Changing how aid is administered is not the same as changing who has the authority to decide.
The humanitarian system can narrow an appeal, simplify coordination, reorganise its funding and invite different people onto a stage; without changing the most important thing: who decides.
A smaller centre can still keep a very firm grip.
That is the question I believe Tom Fletcher’s Humanitarian Reset must answer. Not whether it can make an overstretched system leaner. Not whether its leaders are sincere. But whether it can redistribute authority beyond the institutions that already hold it.
This is not an expectation imposed by its critics. Devolving power is part of the Reset’s stated purpose. Its commitments include stronger local leadership and an ambition to allocate 70% of OCHA-managed pooled funds to local actors. Those are substantial promises. They deserve something more demanding than either automatic applause or automatic dismissal. They deserve scrutiny. Global Protection Cluster
Who can now make a decision that previously required international permission?
That is where the assessment should begin.
Follow the money, but do not stop there
In May 2026, the United States announced an additional US$1.8 billion for OCHA’s Humanitarian Reset. The State Department also reported that 13% of funds obligated under its first contribution were going to local partners. Funding for urgent assistance is welcome. But that percentage, by itself, cannot establish that decision-making power has moved. U.S. Department of State
An organisation can receive funding while remaining unable to set priorities, negotiate reasonable conditions, change an intervention or challenge the institution controlling its next grant.
We therefore need to distinguish funding received by local organisations, funding implemented through local organisations, and funding governed by local organisations.
These are not interchangeable achievements.
Nor should pledges, allocations, obligations and disbursements be blended into whichever percentage makes the most persuasive announcement. A credible account must identify the funding stage, the recipient, the intermediaries and the reporting period. The UN’s own pooled-funding terminology distinguishes, for example, an approved allocation from a contribution commitment or an actual transfer. MPTF Office
The question is not whether pooled funds are inherently good or bad. It is whether their governance changes the relationship between those who finance a response and those expected to deliver it.
More money passing through a different international mechanism is not, in itself, a redistribution of power.
Follow the authority
The Reset places considerable emphasis on empowering Humanitarian Coordinators and country-level leadership, alongside its commitments to local actors. That may improve decisions currently constrained by distant headquarters. But these are two different reforms. Global Protection Cluster
Moving authority from an international headquarters to its country-level leadership is decentralisation within the international system. Moving authority to locally accountable institutions is redistribution beyond it.
One does not automatically produce the other.
NEAR’s June 2026 consultation with its members makes this distinction painfully concrete. Members described situations in which local organisations supplied the frontline information, access and community relationships underpinning the response, while funding and decision-making remained concentrated in international mechanisms. They also warned against transitions that transferred responsibilities without the resources, political support or authority needed to exercise them. These are reported experiences, not a verdict on every country operation. But they identify precisely what a credible Reset must confront. NEAR
Handing over exposure is not handing over power.
Localisation must not become the respectful name for an unfunded withdrawal.
Participation is not proof
At the UN General Assembly on 24 September, the discussion on the Reset and responsible transitions again emphasised transferring responsibility, resources and decisions towards national and local systems. NEAR’s executive director, Hibak Kalfan, participated in the panel. That engagement matters. UNDP
But participation should not be made to carry a claim it cannot substantiate.
A local leader’s presence does not tell us who approved the budget, whose priorities prevailed, who can reject an allocation or what happens when a local organisation challenges the rules.
The danger is not that local leaders engage. They have every reason to use these spaces to influence decisions. The danger is that international institutions treat their participation as evidence that power has already been shared.
That is how participation can become borrowed legitimacy: the credibility of people rooted in crises is used to validate an architecture they still cannot meaningfully govern.
The Wilton Park discussion on UN80 and the Reset reached a similar practical conclusion. Its published summary called for moving beyond counting local representatives in internationally defined structures, towards meaningful influence, locally grounded priorities and shared—not simply transferred—risk. LinkedIn
The test is not whether local actors are visible inside the process. It is whether they can change its decisions.
Local leadership is not waiting to be invented
There is another problem with an international-centred account of reform: it can make existing alternatives disappear.
NEAR’s research has mapped more than 60 locally led pooled funds across the Global South, spanning different regions, sectors and institutional arrangements. They are not all equivalent, and they should not be treated as interchangeable substitutes for OCHA mechanisms. But their existence matters: locally governed financing is not merely an aspiration awaiting international design. NEAR
There is also evidence worth taking seriously on delivery. Start Network’s February 2026 briefing, drawing on an external evaluation of the Start Fund, reported that 95% of community respondents in local- and national-NGO-led projects strongly agreed that assistance arrived at the right time, compared with 53% in INGO-led projects. This is a finding from that evaluation, not a universal ranking of organisations. It nevertheless challenges the assumption that stronger local leadership necessarily comes at the expense of effective delivery. Start Network
The question is therefore not simply how to make local organisations fit international funding systems. It is also how international resources should support institutions that local actors have already built.
