Peacebuilding is people-centred, so by definition it relies on localising processes that prevent, resolve and transform conflicts. Peacebuilding also succeeds precisely because it is embedded in a context-specific and locally led understanding of social and political dynamics.

Consequently, localisation is a foundational value for Interpeace. The organisation’s very purpose and its definition of localisation have always been to help create local capacity, ownership and leadership so that conflict can be managed and changed for the better in sustainable and non-violent ways.

This is why Interpeace celebrates, embraces and champions localisation. It is part of Interpeace’s DNA and has been since the organisation was established 30 years ago. Recognition that the citizens of conflict-affected contexts must continue to serve and be supported as the leaders and owners of solutions is illustrated powerfully and infused throughout this 2022 report.

This is also why Interpeace starts its in-country work from the perspective that the local context and leadership is a positive point of departure, building on current resilience and capacity, rather than assuming that the solutions to conflict resolution and insecurity lie elsewhere. And this is why Interpeace places so much emphasis in its peacebuilding on accompaniment, participation and sustained empowerment at the local level. It is not by chance that Interpeace was, for part of its history, officially described as the “International Peacebuilding Alliance”: at its heart, it has always aimed to bring together and support locally established organisations under one mutually supportive and global peacebuilding umbrella.

By embracing all local actors, Interpeace places itself at the forefront of fostering localisation.

By embracing all local actors, Interpeace places itself at the forefront of fostering localisation. The most effective peacebuilding results are often achieved through an intentionally multitrack approach, bringing together Track-3 actors at the grassroots, Track-2 actors in civil society and Track-1 national leadership actors. This is what Interpeace calls its “Track 6” approach – the sum of all tracks taken together.

Localised peacebuilding processes need to reconcile the competing and often contradictory interests and priorities that lie between these different tracks of engagement, especially between governments and civil society. While this can often be challenging, peacebuilding processes that do not adequately engage the State as a transformative actor of change are ultimately difficult to sustain. A government that is supported and encouraged to ingrain systemic and institutional change for better conflict management and transformation will ensure sustainable forms of social cohesion, which evidence shows cannot be achieved by short-term, externally driven interventions, however willing and supportive those may be.

It is therefore an important but often neglected aspect of successfully localised peacebuilding to recognise that no State in any part of the world should abrogate its prime responsibility for its citizens’ security and peaceful existence, let alone their welfare and development. And States that enjoy the legitimacy of their own people should be encouraged and supported to do so.

From localisation to subsidiarity

This points to why Interpeace’s conception of “localisation” – when moving from the conceptual to its practical application – can perhaps be better understood as “subsidiarity”. By this is meant the anchoring of responsibility, resources, opportunity and accountability at the most local level possible. Roles and responsibilities for peace and cohesion exist at all levels of society, including governmental as well as non-governmental actors. And these all require recognition, respect and empowerment in a mutually reinforcing way, at national, sub-national, community, family and individual levels.

An Interpeace initiative which culminated in 2022 was the creation and support of an International Commission on Inclusive Peace. This led to the launch in 2023 of the Principles for Peace, now supported by an independent foundation that is promoting a paradigm shift in peace processes. Following deep, worldwide consultation, the Commission reaffirmed existing evidence that local ownership is not only necessary, but that it is often also insufficient.

“Subsidiarity”, rather than “localisation”, recognises and embraces ownership and accountability at the most local level possible.

“Subsidiarity”, rather than “localisation”, is one of the eight Principles for Peace that now provides a global framework for contemporary peace processes. And it is reflected in Interpeace’s peacebuilding, which recognises and embraces the complexity of relationships between various peace actors and the need for solidarity and co-operation between them, with ownership and accountability at the most local level possible.

The relevance of Interpeace’s approach to advancing meaningful localisation – or subsidiarity – is also demonstrated by its in-country teams and local partners and their practical achievements. Each team in each country is constructed according to a highly context-specific anchoring of local needs and existing local capacity. How Interpeace works and how it constructs its teams evolves almost continuously to reflect and respond to changing realities and needs on the ground.

The relevance of Interpeace’s approach to advancing meaningful localisation – or subsidiarity – is also demonstrated by its in-country teams and local partners and their practical achievements. Each team in each country is constructed according to a highly context-specific anchoring of local needs and existing local capacity. How Interpeace works and how it constructs its teams evolves almost continuously to reflect and respond to changing realities and needs on the ground.

