Localization. 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, addressing localization challenges.

Yet new research suggests something uncomfortable. Localization, 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.

Localization as Competitive Currency

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 localization’ and addressing localization challenges 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—localization through public commitments, joint branding, and consultative workshops, they add to this, symbolic capital, with the legitimacy to define what good localization looks like.

Institutional donors increasingly require localization 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.’

Why SNGOs Can’t Compete on Equal Terms

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 localization 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 localization may feel progressive, but it can just as easily entrench inequality.

Read the full article about addressing localization challenges by Nicola Banks at Alliance Magazine.