At one panel, initiatives rooted in local communities of practice and scholarship in, e.g., Sudan, South Sudan, and Lebanon demonstrated the impact of local responses. By operating at the meso- and micro-levels, they create spaces of mesh, of dense horizontal and vertical relationships. In these spaces where agency is distributed and form is in motion, humanitarian and development practice is being created in a different likeness, one that reflects the places of origin. Connecting horizontally across communities and vertically into national and international systems, local initiatives capture insights that demonstrate just futures are in the making, where a reimagining is underway, that challenges conventional views on power, practices and localisation.

What local initiatives offer for an international transformational process seeking just futures

As four scholars/practitioners researching with local organisations and communities, we discussed how local communities of practice aren’t waiting for permission to determine their just future. Instead, they are finding ways to connect and exercise their strategic agency, with the potential to shape a global transformational process. All this despite formal localisation efforts and not because of.

Renée van Hoof brought up an inspiring case, inviting panel participants to critically rethink the role of international organisations within the humanitarian and development system. In the raging 3-year war in Sudan, “emergency response rooms”  - fully informal groups of community volunteers – are serving as principal humanitarian responders across vast areas. Locally embedded, volunteer-led, and held accountable by their own communities, ERRs provide food, health services, protection, and information — often way before international actors have started their responses or where those cannot access. . Stichting Vluchteling (SV) directly funds these groups, offering a bold and practical answer to reimagining the current traditional humanitarian architecture, with high returns for the funds spent, yet without the international expertise and systems normally required. This way of working demonstrates existing humanitarian structure’s main support can be two-fold: to trust those working at local sites to provide life-saving aid and ensure they directly receive the funds to continue their work.

Lisa Peterson directed attention to how local actors build and practise collective leadership. She explored how they navigate power differentials and construct legitimacy together, to understand how this collective coordination has the potential to transform humanitarian governance from supply-driven to demand-driven. Grounded in a preliminary analysis of local initiatives, this work makes visible what is currently under-investigated: how local actors are already working collectively.

Finally, Watfa Najdi introduced how Lebanese IDPs reactivated existing solidarity networks to design and execute bold initiatives that reimagined crisis response beyond the humanitarian framework. The sewing machine initiative in a displacement shelter in Beirut, where IDPs partnered with a local textile factory to increase the production of much-needed blankets and pillows, focused on the knowledge of women and men as expertise to develop local (household) economies. Similarly, the kitchen mutual aid and collective care response in several displacement shelters and coffee conversations across the country demonstrate how people create possibilities that make a difference to their immediate needs. In all examples, ordinary people join forces, share ambitions, and utilise approaches based on their knowledge, expertise, and resources.

Local communities, local organisations, and collectives at various levels with conflicting interests, behaviours, and attitudes are present in the three conflict zone cases. The focus on ordinary people, their collectives, and their responses sheds light on how divergent perspectives share space successfully, where collaboration prevails over conflict. Their work captures insights that centre the question of how external actors can contribute to the local redesign by focusing on three overarching themes: power, practice, and localisation.

Re-imagining power, practices and localisation

The three cases demonstrate how people rethink and react to humanitarian and development work: they work collectively to ensure support, tapping into a wealth of locally available knowledge, expertise, and resources. The volunteer-led ERRs in Sudan, at micro- and meso-levels, in South Sudan, and in Lebanon, IDPs took initiatives into their own hands, refusing to be reduced to passive recipients of aid.

The panel participants discussed how external actors both stall and facilitate local redesign and how they can both participate in and obstruct the making of a just future in relation to power, practice, and localisation. 

Power, often thought of as exerted as overt and unidirectional, can be regarded as a network of social boundaries that constrain and enable action for all actors (Hayward, 1988, p. 2). Shaped by individuals, groups and their dynamics, power is not simply imposed from above or below but is co-created. This idea of power as a network of social boundaries was applied to both study and execution by the panel, deliberating on what power looks like in a process of creating just futures.

The panel addressed geopolitical players and their systems, and the inordinate extent to which they protect their existing institutions over the people they should serve. Key states stay in power via their dominant definitions and solutions, e.g., on due diligence, accountability, and expertise. Their exclusive bureaucracy stays unilateral through states' financing international organisations to empower the ‘local,’ within a framework that is defined at global levels, built to maintain itself, and detached from local knowledge, expertise, and resources. Transitioning to a just future where local initiatives critically link horizontally across communities and vertically into national and international debates, international actors will need to recognise, include and participate with an empowered ‘local,’ on different terms.

Power structures can be further considered by looking at practices and action: the social cooperative forms of human activities, captured in relationships, discourse, and actions. The action in the three cases taking place in kitchens, care systems, or coffee conversations can be juxtaposed next to institutions and states. This level of self-organisation springs from a grounding in practice that favours knowledge and experience over bilateral transactions between states and international expertise.

These existing practices should be the starting point, and not only when the system (temporarily) collapses during a crisis. Global actors’ responses require a transition process, starting with recognising and complementing the crucial expertise that is locally present, e.g., flexibility of approaches, and an accountability to people.

The panel participants, in closing, sought to contribute to moving beyond localisation as a concept. Since 2016, localisation has been increasingly promoted as a way forward. However, even modest goals have not been met, and the process remains largely top-down and centred on redistribution. Is it possible to shift away from localisation and embrace a new language, experience, and approach? The Lebanese kitchens are not reinforced by localisation but by original interventions of capable actors that assess and understand needs since they are part of the context.

Local people are the principal actors instead of a ‘stopgap' when access is limited. Localisation would then be about how to complement what is in place and understanding what international actors' responsibilities and aspirations are in that role? Once the coffee conversation or emergency rooms are a starting point, the meso- and macro-level may be constructed by bringing together local actors in mixed collectives, national dialogues, and international policy exercises.

Ideas for research, policy, and practice

In conclusion, panel facilitator Anne Brinkman summarised the ideas and direction for research, policy and practice. Transformation to just futures is not redistribution of power or resources. It is a continuous process of balancing interests, behaviours, and attitudes at local and global levels. States, international organisations, and local people play distinct and essential roles. It could be time to start by recognising local people as critical actors and seeking to capture the diverse experiences of what the power and rules of law are grounded in: a social-cultural morality that resonates and works in a conflict context.

Just futures require a transformation process as it develops in local sites, executed by people. Their actions are a starting point to negotiate between various parties on what knowledge is available and may be generated, what experience is valued and may be complemented, and what resources are available and could be complemented. This transformation that is already afoot to a just future is not a blueprint, but instead a frame of possibilities for local people in crisis contexts to enact via their collective practices and perspectives.