In Somalia and Burkina Faso, for instance, Interpeace’s teams are 100% composed of national staff, who represent the diversity of their communities and who shape the design and direction of Interpeace’s directly delivered work in those countries at all levels of society. In Guinea Bissau and Côte d’Ivoire, Interpeace has established and accompanies stand-alone local partner organisations staffed by nationals of those countries who lead programme delivery. In other contexts, such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, there is an in-country Interpeace team accompanying an alliance of local partner organisations, working on delivery together. Elsewhere, such as in Yemen, all of Interpeace’s work is delivered by empowering the agency of local partner organisations.

Today, Interpeace works with and through 30 local partner organisations, the most in its history. Meanwhile, some of those partners that Interpeace helped to create from their foundations are now initiating, leading and supporting in-country peacebuilding work of their own with other international and local partners.

Leadership matters

In 2018, Interpeace published a Policy Note, Local Leadership to Local Ownership – An Essential Element for Effective Peacebuilding and Conflict Prevention, which deals pathways to achieve localisation and continues to stand the test of time. The essential point is that local ownership is a crucial goal that is universally recognised but poorly executed.

Fostering local leadership is a practical way to put local ownership into effect and to measure progress.

Fostering local leadership is a practical way to put local ownership into effect and to measure progress. At a programmatic level, it is possible at any stage to identify the extent to which local leaders have been involved in the design and implementation of peacebuilding, to measure progress in this direction and to identify the capacity needs to support constructive and positive forms of leadership.

The inclusion and strengthening of local leadership does not assume that it will, by default, positively contribute to a peacebuilding intervention. Local peacebuilding leadership may be found within existing political, social and cultural contexts. But existing capacity can often be helpfully supplemented by new leaders with a commitment to sustainable peace in their own societies, especially women, young people and representatives of marginalised groups.

Interpeace’s experience also shows the importance of avoiding the assumption that local capacity does not already exist in even the most violently contested spaces;

of ensuring that local actors are responsible for both strategic as well as day-to-day decisions, even at times at the expense of international actors’ goals; and, of ensuring that positive local leadership is sustained for the long term.

What needs to change?

A common misconception in the current uptick of global discussion of localisation and peacebuilding is that “peacebuilding” is conflated or confused with government-led, stability-oriented, Western-style interventions. There is certainly a troubling history of weaknesses in the design of peacemaking and mediation interventions, stabilisation missions, disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration programmes and security sector reform approaches, where they have too often reflected the objectives and priorities of external actors. In such cases, there has indeed been years-long legitimacy to claims that these approaches should be “decolonialised” or “de-Westernised” or entirely changed. Interpeace itself has itself been calling for such change for decades, since its 1998 Bossey Statement, and continues to work practically to achieve such change in policy and practice.

Interpeace’s localised and civilian peacebuilding has occurred historically in countries of both North and South, from Sweden to Somalia, from Cyprus to Mali and beyond. Peacebuilding is driven by local conflict management needs, not by the amount of wealth or other endowment of a particular community.

Nor does this line of reasoning recognise that successful peacebuilding is driven in its design by ensuring first and foremost that the best combination of actors is involved to resolve conflict and advance cohesion, including external actors at times.

There are still too many instances of peacebuilding that inadequately take local voice and agency into account and that marginalise or shade the centrality of cultural contexts, including traditional leadership and justice models. On the other hand, some of those very same local dynamics can be the underlying causes of tension and conflict and, in such cases, international actors can play a limited but positive role that is not at odds with localisation. For peacebuilding, as in mediation, it can be the presence of an international actor that constructively contributes to disrupting a negative status quo or to creating new pathways and inclusive spaces to resolve conflict in a trusted and neutral way.

Another continuing challenge in both the peace and security sectors is the resistance of international actors to limit the intent and design of their own interventions in favour of embracing instead the vision of those most affected.

Another challenge in both the peace and security sectors is that international actors tend to exert their own strong intentions and designs in their interventions instead of embracing the vision of those most affected. In 2022, one of the main findings from Interpeace’s Rethinking Stability project (a two-year, multistakeholder review of lessons learned from international stabilisation missions), was an all-too-frequent absence of locally defined peace and security goals, let alone objectives or methods for achieving them. Unless future stabilisation missions are genuine about placing local communities at the heart or at least the head of design and accountability, those missions will continue to be sub-optimal, or even risk being drivers and exacerbators of conflict.

