The Paradox of Localization and Research in Development: Let Local Organizations on the Front-lines Lead the Conversation

Local organizations and interventions have rarely been considered in the body of work on ‘evidence-based’ practice. Yet we know that leaders located in, and hailing from the communities they serve are likely to better understand and be able to identify the needs of that community and thus are more likely to develop impactful interventions.

Development practice should be a democratic undertaking. People have a right to have a say in the decisions that affect their lives and to lead the interventions that affect their communities. We all have that right. So why are local leaders, and practice excluded from global conversations? The problem is one of the methods.

Despite the fact that “localization” is a popular phrase in development spaces and forums these days, we rarely see the devolution of decision-making and donor dollars to local organizations.

While paying lip service to ‘localization,’ policy and research reports simultaneously call for more experimental evaluations documenting the impact of interventions that can be ‘scaled.’  Yet experimental evaluations famously cost multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars, require enormous woman-power and technical expertise, and so are rarely accessible to organizations without access to global capital.

The irony here is that alongside the argument for localization, the tools used to ‘identify best practices’ can only be deployed by large, (and often multi-national) NGOs.  Experimental evaluations are important methodological tools, but they do not answer necessary and practical questions about how and why program interventions work.

Research reports these days often include explanations arguing that these evidence-based interventions (i.e. those that have been experimentally evaluated) should, of course, be adapted to these new settings and tailored to meet the context. However, rarely is there an explanation of how such contextualization should take place or what it entails—leaving local organizations to answer that question.  Hence, we’ve arrived at a paradox.

In development, the only room for ‘localization’ is to include local organizations as the implementors and ‘contextualizers’ of interventions developed by other, much larger organizations. The implicit assumption? Large, international organizations have better solutions to development challenges.

What to do about a sector whose rhetoric is fundamentally opposed to the primary tools of decision-making?

Adopting ‘localization’ as a primary strategy necessitates that our methods become more diverse and accessible to local leaders and the organizations that they run.

This includes thinking more broadly about partnerships, spending more to engage in research, collaborating and co-creating research that is mixed methods, and driven by questions that matter to organizations on the front line.