As local as possible, as international as necessary: Understanding capacity and complementarity in humanitarian action

Understanding these debates and issues is critical to understanding whether the current diagnosis and proposed solutions to support a more local humanitarian response are the right ones. This Working Paper takes a critical look at this discourse. It argues that defining and assessing capacity is not a technical exercise but a political one; that issues of capacity are not new to the humanitarian sector, but that past efforts at capacity strengthening have not necessarily resulted in more locally-led humanitarian action, in part because they have tended to focus on making local organisations a better fit for partnerships, rather than better or more effective humanitarian actors in their own right; and that, in exploring the interaction between local and international humanitarianism there is a need to identify those factors that support or undermine complementarity between local and international actors.