This does not mean abandoning international solidarity. NEAR’s members explicitly value the UN’s roles in protecting rights, maintaining international norms, providing technical support and convening across political divides. Their argument is for a different relationship—not international disappearance. NEAR
The deeper reset is about our place in the system
My concern, shaped by my work inside international NGOs and through IARAN, is that we can become very accomplished at redesigning institutions without reconsidering their entitlement to lead.
In our Future of Aid 2040 work with the Centre for Humanitarian Leadership, we distinguish changes to structures and procedures from changes to the deeper assumptions sustaining them: whose expertise counts, whose priorities define the response, and who is considered qualified to decide. Our analysis argues that transformation requires changes in culture and power, not merely adjustments to the organisational machinery.
Applied to the Reset, this leads me to an uncomfortable question: are we organising around the future of solidarity, or around the continued centrality of the organisations through which we have become accustomed to expressing it?
Those are not the same project.
For those of us working internationally, meaningful reform includes asking which decisions we should no longer control and which roles we should no longer occupy.
This is what I mean by the danger of a simulacrum of change: not a reform in which nothing happens, but one in which visible changes become substitutes for the transformation they are supposed to demonstrate.
There can be real improvements in coordination, real effort and real benefits; while the underlying hierarchy remains remarkably intact.
What would constitute proof?
I would judge the Reset against three tests.
Authority. Publish who sets priorities, approves allocations, changes the rules and resolves disputes. Show the decisions that local actors can now make independently; not simply the meetings they attend. Explain how affected communities can challenge those decisions.
Resources. Report both funding amounts and shares, distinguish direct grants from onward transfers, and disclose grant duration, flexibility, overhead provision and intermediary costs. Show whether local institutions are gaining the means to sustain themselves, not merely receiving more delivery obligations.
Accountability and risk. Make clear who bears financial losses, compliance burdens and security responsibilities. Assess success through people’s experience of assistance and their ability to influence it, alongside donor reporting requirements. These tests build on the practical questions about governance, transparency and risk-sharing raised at Wilton Park. LinkedIn
None of this requires romanticising the local. A national monopoly is not an improvement simply because it is national. Reform needs safeguards against exclusion and capture, space for independent civil society, and accountability to people whose interests established organisations (international or local) may fail to represent.
Nor does this require pretending that a global transformation can be completed overnight. It requires visible changes in authority, a credible baseline and progress that can be independently examined.
The burden of proof belongs to those claiming transformation, not to those asking where the power went.
If authority has moved, show where, to whom and with what guarantees.
If it has not, call it restructuring.
The vocabulary of transformation should not become the last defence of the status quo.
#HumanitarianReset #Localisation #FutureOfAid #ShiftThePower
Bibliography
Global Protection Cluster. Protection and the Humanitarian Reset. Institutional account of the Reset’s priorities, country-level leadership arrangements and ambition to allocate 70% of OCHA-managed pooled funds to local actors. Accessed 27 September 2026. Global Protection Cluster
United States Department of State. United States Pledges Additional $1.8 Billion in Life-Saving Humanitarian Funding to OCHA’s Humanitarian Reset… Media note, 14 May 2026. Source for the additional pledge and the government’s reported 13% figure concerning obligations under its first contribution. U.S. Department of State
United Nations Multi-Partner Trust Fund Office. UN pooled funding: key concepts and terms. Definitions supporting the distinction between funding commitments, allocations and transfers. Accessed 27 September 2026. MPTF Office
NEAR. Redefining the Role: What NEAR Members Need from the UN. Position paper, June 2026, particularly pp. 1–5. Member perspectives on international institutions’ continuing value, concentrated decision-making and transfers of responsibility without adequate resources or authority. NEAR
United Nations Development Programme. The Humanitarian Reset and Responsible Transitions [UNGA81 event report], 24 September 2026. Documents the discussion’s stated ambitions and participants; it is not an independent evaluation of implementation. UNDP
Wilton Park. UN80 and the Humanitarian Reset: redefining UN roles in a more local humanitarian system. Meeting summary, published 9 September 2026; rapporteur Alison Dunn. Practical proposals on local influence, governance, transparency and risk-sharing. LinkedIn
NEAR. Locally-led Pooled Funds in the Global South: What the evidence shows. Policy brief, May 2026, based on research by Themrise Khan. Maps existing locally led financing mechanisms and their institutional diversity. NEAR
Start Network. Localisation works: locally-led humanitarian action in the context of the Reset. February 2026, particularly pp. 2 and 5. Draws on external evaluation findings and member evidence concerning timeliness, quality, partnerships and power. Start Network
IARAN and Centre for Humanitarian Leadership. Future of Aid 2040: Pathways to Transformation—An Outlook to 2040. 2025, particularly the executive summary and analysis of the humanitarian system’s underlying structures and assumptions. IARAN