The politics of local humanitarian recruitment in DRC

There have been growing calls over the last decade for humanitarian agencies to ‘localise’— to address unjust and unequal power relations in the contemporary system by transferring power to local personnel. In 2016, for example, the UN Secretary General argued that humanitarian action should be ‘as local as possible, as international as necessary’, triggering a flurry of reform initiatives—a process termed ‘localisation.’ This was part of a growing sense that it was time to address North/South power imbalances, and remedy paternalistic interventions that marginalise local actors. Dr Myfanwy James questions, what does local actually mean and what happens when the meaning of local itself is up for debate?