Monthly Archives April 2026

Local and National NGOs: Operating in the Spaces Between

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In 2025 humanitarian donor funding contracted by between 34% and 45% and international organizations and systems reacted. They have responded not only to financial reductions, but to perceptions of duplication and inefficiency. Immediate solutions have been rolled out to mitigate the financial crisis and improve public perception (e.g., staff reductions, mandate rationalization), and longer-term proposals are being debated to address a new future with less funding and higher expectations of targeted impact.

Image by Angelo Giordano from Pixabay

Among these proposals, and demands, is a genuine pursuit . While there is no single agreed-upon definition of localization, it is generally considered to be a shifting of power and leadership from international actors to local and national actors, through equal partnerships, direct funding and representation in decision making bodies. The Grand Bargain in 2016 foregrounded localization in humanitarian action by establishing commitments with targets agreed upon by major donors and humanitarian organizations.

The proposed path that localization takes in the future depends on the intentions of those currently in leadership positions in the sector. One status-quo path has the primary goal of improving efficiency for international organizations and their architecture, with national actors being an instrument to achieving that. Another path has a goal of fundamentally centering local and national actors, their systems and ways of working to lead humanitarian action, with international organizations being an instrument to that transfer.

For this latter transformative path, international actors will need to de-center themselves and look outside their international architecture. They will also need to set aside the stereotypes of local and national actors and see them as successors. This means understanding and appreciating they occupy and the diverse roles they hold in those spaces, both of which haven’t been well understood, acknowledged or legitimized. Liminal spaces have been described by Alasdair Gordon-Gibson as places where humanitarian action meets and engages with the reality of politics and power, and by Larissa Fast as roles that shift between formal and informal systems and operate at the margins of traditional humanitarian order.

This blog draws from a literature review on one segment of local and national actors, the local and national non-governmental organization (LNNGO), with a focus on South Sudan, a country with over 230 LNNGOs working to address humanitarian needs, pursue development and foster peace. This case provides a glimpse into the liminal spaces LNNGOs occupy in the international humanitarian architecture and their own countries, operating within and between the boundaries of different systems.

Working across the boundaries of the Nexus, and the Public-Private divide

The triple nexus is an approach to strengthen the coherence and linkages amongst actors and actions across these three pillars of work. In South Sudan the three pillars are still largely theorized, funded and implemented within one or another. An integrated approach is mostly conceptual for international actors’ work as noted by Tschunkert et al. This gap between theory and practice can be attributed to a number of factors, humanitarian adherence to neutrality, and how an integrated approach is even defined.

The space between the pillars, where the nexus occurs in practice, is occupied by LNNGOs. Though seemingly new, the integrated approach is a familiar way of working for many LNNGOs, reminiscent of . Conceived in the 1980-1990s, LRRD was based on a linear continuum model where one phase of assistance prepared the ground for the next. In the space between the silos, distinctions become less stark. Development, humanitarian and peace labels are less relevant, and LNNGOs labeled as one or another don’t necessarily see themselves or their work in those rigid terms. In many cases the necessities of everyday humanitarian action do not allow an organization to work solely on one of the pillars.

Intersectional Translator

LNNGOs have sustained operations, physical presence and integration in communities making them community anchors that hold an understanding of interconnected needs, from both a nexus and sectoral perspective (e.g., livelihoods, health, etc.). They see communities in a holistic manner, not simply their immediate need but the evolution from the short to long term. Though donor financing is generally for short-term projects, LNNGOs’

For instance, faith-based organisations interviewed by De Wolf and Wilkinson described how their projects might include peacebuilding work, with education, livelihoods, and food security all at once. As one staff member put it, “it’s difficult to distinguish between the triple nexus” because their work “is mingled and the boundaries between them are blurred.”

Systems Weaver

Across volatile contexts with peaks and troughs of need, LNNGOs adjust their course of work from long-term development and peace activities to emergency activities addressing sudden need, and vice versa. They weave systems and single pillar-funded projects together implementing the nexus outside formal mechanisms. With competitive funding environments this may even mean they take on projects that do not closely align with their technical strengths.

