focus on emerging donors and a case study from Colombia.

The article by Agnieszka Paczyńska, a professor at the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution, George Mason University, provides an alternative viewpoint on the localization debate by taking a deeper look at the localization practices of two emerging donors, China and India. By analyzing China's and India's development and peacebuilding priorities in Africa, Paczyńska finds that neither country uses localization language or adheres to the donor push around current localization efforts. She argues that the principles of localization are embedded in emerging donors' priorities when engaging African governments, by their emphasis on nationally led and nationally owned development and peacebuilding. For these reasons, and their own domestic political configurations, these emerging donors do not place the onus on civil society actors and NGOs as a pathway for their localization efforts. Paczyńska shows points of convergence and divergence between emerging donors and traditional donors from the Global North, providing a nuanced assessment of the complexity of the donor landscape as donors seek to promote local ownership.

The final article, written by practitioners María Lucía Méndez from Fundación Ideas para la Paz and Leslie Wingender from Humanity United, situates the localization debate using Colombia as a case study. The authors highlight how this debate looks different in Colombia due to the country's strong state and civil society capacity to manage international funds. The authors provide an in‐depth perspective on the differential impacts that financing from international donors has across different national‐ and regional‐level organizations, creating silos and driving competition that inhibits these local organizations' ability to become leaders in social transformation. Méndez and Wingender provide a behind‐the‐scenes analysis of a partnership between a national‐level organization and a private American foundation based on principles of trust, horizontal partnership, and mutual learning. They unpack what it took to arrive at this model, including an analysis of the enabling conditions and risk factors. They conclude with a call for continued analysis and research on the impact that this new type of partnership model can have on funding and investing in local organizations and on moving the localization effort forward into a transformed way of engaging across diverse stakeholders in the international peacebuilding system.

This special issue of Negotiation Journal has set out to provide many perspectives on the challenges and obstacles that donors face in moving from their assertion of localization commitments to the realization of those commitments. A diverse set of authors has provided reflections and research from their areas of expertise and practice in order to explore these challenges from various angles and viewpoints. In these articles, we learn about the history of the localization debate in the peacebuilding field and the challenges for the future. As a whole, the issue provides critical insights into power dynamics in humanitarian negotiations, accountability, and monitoring and evaluation practices, as well as practical case studies and ideas about how we might begin to address these obstacles to localization. As expected, the theme of power runs throughout all these articles and illustrates the current inequities in the international aid system and the ways that donors continue to make decisions about what “is best” for their aid recipients based on consultations with governments that do not represent such recipients or have their best interests at heart. It is clear that a change is necessary, and has been necessary for a long time, and that this change must begin with a shift in donor practices—including donor incentives and accountability practices—and in bureaucratic systems in order to truly attend to those who suffer most.