In recent years, the humanitarian sector has begun to reckon with a fundamental contradiction at its core: aid systems designed to alleviate suffering often reproduce the very power dynamics they claim to address. The growing movement toward “localization”—shifting power and resources to local actors—represents not merely a technical adjustment but a profound challenge to how humanitarian narratives are constructed and whose knowledge counts in crisis response. This blog post explores the future of humanitarian localization through critical theoretical lenses that help us understand the deeper power dynamics at play.
The Humanitarian Paradox: When Help Reinforces Hierarchy
“Until the lion tells his side of the story, the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” This African proverb captures a fundamental dynamic within traditional humanitarian structures. International organizations, donors, and experts have long controlled the narrative of humanitarian response, positioning themselves as saviors while positioning crisis-affected populations as passive recipients of aid.
Through Michel Foucault’s lens of power-knowledge, we can see how humanitarian discourse doesn’t simply describe crises but actively produces particular kinds of knowledge about affected regions and populations. The seemingly neutral language of “beneficiaries,” “vulnerable groups,” and “capacity building” constructs a reality in which external expertise is privileged and local knowledge is subordinated. This isn’t merely linguistic preference but a productive force that materializes specific power relations through which resources flow and decisions are made.
Consider how humanitarian reports, assessments, and funding proposals typically frame local populations: as lacking capacity, vulnerable, and in need of external assistance. This framing doesn’t simply describe pre-existing conditions but actively constructs a reality in which international intervention appears necessary and justified. The very methodologies through which “needs” are assessed often reflect external priorities and epistemologies rather than local understandings of wellbeing and resilience.
Orientalism in Humanitarian Garb
Edward Said’s analysis of Orientalism helps us understand how humanitarian narratives often construct the “Global South” as perpetually in crisis, chaotic, and dependent. Media representations of disasters typically follow familiar scripts: desperate faces, overwhelmed local systems, and Western aid workers bringing order to chaos. These images don’t simply document reality but construct particular understandings of affected regions that justify specific forms of intervention.
The persistent framing of humanitarian crises as emergencies requiring external expertise obscures their historical and political roots, many of which trace back to colonial and neocolonial relations. When a drought in the Horn of Africa is presented as a sudden natural disaster rather than the outcome of decades of climate injustice, resource extraction, and imposed economic policies, the resulting interventions address symptoms while leaving structural causes intact.
Localization challenges this Orientalist framework by recognizing affected communities not as passive victims but as agents with their own knowledge systems, coping strategies, and visions for recovery. When local actors lead humanitarian response, different understandings of both problems and solutions emerge—ones that often connect immediate needs to longer-term structural change in ways that challenge dominant humanitarian narratives.
The Lion Speaks: From Inclusion to Epistemic Justice
Efforts to “include” local voices within existing humanitarian structures often fail to address the deeper epistemological hierarchy that determines whose knowledge counts as legitimate. Token participation of local organizations in coordination meetings dominated by international agencies doesn’t constitute true localization if the fundamental frameworks through which crises are understood remain unchanged.
Miranda Fricker’s concept of “epistemic injustice” helps explain why simply adding local voices isn’t enough. When local knowledge is systematically devalued or misinterpreted through external frameworks, affected populations experience what Fricker calls “hermeneutical injustice”—being denied the conceptual resources to make sense of their experiences in ways that are recognized as legitimate within dominant discourse.
True localization requires moving beyond inclusion toward what we might call “epistemic justice”—recognizing local ways of knowing as legitimate in their own right rather than as inputs to be validated through external expertise. This means fundamentally rethinking how we understand concepts like “evidence,” “effectiveness,” and “accountability” in humanitarian response, acknowledging that these are not neutral technical terms but concepts embedded in particular knowledge traditions.
Recursive Patterns: Why Localization Remains Elusive
Despite widespread rhetorical commitment to localization, progress remains frustratingly slow. The Grand Bargain commitment to channel 25% of humanitarian funding directly to local actors remains largely unfulfilled, with most funding still flowing through international intermediaries. According to the Development Initiative’s report, Grand Bargain signatories only provided 4.4% of their total funding to local and national actors in 2023, and only provided 0.6% directly. This gap reveals a stark reality: while the system speaks the language of localization, its core power structures remain unchanged.