In De Wolf and Wilkinson’s research local actors said their proximity to communities enables them to work through the nexus pillars in a cohesive manner that addresses both long and short-term need. One local actor explained with an example of how examining and addressing the inter-relationship between cattle-raiding and food insecurity was both a peace and humanitarian activity. Local organisations often use different pools of money to achieve these ends, making unflexible funding become flexible.

Social Cohesion Actor

LNNGOs overcome tensions between humanitarian and peace activity as on-the-ground social cohesion actors. The literature often distinguishes between ‘small p’ peace (community-level cohesion and conflict prevention) and ‘Big P’ peace (disarmament, demobilization, stabilization and peacekeeping activities), Tschunkert et al note how ambiguity around the concept of the peace pillar altogether leads donors to focus on tangible small p activities. Typically carried out in volatile settings, off limits to international staff, LNNGOs are tapped as sub-contractors of small p work, as pointed out by Kemmerling, and through this are the de facto nexus implementers.

Political Broker

Navigating power, relationships and resources LNNGOs leverage their comparative advantage, bridging the worlds of local populations, government authorities, donors and aid agencies. With a fluency in the language and rules of the aid system, LNNGOs serve as liaisons between communities and other actors. Moro et al note how LNNGOs serve as interlocutors between communities and aid agencies, including the government. Where communities often lack resources and ability to engage with aid actors on an equal footing, per Kemmerling, LNNGOs have a ‘feel for the game’ of how aid works, e.g., the rules, language, negotiating relationships in different spaces

Basic Service Provider

LNNGOs hold an amalgamated role of both public and social. While operating as NGOs, they often have considerably more resources than local government. Because of that they also have public authority and deliver basic services typically performed by government. Moro et al described LNNGOs as having visible, material signs of authority over that of the government, e.g., vehicles, phones, access to flights, and importantly the funding to deliver services of public benefit. This gives them a public authority, that can be seen as a challenge to government. Tchunkert et al note how this usurping of authority is architected at the national level, with donors circumventing governments to deliver services through the UN and INGOs.

Advocate & Employer

Oftentimes delivering in the communities they are from, LNNGOs bring benefit to their home. They often serve as representatives that advocate for their community, raising awareness of needs at the national level. In Robinson’s research one local actor described national NGOs as ‘mouthpieces’, saying, “if you have a certain community that have no local organisations, the issues, you know, conditions, the pains, the stresses, of certain communities, will not be advocated for”.

They also importantly serve as employers, capacity builders and a rung on the career ladder for local talent’s professional mobility, to the extent that employment is often seen as one of the major impacts of NGO work. In both Moro et al. and Robinson’s research, local NGO employment and leadership was a way to ‘become known’, helping many LLNGO founders and staff move into work with the government and international organizations.

Moving Forward

As the aid system is reshaped toward a leaner and more decentralized future, with localization seen as crucial, a transformational approach is needed. One that recognizes and legitimizes the liminal spaces where national and local actors thrive, and one that moves them from the margins to the center of humanitarian action. Their diverse roles in these liminal spaces must be acknowledged and seen not as deficiencies, but as vital capacities for a new aid paradigm.

About the author

Lisa M. Peterson is a PhD researcher at the International Institute of Social Studies, focusing on humanitarian governance, localization, and NGO coordination.

The Synthesis Architect: Reclaiming nuance by qualitative researchers in the age of AI

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As AI transforms social science, development practitioners must navigate the tension between scaling qualitative data and falling into a ‘hivemind’ of Western-centric consensus. In this blog Arul Chib collaborates with AI to discuss how in shifting from data collectors to synthesis architects, researchers can utilize local models to protect privacy while ensuring the ‘soul’ of the narrative remains human-led.

Image by Anna Shvets on Pexels (CC0): https://www.pexels.com/@shvetsa/

History suggests that the panic surrounding new technologies often follows a predictable pattern of resistance, moving from initial bans and surveillance toward eventual integration. In the 1970s, the introduction of the calculator sparked fears that it would lead to mental atrophy and destroy the fundamental understanding of mathematics.

