Localisation is about agenda-setting; the rest is logistics

Think tanks in the North should stop wasting time on what was called “low-value” work, things like farming systems, tribal customs, rural surveys. Leave that to the South, because it was their “comparative advantage.” The North, meanwhile, should focus on the serious business of shaping what happened at the UN General Assembly, the World Bank, the European Commission.

I first heard this argument in 2009, as a student at the Institute of Development Studies in Sussex. The claim, made at a public lecture, was a serious one. I remember feeling indignant, as a young development professional would, who had only ever lived and worked in his home country. I could not get past the stereotyping. I was unable to see the good intent that no doubt was behind the comment.

Nearly sixteen years on, I have been reminded of that lecture as I follow trends in the international development sector, in particular in conversations about “localisation.” In many ways the attitudes have not changed - the discourse is set in the North, and the South implements.

The timing makes this sharper than it would otherwise be. USAID has been demolished. FCDO is operating well below the highs of the pre-Brexit era. Donors are making decisions about how deep the cuts should go with “national interest” in mind. At the same time, new commitments are being made to localisation. This is not the first time. In the past, the Paris Declaration in 2005, and then Accra 2008 and Busan 2011 promised country ownership and use of country systems. The contradictions remain true even today. One cannot shift delivery while keeping control over ideas, resources, and the rules of the game.

I should be honest about where I sit. I am a Southern professional based in Nairobi, but I work for a London-headquartered company that depends on western donors for most of our revenue. I am the kind of intermediary that any proponents of localisation would like to reduce in size or eliminate. I write from inside that contradiction.

In reality, the concept of “comparative advantage” is not the right frame for any of this. Neither the south nor the north is a monolith. The nature of any such advantage, or its magnitude, is not forever. The centres of power and innovation are shifting rapidly. Knowledge, skills and policy priorities are not captive to a uni-directional flow - these are currently taking place north to south; north to north; south to north; and south to south. To say that the Southern advantage lies in collecting data while the North handles theory and rule-setting is lazy, and lacking in ambition.

The shift is already visible if one looks for it. India is exporting Digital Public Infrastructure to countries in Africa, and that started before Western donors picked it up as a development agenda. India’s experience - warts and all - of digitising its social welfare systems is a model that many countries are trying to emulate. M-Pesa was exported from Kenya to other countries in Africa and became a reference point for financial inclusion in South Asia. Bangladesh’s innovations in locally-led climate action have spread to other low-lying parts of the world. The argument we should be making is that Southern actors need to identify the problems that hold them back and should set their own priorities. This is not just to lay claim over the development agenda - it is simply a pragmatic response to the fact that externally-set agendas have not worked, and there is no reason to believe they will work in the future.

There is another example I keep going back to, which is not about knowledge but about narrative. Narrative is no less important. When I moved to Kenya over a decade ago, I would often hear people talking about a “side-hustle.” At the workplace it was a disparaging reference to colleagues who were possibly not fully committed to their jobs. In economies like Kenya’s, it is an indicator of a thin organised sector with little employment opportunity. Households spread risk across three or four small income streams to make things work. For some it was survival in a difficult economy. For others, it was what you did while waiting for the big break.

It is actually not amusing to note how, a decade later, gig work is part of government policy in multiple countries, not just the global south. Economists in multilateral and consulting firms talk about the “future of work” in the post-Covid world. Northern policymakers debate how best to regulate individuals and employers in this brave new world.

These are not the same phenomenon. The Kenyan side-hustle was a survival strategy in an economy that had not built formal employment at scale. The Northern gig economy is being promoted by app-based firms that prefer not to carry the cost of full employment. If Southern researchers had been setting the question for their economies from the start, the framing would not have been “how do we build a gig economy.” It would have been: what does it mean that the formal employment promise has failed in both contexts, and what should be done about that. Instead, business models built on gig work raised venture capital in the North and returned to the global south as employment innovation, part-time and with hardly any meaningful social security.

The phrase “Global South” can also hide as much as it reveals. Delhi and Dhaka are both in the South. So are Pretoria and Mogadishu. The contradictions are self-evident. China is the largest bilateral lender to many African governments. South-South cooperation has shown the tendency to entrench its own hierarchies.

The ‘elite bargain’ (H/T: Stefan Dercon) in southern countries need to take ownership of their own levels of policy ambition (H/T: Ken Opalo). If ‘localisation’ just means moving the prime contract from London to Delhi or Nairobi, that is by no means now a guarantor that the benefits will trickle down to households that are most in need. And this is worth keeping in mind even as we recognise exactly the kind of southern successes that I talk about earlier.

This is why agenda-setting matters more than anything else in the localisation debate. Who decides what we research on climate. Who decides what counts as a priority for climate action in contexts that affect the most, and among them, the most vulnerable. Where does digital governance matter most. What is holding back firms from growing and innovating.

Southern actors have to be the ones setting those questions, and they have to do it in ways that: (a) do not mimic what donors are asking of them; (b) are making the best use of the ideas and knowledge that are generated in their own countries; and (c) are accountable to more than the local elite that benefits from the status quo. Whether that wider conversation happens - going beyond rhetoric - is the test. Otherwise, nothing would have changed, and this piece can be written in full a decade from now.