NEW CIPSS OCCASIONAL PAPER: ‘Walking the Localization Talk’: A Practitioner’s Reflections
An “Occasional Paper” by Marc Linning.
Today, there is significant contestation of the idea that policies aimed at managing conflict, improving human security, and building sustainable peace can or should be Western led. Instead, as both the effectiveness and legitimacy of external action are called into question, and calls to decolonize humanitarian aid intensify, local communities and organizations are directly challenging international policy frameworks and pushing for various forms of “localization.” Scholars are also paying increased attention to more bottom-up or localized dynamics, particularly within specific policy areas such as forced migration, the protection of civilians, humanitarian action, and peacebuilding. The acknowledged weaknesses of outsider-led policy approaches have accelerated efforts to demonstrate that situating power and agency closer to local communities can both improve policy outcomes and serve important normative objectives.
This CIPSS working paper, which forms part of a broader SSHRC-funded project on ‘Localization in World Politics’, examines how one international humanitarian NGO – the Center for Civilians in Conflict (CIVIC) – has changed its organizational culture in pursuit of a more localized approach. Through changes in staffing, new forms of engagement with communities, and on-going research, it has adopted a new way of working that is not only civilian-centered, but also entails collaborating with conflict-affected civilians as lead agents in their own protection. CIVIC’s community-based protection (CBP) approach demonstrates how to make principled humanitarian action ‘as local as possible and as international as necessary’, and how international actors can form more equitable partnerships with local actors by investing in local capacity and leadership. The reflections captured here therefore provide food for thought for others working in the field of protection, as well as the wider humanitarian sector, when it comes to operationalizing the key goals of localization.
Drawing from several contexts in which CIVIC has worked (including Nigeria, Mali, Kenya, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine and Yemen), the paper shows that CBP can enhance immediate protection for civilians, but also contribute to longer-term goals such as local cohesion and peacebuilding. At the same time, it argues that CBP only works under certain conditions, and that international actors who seek to support it need to consider potential challenges, including the possibility that community protection groups may be coopted in ways that reinforce traditional power structures or the risks to community members who collaborate with organizations like CIVIC. The paper also advises that efforts at localization must be flexible and context specific: not all practices, even if seen as ‘best practices’, will work everywhere.
