Localization in Myanmar – From Buzzword to Imperative

Development

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On 15 August 2023, the UN’s Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs, Martin Griffiths, met Myanmar’s chief general and coup leader Min Aung Hlaing. It was the first meeting between a high-ranking UN official and Myanmar’s dictator since the military coup in February 2021. OCHA promoted the meeting as humanitarian access negotiations on the highest level (Laerke, 2023). As expected, Griffith’s audience with Min Aung Hlaing was instrumentalized by the regime in its propaganda channels (MNA, 2023). Also as expected, the meeting caused enormous outrage among local humanitarian actors in Myanmar (Progressive Voice et al., 2023). This event stands to show how charged the humanitarian space in Myanmar is.

In my first post, I explored how the contested digital space in Myanmar is controlled and used to both oppress and resist. The environment of online and offline repression and the control of financial streams have great implications for the humanitarian situation in Myanmar. OCHA highlights telecommunication and internet restrictions as grave barriers to delivering humanitarian aid (OCHA, 2023). On the contrary, using technology as a tool, for example, for digital crowd-based fundraising, has helped local organizations to deliver life-saving aid in areas out of the reach of international organizations and to overcome funding gaps (ICG, 2022),

In this final post, I will examine how local actors in Myanmar have become humanitarian leaders who demand greater support, respect and decision power in the humanitarian response. They communicate these demands with much authority and urgency, as they are the backbone and the forefront of the humanitarian response in Myanmar, which is utterly dependent on what is referred to as localization.

Approaching localization

Localization is a contested umbrella term that broadly refers to “all approaches working with local actors” in the humanitarian and development sectors (Wall and Hedlund, 2016, p.3). More concretely, localization often describes the transfer of humanitarian management from international to national and local actors. Localization was formalized through the World Humanitarian Summit (WHS) and the Grand Bargain in 2016 and has since become a priority in global humanitarian architecture (Elkahlout & Elgibali, 2020). The Grand Bargain lays down flexible, multi-year funding of local partner organizations, strengthening local partnerships and capacity-building of local partners through donors and international organizations. (IASC, 2016).

Despite these ambitious goals, localization is often criticized for being used by aid organizations as a watered-down buzzword for the mere delegation of operational tasks and project management to local implementing partners without truly expanding local leadership and self-determination (FlyingLabs & WeRobotics, 2022; Slim, 2021). Similarly, remote management of local staff, a practice that has gained much significance since the COVID-19 pandemic and the consequential travel restrictions, is often incorrectly referred to as localization by international NGOs (Barter and Sumlut, 2022).

But localization can also be treated as a much more profound concept that describes the decolonization of the aid sector and a transformation of power relations between international, national and local organizations (Barter and Sumlut, 2022; van Wessel, Kontinen & Bawole, 2023). Organizations and scholars, particularly from the Global South, increasingly call for more direct funding of national and local organizations by international donors (Décobert & Wells, 2023; Slim, 2021). Local and national NGOs would then take over the role of intermediaries between donors and local frontline responders, which fundamentally challenges the position of international NGOs as brokers between donors and local actors.

All these approaches to localization and its debates play into Myanmar’s current humanitarian dynamics. However, before turning to the present, I will briefly look back at the history of localized humanitarian aid in Myanmar.

Localization in Myanmar before the coup

Myanmar has a rich and sophisticated civil society, a plethora of community-based organizations (CBOs) and several national NGOs. This made Myanmar a suitable country for localized approaches by international actors and more formalized localization programmes modelled after the Grand Bargain between 2016 and 2021 (Haines & Buchanan, 2023, HARP-F, 2021).

But already during the 1990s and 2000s, decades of military dictatorship, localization was a humanitarian practice in Myanmar, as the international community had virtually no presence in the country. CBOs and ethnic health organizations (EHOs) delivered cross-border humanitarian aid to war-torn areas along the Thailand-Myanmar border (South, 2008). When Myanmar became a haven for large-scale development cooperation after 2011, these organizations were largely sidelined by international donors and suffered funding cuts (Décobert, 2019). Today, the same CBOs and EHOs, with their networks and expertise, are more important than ever (Fumagalli, 2022).

When cyclone Nargis hit Myanmar in 2008, killing around 140,000 people, international organizations were denied access for many weeks (Hedlund & Su, 2008). Local initiatives and religious organizations stepped in for the overwhelmed and incapable authorities and carried out a first emergency response, delivering life-saving aid to affected populations (Boutry, 2013). Later, these local actors were often dismissively treated by international aid professionals who had finally received their visas (Hedlund & Su, 2008).

