The humanitarian field has a lot to learn from community-led practices in development aid.
For over a year, I have teamed with scholars, practitioners, and students working in the humanitarian field to study the multiple ethical dimensions of closing down humanitarian projects and how to manage humanitarian patient data responsibly. During the summer of 2022, I had the incredible opportunity to become a research intern for The Movement for Community-Led Development, a consortium of over 1500+ non-governmental, civil society, and community-based organizations working together to achieve greater community-led development.
During this time, I was tasked with studying a Participatory CLD Assessment Tool, developed by a collaborative research group from this organization, and trying to adapt it to a humanitarian context. From this experience, I was able to examine various approaches the development and humanitarian field have towards community engagement. This has led me to inquire about how each field understands what is meant by community, as well as what they can learn from each other to reach goals that align with community needs and priorities.
How is community-led development understood in the humanitarian context?
Community-led development (CLD) can be understood as a participatory process in which community members work together to identify common goals, develop plans to achieve them, and create collaborative relationships between themselves and other actors with the aim of building on community strengths and leadership. The Movement for Community-Led Development (MCLD) has also recognized eleven important characteristics that exist in community-led programs. These include: participation, inclusion, voice, community assets, capacity development, sustainability, transformative capacity, collective planning and action, accountability, community leadership, adaptability, and collaboration.
In a humanitarian context, the processes of community collaboration exist mainly under the umbrella of localization. The call for localized approaches has become a central mission for humanitarian aid since the Grand Bargain World Humanitarian Summit in 2016, where leading funders, organizations, and nation states agreed that humanitarian action should be “as local as possible, and as international as necessary.” Since then, the focus of local involvement has centered on directing funding to local actors and strengthening local leadership. However, despite the commitments made to localization since 2016, its goals have not yet been reached or properly measured. For instance, from the intended 25% of funding aimed to go directly to local humanitarian actors, only 1% was successfully provided to local organizations by 2018, according to a report from Development Initiatives.
What is missing in localized humanitarian aid?
Between community-led development and localization, there are several differences in practice. In development aid, given that the focus centers on empowering systematic and long-lasting outcomes for communities, there is support for long-term objectives and sustainable projects. However, in humanitarian aid, emergency assistance is focused on a short-term basis– where creating systematic changes is outside the scope of the majority of humanitarian projects. The aim of humanitarian aid centers in alleviating suffering and providing life-saving services. These differences have led both fields to define their independent objectives to reach community-led participation. The efforts in both fields have remained distant, with humanitarians focusing on directing funding and enhancing community participation and development workers focusing on supporting communities to be the leaders of their own interventions.
That being said, I want to argue that the humanitarian field should look at what aspects of community-led development can support the localization agenda to reach greater locally-led humanitarianism. Below I propose three key lessons that humanitarians can learn from CLD.
Community-Led Development plans for the sustainability of communities
Humanitarian aid is designed to be temporary. It is an emergency response to conflict, natural disasters, health epidemics, or any other life-threatening crises. Although sometimes humanitarian crises can become protracted and have a long-lasting duration in affected communities, aid is not designed to be long-term. The sustainability of humanitarian projects is impacted when humanitarian organizations leave.
On the contrary, development projects strive to only create sustainable outcomes. Thus, when projects are completed in community-led development, communities should have the capacities, resources, and skills to continue to benefit from a program. In this way, throughout the project, all partners share capacities from learning-by-doing. The program is designed with this question in mind: how will the impact be long-lasting and effective to meet the communities’ needs?
In planning humanitarian projects, the same question should be included in planning for withdrawal. Humanitarians need to plan for harm minimization, but should also arrange for empowering resilience in communities and ensuring that communities have resources to begin processes of sustainability.
Community-Led Development is committed to #ShiftThePower
A deterring factor of shifting the power in humanitarian aid is the limitation of donorship. Big funders of humanitarian projects are able to set the mandate of an intervention. As a result, humanitarian workers design monitoring and evaluation practices that report and remain accountable principally to donors and not the communities they are assisting. Thus, the power imbalance between big donors, the intermediary organization, and local participation is a reason why one of localization’s main goals and indicators is to direct funding towards local actors. This shift of power dynamics, is one of the first steps (of many) that humanitarians can take in efforts to #ShiftThePower to community and local partners.
Community-led development has been committed to breaking down power dynamics and influencing policy through advocacy. Development actors have recognized that the best pathway to #ShiftThePower is by establishing relationships of trust and mutual respect with policy makers who share similar visions of community-led development. Likewise, humanitarians should strive to build equitable, complementary, and trustful relationships with community actors. Instead of solely providing emergency assistance, efforts can be taken to ensure that mutual partnerships exist, including donors, and that local voices are heard and actionalized.
Thinking about opportunities VS constraints
From talking with different humanitarian partners about the Participatory CLD Assessment Tool, I found more challenges than opportunities to incorporate this tool to a humanitarian context. These challenges are real and humanitarian aid does not have the luxury of time. Emergency responses need to happen quickly and efficiently, and there is little room for extensive planning and involvement of the community in all stages in an equitable manner. As mentioned above, power imbalances through donorship and international humanitarian organizations are difficult to break down in an emergency setting. Additionally, external factors such as national restrictions may inhibit international organizations’ ability to create advocacy and community engagement activities. All these things present constraints to adopting an extensive community-led approach in humanitarian action.
Nevertheless, I believe that by re-imagining a new framework for localization, we can begin to create solutions that will align with the values of community-led development. The constraints articulated above may help us to look at what aspects of humanitarian action need critical engagement, as much as they are ingrained in the humanitarian ecosystem. For example, the efforts of shifting from response to preparedness can help us navigate the limitations that time presents to community engagement. Efforts to build partnerships with development and community actors can also contribute to building a localization agenda that is conducive to re-thinking community leadership and sustainability in humanitarianism.
What is next for community-led humanitarianism?
Community-led development has many lessons that humanitarian actors can take to re-imagine localization and begin a path towards community-led humanitarianism. Although constraints of time and resources in the humanitarian context are real, thinking about different ways to approach them can provide new avenues and solutions to community engagement. Similarly, more efforts in shifting the power and devising plans for sustainability can enhance the localization approach. Localization should be merely seen as the beginning of a journey towards community-led humanitarianism.
Edited by Kimberly Nicholson