The current debate on localisation is also focussed on actors in the much larger development and humanitarian sectors, which are different and distinct from the peacebuilding sector even if all three continue striving to work together more effectively. Humanitarian intervention, for instance, largely entails a linear and vertical one-way transfer of support from the resource-endowed to those in, usually, pressing need. But peacebuilding cannot be effective if it is driven by mechanics of design, budgeting, reporting and accountability that are similarly externally defined rather than localised.

For instance, in the World Humanitarian Summit and ensuing Grand Bargain of 2016, humanitarian actors undertook to work towards a target of transferring 25% of humanitarian financing to local organisations at the in-country level. More than half a decade later, an analysis by the Humanitarian Practice Network showed that local and national actors received less than 10% of total funding in ten major humanitarian response countries.

Similarly, estimates in the Global Humanitarian Assistance Report by Development Initiatives found that only 3% of international humanitarian funding in 2020 flowed directly to local and national actors. In 2021, this even went backwards, with direct funding decreasing by almost two thirds, to the lowest volume (USD 302 million) and proportion (1.2%) of total international humanitarian assistance seen in the previous five years. One of the most generous humanitarian donors worldwide, USAID, as recently as early 2023 acknowledged that the 25% target remains a distant prospect.

Interpeace, by contrast, transferred between 30% and 40% of its annual income to local partner organisations for direct in-country implementation between 2020 and 2022, and Interpeace continues to work towards enabling local partners for the long term, recognising its role as an international actor.

But what about the other 60% to 70% that even Interpeace is still not yet able to transfer to local partners? The reasons for this are multiple and are the same or similar to those in the humanitarian and development sectors. One is the accountability demands of those investing financially in peacebuilding and their lack of willingness to accept high thresholds of risk; these demands can account for up to half of the investment that is not transferred to local agents of change. As new sources of peacebuilding funding are being sought, including from the private sector in the form of innovative financial instruments such as peace bonds, the accountability demands are likely to rise.

In 2022, Interpeace co-created a Resilient Partnerships Strategy with and for its in-country partner organisations. The vision of the strategy is to have partners that are “respected and accompany and support one another according to their respective capacities.” The strategy is anchored in principles including accountability to communities as well as to donors, conflict sensitivity, inclusion and meaningful participation.

A goal of the Resilient Partnerships Strategy is to support in-country partners to be more viable and sustainable, by encouraging donors to provide flexible funding that enables those partners to invest in themselves, and to develop sustainability plans.

Another goal is to develop and maintain accountability systems which work for local partners. Accountability continues to be a significant obstacle to localisation. Naturally, governments investing in peacebuilding expect their reporting and, especially, expenditure transparency obligations to be upheld, given their own accountability in turn to the taxpayers from which the investment originates.

But much of the contemporary conversation about accountability – which has been largely unchanged for decades – is top-down, donor-driven and deaf to bottom-up accountability at the local level.

An argument can even reasonably be made that international non-governmental organisations have been left as intermediaries to carry the risk, the responsibility and the cost: they are expected to ensure that financial and other donor accountability standards are met by local actors, without those same local actors having a voice in defining the accountability framework and without the resources being provided to build the requisite capacities.

Resource decisions, accountability and risk frameworks need to be driven first and foremost by the expectations and vision of the communities affected by peacebuilding, not external actors.

Accountability and risk management frameworks need to be driven first and foremost by the expectations and vision of local populations. Insufficient attention is being given to defining how accountability can be re-imagined and re-engineered in ways that place the local context first while still accommodating donor needs and obligations.

In sum, accountability is a triangulation of the interests and obligations of investors, intermediaries and affected communities, but that third part of the triangle is generally missing at present. This remains a fundamental systemic weakness and gives insight into the continuing power dynamics at play between international and local actors.

Looking ahead

Localisation is both the starting point and the end point of peacebuilding. So, unsurprisingly, localisation is part of Interpeace’s DNA. It is the legacy which the organisation always aims to leave behind when its in-country contributions anywhere come to an end.

But no peacebuilding organisation should cease to self-evaluate, learn and improve. This is why Interpeace established an in-house leadership working group in 2022 to explore localisation and will continue these efforts. In 2023, this will include hosting a consultation for peacebuilding organisations to explore improved accountability to local partners and affected communities.

By many metrics, Interpeace’s support for the principle and practice of localisation – or subsidiarity – is ahead of the curve of current global debate. Interpeace is a leader when it comes to achieving authentically locally led and owned conflict transformation. But we know there are still gaps and ways to improve. These include measuring progress towards more meaningful localisation, defining the incentives required to advance in that direction, and rethinking the transactional practices that fuel the current way in which localisation occurs. They represent a call to more action.