The Localization Agenda : Aid's Failure to Deliver on Its Grand Promise.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Savard, Marie-Claude, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Economic assistance.

Humanitarian assistance.

Non-governmental organizations.

Nonprofit organizations.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (241 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

London : Bloomsbury Publishing (UK), 2026.

System Details:

text file rdaft

Summary:

Examines the humanitarian industry's latest failed attempt at reform, identifies the key contradiction at the heart of it, and suggests ways to do things better.

Contents:

Intro

Halftitle Page

Title Page

Contents

Foreword: Epistemological Challenges

1 Localization: Failure to Launch

Challenges to localization

Episteme as territory

The supplantation of knowledges otherwise

A note about positionality

Vignette: El Traidor

Overview of the next chapters

2 Emergency Assistance and the Rise of Technocratic Thinking

Unfreezing the story

Omissions in aid's genealogy

Vignette: To West Papua's Morning Star

(De)colonization and development

The era of NGOs and neoliberalism

A dawning legitimacy crisis

Humanitarianism's mission drift

The road was paved with good intentions

3 The Localization Agenda: What We Know, What We Don't Know

Localization is an old idea

Who are the knowledge producers in localization?

What the literature tells us

The most prominent theme in the literature: Capacity

Vignette: The sky is pedagogy

Knowledge as a common denominator

4 The Gatekeepers

The consecration of Western knowledge in aid

Those who "know"

Technocracy, a child of power and knowledge

Managerialism and its power tools

The construction of knowledge deficiencies

What is a machine without cogs?

The power-knowledge complex

Vignette: On being a disempowered bystander

5 The Shepherds

Advocates of the weak and the poor

The chosen ones

Capacity building or steering?

Certificates of competence, certificates of resemblance

If you have your hand in another man's pocket, you mustmove when he moves

Vignette: I'm too Cartesian in Burkina Faso

"Universal" management expertise as the new modernity

6 The Case of Amani

Ambivalence among the shepherds

Inside Amani

Vignette: The sound of my legitimacy crisis

"But your country offices, what is that?"

Another organizational conundrum: centralizeddecentralization.

The shepherds' tools

Tensions and competing demands at Amani

7 Running to Stand Still: The Humanitarian System's Self-Preservation Mechanisms

Enter the paradox

The aid industry's competing demands

Paradox in the aid industry: ignore or embrace?

The obstinacy of hierarchy

Vignette: Los hombres de plástico

Localization is not possible from within

8 Toward a Polycentric Ideal of Aid

On ending the ontological occupation of aid

Aid as a polycentric system

Monoculture is not the way forward

Acknowledging cognitive and epistemic injustice

Boundary spanners instead of shepherds

Engagement with restorative dialogue

Make way for the choreography of autonomous design

Vignette: Coda, or the restaurant at the edge of the world

Endnotes

References

Index

Imprint.

ISBN:

1-350-57907-6

1-350-57905-X

OCLC:

1577547078