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Localisation. Shift the Power. Locally Led Development. These phrases dominate aid sector debates and demand one simple change: for resources and decision-making to be brought closer to those they’re meant to serve.
Yet new research suggests something uncomfortable. Localisation, as currently practised, often strengthens Northern NGOs’ (NNGOs) grip on the system. Unless funders pay attention, their well-meaning investments could be propping up the very power structures they hope to dismantle.
This study, published in Development in Practice, is based on 53 interviews with NGOs and networks in Ghana, Uganda, and Europe. Its findings show that ‘doing localisation’ has become a form of cultural capital within the aid industry.
NNGOs already hold the economic capital (funding and donor relationships), social capital (networks and influence), and cultural capital (managerial systems and recognised accountability practices) that the existing funding system rewards. But by ‘performing’ — a term taken from sociologist Pierre Bourdieu — localisation through public commitments, joint branding, and consultative workshops, they add to this, symbolic capital, with the legitimacy to define what good localisation looks like.
Institutional donors increasingly require localisation in grant applications, and this has spurred NNGOs to showcase their alignment with Southern NGOs (SNGOs) in ways that reinforce, rather than redistribute, authority. As one SNGO interviewee puts it bluntly: ‘They have the existing relationships with donors… so they lead the processes.’
SNGOs, however, bring their own powerful capital. Deep community trust, lived knowledge, and contextual astuteness to name a few. But the aid field rarely recognises these as capital worth funding. They don’t easily ‘translate’ into the metrics and management systems Northern donors see as legitimate, and competing for authority in localisation processes means time, money, and staff capacity SNGOs often don’t possess.
Even well-intentioned efforts to ‘build local fundraising capacity’ can end up training SNGOs to mimic Northern norms rather than shape their own, eroding the authenticity of their community-led work in the process.For philanthropists, the takeaway is: funding Northern-led localisation may feel progressive, but it can just as easily entrench inequality.
The report authors call this NNGO-centrism, a system where Northern actors retain the authority to decide what counts as localisation, while Southern partners remain implementers rather than agenda-setters. ‘When your hand is in somebody’s mouth all the time,’ one Southern leader said, ‘you are careful not to make them angry, because you could be bitten.’
This isn’t just a missed opportunity. It’s a structural problem. Without shifting that authority, localisation risks being little more than the Emperor’s New Clothes of aid reform: a new outfit over the same old power dynamics.
The good news? Philanthropy is uniquely positioned to break this cycle — and many foundations already have. Unlike institutional donors locked into rigid funding mandates and compliance frameworks, foundations have the freedom to choose how and where they fund.
Some are using that freedom to set a different standard. The Segal Family Foundation, for example, prioritises direct, long-term relationships with Southern visionary leaders. They let go of unnecessary control, treating trust, not risk, as the currency of their partnerships and as the solution to unlocking long-term societal transformation.
Others, like Co-Impact, provide funding that is long-term, unrestricted, and focused on scale, while innovative organisations, like One World Together, are building the infrastructure to cut out intermediaries and connect the funding public directly to communities. By pooling small monthly donations into significant, long-term, flexible funds, they ensure local organisations have the resources and autonomy to act on their own priorities.
Such an approach remains largely foreign to the mainstream donor and NGO sector, yet these practices allow SNGOs to invest in what their communities need, when they need it, and without being forced to fit into pre-approved templates. The benefits extend further. These methods ensure grantees can go beyond service delivery to nudge broader systems into more effective, inclusive, and just frameworks.
Philanthropy is leading responses to calls for ‘big bets’; transformative, multi-year investments that match the scale of changes sought. By committing significant resources directly to locally rooted organisations and networks, foundations can help shift not only who holds the purse strings, but who defines the priorities, the metrics, and the measures of success.
In doing so, these funders aren’t just moving money differently, they are modelling what genuinely equitable localisation looks like. They’re proving that when you trust local actors with the resources and authority they need, the result isn’t chaos or waste. It’s lasting impact.
In short, if philanthropy is serious about transformation, it’s time to lean in. Fund the organisations embedded in the contexts you care about. Support South-South networks to set their own standards and back SNGO-led consortia without requiring a Northern intermediary to validate them. The evidence is clear: localisation that leaves power in Northern hands isn’t localisation at all. It’s just charity in new clothes.
Nicola Banks is a professor of global development at the University of Manchester’s Global Development Institute and the co-founder and chief steward of One World Together.
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