Trust in Localisation, Redefined

Ask why more humanitarian funding doesn't reach local organisations directly, and "donors don't trust local actors" is the answer you'll hear most often. It's not wrong, exactly. But it's incomplete, and it's usually only telling one part of a much larger story.

In our work, we see trust break down in five distinct ways:

• Funding: whether financial systems exist to justify direct, flexible support

• Decision-making: who actually sets priorities and leads

• Expertise: whose knowledge shapes programme design

• Risk-sharing: who carries the danger, and who carries the protection

• Perception: whether local capacity is judged on evidence, or on assumption

Each is solvable, but none are solved the same way.

Funding

Research across the sector points to a specific and solvable problem. A 2025 study in BMJ Global Health, alongside separate analysis from ODI, identifies restricted and heavily earmarked funding, compliance burdens that outstrip what many local organisations are resourced to manage, and real gaps in governance and financial control systems as the recurring, documented barriers, not an absence of goodwill on either side.

This distinction matters because it changes what the solution looks like. If the problem were simply attitude, the fix would be advocacy: convince donors to trust more. But the actual barrier is structural. Donors are, reasonably, cautious about extending flexible funding to organisations whose financial controls and governance systems they cannot easily verify. Many local and national organisations, in turn, are highly capable in their programming, but have rarely been given the support to build the institutional systems, board oversight, financial controls, and audit readiness that would let a donor extend that confidence.

Closing this gap is not about convincing anyone of anything. It is about building the specific systems that let trust follow naturally.

Decision-making

Even where funding does flow directly, a quieter question remains: who actually decides. Programme design, targeting criteria, and strategic priorities are frequently still set at international organisations’ headquarters, with local organisations positioned as implementers of decisions made elsewhere.

This is trust of a different kind, not that money will be accounted for, but that judgement and direction can be led locally. Solving it looks less like a new system and more like a deliberate transfer: local organisations setting their own targeting criteria, holding real seats in coordination and governance structures, and signing agreements that assign decision rights, not just delivery targets. The difference between being consulted and actually deciding is the whole gap.

Expertise

Local organisations are frequently closest to the context, and the history that shapes whether an intervention works, yet needs assessments and technical design are still routinely led by international staff or external consultants. The sector says it values local expertise while building its evidence base around someone else's.

Closing this gap means changing who holds the pen, not just who's consulted before it's picked up. Local organisations leading needs assessments and evaluation frameworks themselves, rather than reviewing drafts written elsewhere, is what turns a stated value into a working practice.

Risk-sharing

Risk that flows only one way quietly signals where trust actually sits, regardless of what the partnership agreement says. Concern Worldwide's Beyond Barriers project, drawing on nearly 300 key informant interviews and over 800 survey respondents across 60 countries, identifies risk-sharing as a distinct barrier in its own right. Local organisations routinely carry the security and financial risk of frontline operations, while the insurance and institutional protection built around that risk remain concentrated with international actors.

Solving this means extending the same protections regardless of who's carrying the risk: duty of care and medical evacuation cover that applies to local staff on the same terms as international staff, security protocols built jointly rather than handed down, and partnership agreements that share liability instead of transferring it downward. If the risk is shared, the cover has to be too.

Perception

Decisions about which organisations are "ready" to lead or receive direct funding are frequently governed by existing perceptions of capacity, rather than current, measured evidence. Concern Worldwide's Beyond Barriers research names this directly: those perceptions persist well past the point where they reflect reality, and they shape decisions more than any audit does.

The fix is structural rather than attitudinal, the same principle running through every section here. Transparent, regularly updated capacity assessments, built on demonstrated track record rather than institutional memory or reputation, replace assumption with evidence that can actually be checked.

One Root Cause

Funding, decision-making, expertise, risk-sharing, and perception are five genuinely distinct problems, each with its own evidence, its own mechanics, and its own fix. But they share one root cause: the sector's default systems, funding architecture, risk protocols, and decision-making structures were built around international actors first, and local organisations have had to fit into them after the fact, rather than being built in from the start.

That shared root is why progress on one front rarely builds trust without progress on the others. Strong financial systems mean little without decision-making authority to match. Real authority without a platform to be heard is trust extended on someone else’s terms, not the organisation's own. And an organisation carrying disproportionate risk, while still being judged against outdated perception rather than demonstrated capability, is being asked to earn trust twice over.

Nearly a decade after the Grand Bargain's localisation commitments, the sector still largely treats these as five unrelated debates rather than one root cause showing up in five places. We think that's the wrong framing, and it's the one we work against every day.

Sources: BMJ Global Health (2025); ODI, "The state of international humanitarian funding to local and national actors" (2026); Concern Worldwide, Beyond Barriers project (2021–2024).