After Nargis, all major UN agencies and international NGOs established their presence in Myanmar. Still, the authorities often did not grant humanitarian access to conflict-affected areas to international organizations, who then had to rely on local partners for aid delivery (Jaquet & O’Loughlin, 2012). Based on necessity, these partnerships constitute what Barter and Sumlut call “low-quality localization” (2022, p.850). However, they also involved extensive capacity-building in humanitarian programming, technical assistance and formalized localization programmes, such as HARP-F (Jaquet & O’Loughlin, 2012, HARP-F, 2021). Local actors followed cluster approaches and established local coordination mechanisms, such as the Joint Strategy Team (JST), all of which now contribute to the effectiveness of locally-led humanitarian action in post-coup Myanmar (Barter & Sumlut, 2022).

This brief historical background aims to show that local actors in Myanmar have years of professional experience coupled with deep local knowledge of political, cultural and religious contexts.

We have been working with the UN and international NGOs for more than a decade but still they are talking about building our capacity. What about the capacities that we have that they don’t, such as language skills, knowledge of the context and long-established relationships?   

(Near, 2022)
The role and risks of local humanitarian actors since the coup

Since the military coup in February 2021 and its severe humanitarian fallout, localization in Myanmar is no longer a humanitarian-development buzzword put to trial. It has become a matter of saving lives.

In a strategy to cut off the armed resistance from the support of the people, known as the Four Cuts Strategy, the regime deliberately targets civilians and their livelihoods, including through airstrikes on villages, towns and even IDP camps. According to OCHA, 17 million people in Myanmar, more than a quarter of its population, are classified as having humanitarian needs (2023). Two million people are internally displaced, of which 1.7 million people have been displaced since the coup (OCHA, 2023). In its annual humanitarian needs overview, OCHA notes the heavily restricted humanitarian access and the reliance “on local networks of responders” with a high degree of risk transfer to local actors (2023, p.64).

Since the COVID-19 pandemic and the military coup, international organizations have significantly reduced their presence and operations in Myanmar. (MLHN, 2022). This leaves local actors as the primary responders to a soaring humanitarian crisis while facing severe operational restrictions and great risks. The Myanmar army has repeatedly disrupted aid delivery, looted aid material and arrested and killed aid workers (HRW, 2021).

Aside from the surveillance, movement restrictions and telecommunication curbs, the recently amended “Organization Registration Law” forces all organizations to register with the authorities and reveal their funding and organizational ties (UNHRC, 2023). Many unregistered local organizations are now technically illegal and operate in a clandestine and low-profile manner. This greatly complicates funding for unregistered organizations and even for registered organizations, who are often acting as intermediaries. The inflexibility of donors to adapt to changing circumstances and the bureaucratic hurdles in funding processes pose additional challenges for local organizations (Décobert & Wells, 2023; MLHN, 2022).

Building and maintaining partnerships with local organizations also poses exacerbated challenges and risks for national staff of international organizations.

Elevated roles and risks of national staff

Local staff of international NGOs and UN agencies are increasingly deployed in mid-management positions within organizations as internationals have been unable to enter the country due to travel restrictions and instead resort to remote management practices (Haines & Buchanan, 2023). While this practice elevates the role and the risk of local staff, it does not usually mean better remuneration. While national UN officers receive danger pay since 2022 and are paid in US Dollars, staff of INGOs are usually paid in Myanmar currency and have to cope with skyrocketing inflation and living costs (Ring, 2023, UNICEF, 2022).

Recently, 80 local staff of the World Lutheran Foundation were fired after they went on a labour strike to demand better pay – a case that shows how exploitive some organizations in Myanmar operate and how ignorant they treat the concerns of their local employees, despite the increased delegation of responsibilities and risk (Ring, 2023). Bian (2022) highlights the inequality between local and international staff within humanitarian organizations despite the high value they bring to international organizations with their local knowledge, language skills and expertise. Myanmar is no different here.

Certainly, UN’s relief chief Martin Griffith’s meeting with junta leader Min Aung Hlaing did not help local staff of international organizations in their efforts to build trust with local partners in an extremely tense and dangerous political environment that often puts national staff between a rock and a hard place. 

Localization as empowerment

In a recent paper, Barter and Sumlut (2022) examine how conflicts can either empower or disempower local actors in localization processes. In the case of Myanmar, they attest that local actors have leveraged the humanitarian dynamics to “achieve significant advancement of the localization agenda” (p.861). In their view, local actors in Myanmar are leading the humanitarian response while international actors search for relevance.

In the face of mounting humanitarian challenges in Myanmar, the inactivity, recession and rigidity of international actors do indeed facilitate a process of self-empowerment of local actors that is very apparent in their communication. In a positioning paper, the Myanmar Local Humanitarian Network, a network of national NGOs, states:

For us, localisation need to take into account local leadership and their initiative, space, existing local knowledge, coordination mechanisms and their strategy as well as the decision-making power towards the affected communities instead of an instrumentalisation of the localisation agenda. Localisation needs to take into account the current power imbalance of existing internationalised humanitarian aid architecture and moving towards a real equitable and equal partnership.

