Global Partnership Conference: shifting power must be more than a slogan

While Westminster obsesses over its latest political drama this week, a quieter but arguably just as important conversation is taking place elsewhere in London.

The Global Partnership Conference, convened by the UK government alongside South Africa, philanthropies and development finance actors, is being presented as a fresh start for international development and humanitarian action in an era of global aid cuts. It promises innovation, new coalitions, smarter technology and stronger local leadership.

Partnership is the conference’s over-arching theme, and “shifting power” is expected to feature prominently. CAFOD is hosting a space at the conference where local civil society leaders from Sudan, South Sudan, Myanmar and elsewhere will share their experience of funding and partnership approaches that reinforce local leadership in crisis response. They will also highlight the barriers that continue to limit these efforts, in dialogue with donor representatives from the FCDO, Swiss Development Cooperation and philanthropy.

Political championing of partnership is welcome

That kind of exchange matters. Senior FCDO officials and advisors in UK embassies have recently been asking local actors what it would take to make a meaningful change. This is welcome, not least because it suggests a political interest in listening beyond established institutional channels. The question, however, is whether that interest will translate into changes in how humanitarian funding, risk and authority are organised.  

For years, the default has been to channel large volumes of humanitarian funding through large international bodies, mostly UN agencies and a small number of INGOs.

Localisation has too often been reduced to incremental improvements in basic metrics, such as the provision of overheads to local actors. Even progress on these most basic aspects of treating local actors fairly has been challenging. So the fact that ministers have made “modern partnerships” a priority, and that the Conference is creating space for local actors and donors to engage, is significant.

But if shifting power is to mean anything, it cannot remain a phrase attached to a system in which money, risk and decision making still flow upward.

Local actors already do the hardest work – without the power to shape it

New research commissioned by CAFOD across nine crisis‑affected countries shows what local organisations actually do. They negotiate access, maintain trust, navigate insecurity, sustain continuity and help people get services that would otherwise be out of reach. This is not “added value.” It is the backbone of an effective humanitarian response.

The research’s case studies make this clear. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, local and faith‑based networks reopened space to engage communities on Ebola and cholera because those communities trusted them. In Ukraine, when bombardment hit Kharkiv, a local partner mobilised churches, students, drivers and businesses – relationships that existed long before international agencies arrived. International support added value when it moved quickly, reduced administrative burden and strengthened logistics, safeguarding and finance systems rather than replacing the local response.

Yet the work that makes local leadership possible is the least visible and least funded. Trust building, safe referral, community accountability, local verification, staff care and continuity between crises are treated as informal “local advantages,” not as core humanitarian functions. The organisational systems, safeguarding, logistics, security and institutional resilience that local leadership requires is rarely supported through fair overheads, cost recovery or core funding.

Responsibility has been localised – power has not

South Sudan illustrates this contradiction. Local partners helped sustain access where formal authorisations were not enough, showing the value of embedded presence and trusted relationships in highly constrained environments. Yet consortium structures still too often sideline local partners from strategy, risk decisions and donor engagement.

Responsibility has been pushed downward, especially as international agencies retrench under funding pressure. But power has stayed put.

This is not localisation. It is responsibility without power.

A real shift requires structural change

The conference will talk about modern partnerships, Artificial Intelligence and innovative finance. These matter, but none of them will transform aid if decision making, evidence and visibility remain centralised in Western capitals. You cannot bolt new technology or new finance onto an old architecture and call it a shift in power.

A genuine shift means:

• funding the invisible but essential work that makes response possible, including trust building, safe referral, local verification, community accountability and staff care and continuity between crises
• sharing risk rather than transferring it, including through timely funding, security information, flexible compliance and fair approaches to due diligence
• giving local actors real authority over agenda setting, allocation, adaptation and donor-facing evidence generation, not just a seat in coordination meetings when decisions have already been made
• measuring progress not only by how much funding is channelled, but by whether local actors have real authority over strategy and resources, fair risk-sharing and the institutional support needed to lead.

Localisation cannot be achieved through pilots or one‑off commitments. It requires an architecture that aligns financing, partnership standards, risk sharing and accountability around one purpose: shifting power.

International agencies still matter. But their value should be judged by whether they expand local authority, not whether they keep local actors at arm’s length – close to communities but far from decisions. The strongest accompaniment-based partnerships show that international actors add most when they reduce burden, share risk, strengthen systems, protect local decision space and change their own role over time.

That is the real test for participants at the Global Partnership Conference. Can the modern partnership approach adopted by the FCDO, other donors and international agencies recognise and reinforce local power? Or will shifting power remain a slogan attached to a system that still decides elsewhere?