However, this shift did not kill maths; rather, it ended the era of the human arithmetic clerk, allowing students to focus on higher-order problem-solving rather than the mechanics of long division. Similarly, the rise of Wikipedia as an online resource in the 2000s was initially seen as a threat to academic rigor, but the Internet eventually became a baseline for information literacy where the skill shifted from finding facts to verifying their sources. Today, the emergence of AI in research represents a new phase where the value of academic work is shifting from merely examining the final output (e.g., essay) to understanding the documentation of the thought process through mandatory disclosure of GenAI prompts.

In the field of social science, traditional qualitative research has long been hampered by being slow, small-scale and expensive. This creates a persistent bottleneck where researchers are often limited to a handful of interviews due to the labour-intensive nature of manual transcription and coding. AI offers the promise of ‘deep data at scale,’ enabling practitioners to move from ten interviews to analysing hundreds or even thousands of open-ended responses with increased efficiency. By offloading the clerical work of tagging sentences, the researcher can reclaim time to focus on policy implications and the logic of the synthesis. Within this framework, AI serves as an augmented research assistant rather than a lead investigator, effectively ending the era of the human transcription clerk.

Despite these efficiency gains, AI models present significant ethical risks for development practitioners because they are predominantly trained on Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) data. This inherent bias can skew the interpretation of indigenous knowledge and non-Western development contexts. Furthermore, uploading sensitive field data to cloud-based Large Language Models (LLMs) represents a major ethical breach and a potential violation of privacy regulations like GDPR. To protect data sovereignty, researchers are increasingly turning to local LLMs that run directly on their own hardware, ensuring that the narratives of marginalized communities never hit the corporate cloud.

A core tension exists between the deterministic nature of AI and the expansive reality of qualitative research. While larger models are often expected to be more creative and inclusive, they frequently converge toward a single deterministic consensus, or a global average, due to alignment training. This phenomenon of inter-model homogeneity results in ‘hivemind’ outputs that strip away the originality and understanding (e.g., cultural silences) essential for breakthrough work. Because AI tends to average out outliers, the most critical data points – such as the lone dissenting voice in a village who disagrees with the chief – are often erased or ignored. If the cost of verifying an AI’s summary to ensure it has not hallucinated a consensus is higher than the cost of reading the raw transcripts, then AI becomes a net-negative for research productivity.

To avoid these pitfalls, researchers should utilize AI for deductive tasks, such as applying established frameworks like the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), while reserving inductive discovery for human intuition. Specialized tools like ATLAS.ti allow for thematic interrogation where the researcher maintains a direct link to the raw text, preventing the ‘black box’ problem found in general chatbots. AI can also serve as an ‘unbiased mirror’, identifying themes that contradict a researcher’s own subconscious biases or finding hidden gaps in existing literature through semantic mapping. Ultimately, the value of the development practitioner using qualitative techniques has shifted from a data collector to a synthesis architect. While AI can automate the clerical tagging of data, the final interpretive leap must remain human to ensure cultural nuance and reflexive awareness. By embracing a ‘human-in-the-loop’ mandate, researchers move beyond being simple data sorters to become data critics who provide the creativity that a hivemind cannot replicate.

About the Synthesis Architect:

Arul Chib specializes in the intersection of technology and development, focusing on how digital tools can be ethically integrated into qualitative social science research. This piece was generated by Google Gemini based on his talk recorded at The Centre for Social and Economic Progress, Delhi on 30 Mar 2026. The output was edited for clarity while retaining the authentic voice (e.g., inverted commas for emphasis) of the LLM.

All opinions expressed in this blog are the author’s own, and are not necessarily representative of BLISS, the International Institute of Social Studies, or Erasmus University Rotterdam. Please use generative AI tools with care.

The Silent Exhaustion of the Global Talent Race in CEE Nations

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In the global competition for innovation, the ‘attraction of high-skilled labor’ in countries like Slovakia might still be dictated by the friction of administrative inertia. By recounting his own experience as a South American researcher navigating a postdoctoral offer in Bratislava, Dr Jorge Mantilla’s PACES Perspectives blog illustrates how analog bureaucracy – from ‘wet ink’ requirements to linguistic gaps – remains an important and often invisible barrier to attracting certain groups of high-skilled migrants.

