The importance of local actors to humanitarian action is increasingly recognised. However, they struggle to attract the funding and support they need. This report calls for more support for the role of local actors, without transferring the whole responsibility of responding to large scale disasters to them.
Key Findings
- Local actors often have access to population groups that external actors struggle to reach. They are often much better connected to the populations they serve linguistically and culturally, and can exercise a special kind of moral authority.
- Investment in capacity development for disaster risk management pays off in the long term in contexts where it is driven by a real local need, where local actors are active in programme design and where cultural values are mixed with creative methods, rather than merely fulfilling donor requirements.
- Finance, from both international and national sources, in terms of channels, access and modalities, is critical to sustainable results.
- The profile of local actors in disaster risk management is growing progressively stronger at both the international and the national levels, but the access of local actors to key decision-making forums has not yet caught up.
- Remote management is becoming a necessary mode of operation, but one that presents ethical dilemmas about risk transfer to local actors.
- In protracted conflict, the situation is always fluid, and local actors are rarely neutral or impartial.
- Most true innovation is coming not from aid agencies but from affected populations, who are using communications technology to meet every day needs, join global networks, transfer money and transform their daily lives. And in doing so, they are creating new models of disaster response and bringing in major new actors, particularly the private sector and diaspora networks.
Recommendations
- International disaster response and coordination systems must be tailored to the domestic system and context of each affected state.
- National governments can and should also do more to include potential international assistance in their own national disaster preparedness rules, plans and procedures.
- Domestic and international actors, including new and emerging funders such as the private sector, should work with national governments and civil society to develop financing tools and mechanisms that will provide resources directly to national responders.