(MLHN, 2023, p.2)

Décobert and Wells (2023) highlight the large degree of coordination between national NGOs, not only in the humanitarian response but also in articulating positions towards international actors and donors. These networked national NGOs aim to consolidate their roles as intermediates and brokers to channel funding to frontline local actors and communities in a direct, flexible and needs-responsive manner:

National NGOs are the most relevant organisations to play the intermediary role in the current given context in Myanmar since they have already proven their long-standing working experience with several local CSOs under very challenging and complex situations.

(MLHN, 2023, p.4)

While practical necessities to streamline funding and the calls to submit to local and national humanitarian leadership challenge the roles and operations of international organizations and donors, Myanmar’s politized humanitarian situation questions aid delivery along the lines of humanitarian principles.   

A politized humanitarian space

OCHA highlights a culture of online social punishment, physical persecution and a heavily politicized humanitarian space in which all parties accuse humanitarian organizations of being complicit with either side and “viewing assistance through a transactional lens, rather than based on need and humanitarian principles” (2023, p.20). The agency thereby indirectly responds to the criticism and the demands from local actors that the UN has received since soon after the coup:

The decision that international donors and aid organizations make must be guided by the people of Myanmar, who have overwhelmingly rejected the military junta. This means focusing on principles of solidarity and ‘do no harm’, placing the people of Myanmar at the center of decision making – rather than the overstated principle of neutrality.

(Progressive Voice et al., 2021, p.5).

The authors of this statement from 2021 are a consortium of mostly ethnic CSOs named Progressive Voice, which has also responded in a strong positioning paper to the recent meeting between Martin Griffith and Min Aung Hlaing. The paper was signed by 500 local, national and international organizations and has been widely circulated on social media.

OCHA can no longer afford to rehash failed models of humanitarianism, and thus tacitly giving credence and status to the illegal military junta. Rather, OCHA must be innovative and supportive of local service providers, as well as engage and collaborate with the legitimate stakeholders of Myanmar.

(Progressive Voice et al., 2023)

Indeed, humanitarian actors are walking a tightrope in Myanmar and are facing tough choices (Slim, 2021). A clear siding with the political and armed resistance in Myanmar, to which many local humanitarian actors are aligned, would likely mean the expulsion of the international community from Myanmar, which would then have to resort to cross-border assistance through well-established and functioning networks (ICG, 2022).

But this would have other humanitarian consequences that Progressive Voice does not mention. For example, it would mean the exposure of around 100,000 Rohingya IDPs in Rakhine state to an extremely hostile environment. Local actors in Myanmar have never provided assistance to these IDPs, who are completely dependent on aid provisions from the international community (ICG, 2022). Other areas with large numbers of new IDPs, for example, parts of Sagaing region, cannot be easily reached by cross-border aid.

Diplomacy and advocacy have a role, and there are arguments for the UN to use the communication channels it has to the junta to negotiate access while increasing the support for local actors and advocating on their behalf. International humanitarian presence can protect and can be used as leverage (GPC, 2022). But shaking hands with Myanmar’s dictator and chief war criminal is certainly not the approach that the UN should take. It is a gross spectacle of disrespect to Myanmar’s civil society, which is the best partner that the UN has in the country.

The late Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew once remarked that negotiating with the former military junta of Myanmar was like “talking to dead people” (Roughneen, 2010). The UN should remember these words well and listen to Myanmar’s very alive civil society.

With its strong, self-assured and resilient civil society, Myanmar could be the place for international organizations to practice a different kind of humanitarianism. The kind that is based on solidarity, embraces local leadership, takes risks, and breaks with principled conventions. Unfortunately, the (in)actions of the international community in Myanmar do not signal for this to happen.

References
Personal reflections on the blogging exercise

As someone with a visual communication background, I did enjoy the blogging exercise as it opened the space to work with design and multimedia assets beyond simply writing texts and studying course literature. It was also good to get up to speed again with WordPress. The blogging exercise was the type of group work that required the group to actually function as a team, as the various tasks and responsibilities could only be addressed as such. Thus, the exercise was, for the most part, a good real-life work simulation.

What I did not particularly enjoy was the publicity aspect of it all and being “pushed” to write in the public sphere. Although I have public writing experience in the name of organizations and although my identity on this blog is obscured, I found the blog-writing experience more constraining than liberating. I would have preferred if this blogging exercise would have taken place in the relatively safe space of, for example, the university intranet rather than the www. This would have still allowed for editorial teamwork, which is always useful training when working in communications. But overall, this was a great module. 

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