The promise of highly-skilled migration

The way some academic theories frame the attraction of high-skilled labor can be metaphorically compared to a magnet pulling steel filings across a map. For a nation like Slovakia, the narrative is seductive: by importing specialized minds, the country can fast-track its evolution into a global hub for innovation. But in practice, the magnet of policy often hits the lead wall of administration. I should know. I was the kind of ‘talent’ the rhetoric seeks to attract, only to find that the distance between a signed contract and a postdoctoral position in Bratislava isn’t measured in kilometers, but in grams of paper.

When talent meets bureaucracy

I am a researcher from South America. Not long ago, I was offered a position at a prestigious institution in Bratislava. When the contract arrived, we agreed on a start date six months away – certainly enough time to navigate the visa process, or so I thought. In hindsight, it might have been a conclusion born out of naive optimism.

I’ve never been convinced that a PhD is a reliable proxy for intelligence; if anything, it is a measure of one’s stamina for specialized minutiae. Yet, even with a career built on navigating complex social systems, I found myself profoundly underqualified to decode the mechanics of obtaining a Slovak work permit and visa. There is a specific kind of intellectual humility that comes from realizing that a research degree offers no protection against a process that is complex and emotionally taxing.

A maze of paperwork

Consider, for instance, the criminal record requirement. It sounds simple for someone who has never so much as received a parking ticket. However, in an era where I can authorize a bank transfer with a thumbprint, I instead entered a circular odyssey of ‘wet ink’ requirements. The formula was a bureaucratic triathlon: obtain the physical record, secure an Apostille, locate one of the few certified Slovak translators in the region and coordinate a DHL delivery across a continent.

This cycle can take weeks, even a month. A dangerous timeline, considering these documents have an expiration date. Between translation errors and expiration dates, I found myself repeating this process three times, watching the calendar bleed out.

Distance, language and friction

Then came the geographical and linguistic hurdles. For a researcher in my country, the nearest Slovak embassy is in Brasilia, a mere 4,000 kilometers away. Usually, this requires two separate trips: one for the interview and another to retrieve the passport. Yet, distance was less of a hurdle than the prose.

When I sought clarification on the process, the embassy’s replies arrived as a bewildering linguistic chimera. There is a profound irony in the fact that I, a native Spanish speaker, had to resort to ChatGPT to decipher some words that were, in theory, written in my own tongue. It turned out the language was a confusing hybrid of Spanish and Portuguese.

As our correspondence continued, the tone shifted from cryptic to curt, then from curt to rough. Eventually, the friction was so high that I asked my host institution to intervene through Euraxess – a European researcher mobility network – to act as a buffer. This might underscore a central theme in academic research: Migration decisions are not made in a vacuum of logic; they are made in a crucible of stress. When the bureaucratic apparatus appears hostile before you even arrive, the ‘attraction’ in talent attraction begins to evaporate.

When opportunity collapses

The final blow wasn’t a ‘No’ but a ‘Not now’. With my documents finally secured and flights booked, I requested the final interview. I had been told previously that these were scheduled within a week. This time, however, the response was a shuttered window: the embassy staff was on a mission. The wait for a date would be months. The clock didn’t just run out; it stopped. As the psychological and financial toll mounted, I realized the opportunity had lost its luster. In the end, I chose the only logical path left: I didn’t go.

I don’t believe my story is a mere tale of bad luck; it is mainly about public policy implementation. When high-skilled migration is treated as an endurance test, the host nation rarely wins the race. One can only hope that, in the future, the administrative reality in Slovakia will rise to match the global ambitions of its prestigious universities and research centers.

The PACES project is funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are those of the authors only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

About the author

Dr Jorge Mantilla is an anthropologist and researcher specializing in migration, social trust and intercultural dynamics, with extensive experience in ethnographic and mixed-methods research across Latin America and Europe. His work connects academic research with policy through collaborations with international and development organizations.