Why is structural change so difficult to achieve?
Drawing on concepts from complexity theory, we can understand the humanitarian system as characterized by “attractor states” that maintain existing power distributions despite surface-level changes. International organizations, donor requirements, and professional humanitarian cultures form self-reinforcing systems that absorb and domesticate calls for transformation. Localization initiatives often become technical exercises in “capacity building” or “partnership” that leave fundamental power imbalances intact.
These recursive patterns reveal that localization isn’t simply about transferring resources but about transforming the underlying narrative-material configurations through which humanitarian aid perpetuates itself. What appears as technical reform continually materializes as reinforcement of existing power structures. This occurs through a process of recursive materialization: the international humanitarian architecture absorbs calls for localization and transforms them into practices—standardized capacity assessments, partnership frameworks, compliance mechanisms—that actually reproduce international dominance while appearing to address it. The technical infrastructures, legal frameworks, donor requirements, and professional cultures don’t merely reflect power imbalances; they actively generate them through each iteration of “reform.” Even the very language of localization—with terms like “capacity strengthening,” “due diligence,” ” “passporting tools” and “upward accountability”—encodes assumptions about where legitimate knowledge resides. When local actors must articulate their work through these externally imposed frameworks to access resources, they become entangled in a system that subtly but persistently reconstitutes their position as subordinate, even as they ostensibly gain greater “inclusion.” The paradox is that even radical critiques of the humanitarian system must be expressed in its dominant lexicon to be recognized as legitimate, thus reinforcing the very epistemological hierarchies they seek to dismantle.
Future Horizons: Toward Decolonized Aid
What might truly decolonized humanitarian aid look like? Moving beyond current localization efforts, I envision several key shifts:
From Knowledge Transfer to Knowledge Plurality: Rather than building local “capacity” to implement externally defined best practices, decolonized aid would recognize multiple valid knowledge systems operating in humanitarian contexts. Traditional knowledge, religious frameworks, and local understanding of social relations would be valued alongside technical expertise.
From Risk Aversion to Risk Sharing: Current funding models place most risk on local organizations, requiring compliance with complex donor requirements while providing minimal institutional support. Truly decolonized aid would involve donors and international organizations sharing risk rather than transferring it downward.
From Emergency Response to Structural Change: Decolonized humanitarian aid would reject the artificial distinction between emergency response and addressing root causes. Local actors often understand crises as connected to broader historical and political dynamics, and their response strategies typically integrate immediate relief with longer-term transformation.
From External Validation to Community Accountability: Rather than accountability flowing upward to donors, decolonized aid would prioritize accountability to affected communities, with success defined by their criteria rather than predetermined external metrics.
From Digital Colonialism to Digital Sovereignty: As humanitarian response becomes increasingly digitized, decolonized aid would ensure that data governance, digital infrastructure, and algorithmic decision-making reflect local priorities and remain under local control rather than extracting data for external analysis.
Conclusion: The Hunter’s Tale Retold
For too long, the story of humanitarian aid has been told primarily by the “hunters”—international organizations, donors, and experts who position themselves as saviors while positioning affected communities as passive recipients of their benevolence. Localization represents not simply a technical adjustment to this narrative but a fundamental challenge to who gets to tell the story of humanitarian response and how that story shapes material realities.
True localization requires more than directing funding to local organizations or including them in coordination mechanisms. It requires transforming the underlying epistemological assumptions, institutional arrangements, and narrative practices that systematically privilege external expertise over local knowledge. It means not just letting the lion speak but recognizing that the very categories of “lion” and “hunter” emerge from particular narrative-material configurations that can and must be transformed.
The future of humanitarian aid lies not in perfecting current models but in fundamentally reimagining what aid might look like when it emerges from the lived experiences, knowledge systems, and visions of communities directly affected by crisis. This reimagining isn’t merely discursive but material—it involves transforming funding flows, accountability mechanisms, technological infrastructures, and professional cultures in ways that materialize different power relations.
The hunt continues, but its narration—and thus its materialization—may yet change.