1. Grand Bargain localisation workstream (IASC, 2016). Commits signatories to channel 25 per cent of humanitarian funding as directly as possible to local and national responders.It did the hard thing first, which was to put a number on something the sector had only ever discussed as a principle. A number can be missed in public, and it has been. What I keep running into is that it counts arrival rather than conditions. Money can land in a local account with the spending plan already written somewhere else.
2. IASC Localisation Marker Working Group. Codes funding flows by how many intermediaries sit between donor and local actor.The only serious attempt I know of to make the money question auditable rather than declarative, and counting hops is real measurement. When I tried to apply it to a programme I was managing, one hop with total conditionality scored better than two hops with genuine discretion, and I could not get the marker to say the thing I could see.
3. Charter for Change (2015). Eight commitments, self-reported annually by INGO signatories.Worth taking seriously as a public statement by organisations who did not have to sign anything. As evidence it is the actor measuring itself. I have written one of these returns, so I know how the sentence gets chosen.
4. NEAR Network Localisation Performance Measurement Framework (2019). Seven dimensions covering partnership, funding, capacity, coordination, policy influence and participation.The best in this list, and the only one built from a Southern network outward rather than a donor inward. I have borrowed most heavily from the policy influence dimension, which comes closer than anything else to asking whether a local actor can change something rather than receive something. Capacity still travels one way in the framing, and that is the assumption I bump into when I use it.
5. Start Network, Shifting the Power (2015 to 2017). Measured influence in coordination structures alongside organisational capacity.It identified correctly that a seat at a table is not influence over it. Then it found, as this tool finds, that the difference is far easier to name than to measure.
6. OECD DAC evaluation criteria, revised 2019. Relevance, coherence, effectiveness, efficiency, impact, sustainability.Durable enough that most donor templates are downstream of it, which is reason enough to know it well. Sustainability sits sixth, and in the evaluations I have read and contributed to it gets written last, shortest, with the least evidence behind it. It asks whether benefits continue, which is a different question from whether authority moved.
7. Core Humanitarian Standard on Quality and Accountability (2014, revised 2024). Nine commitments with third party verification schemes.External verification is a genuine advance and the reason I trust a CHS result more than any self-reported return here. It is built around accountability to affected populations, so it catches consultation failures well. It was not designed to catch a partner who gets consulted properly and still cannot move a budget line.
8. USAID Local Capacity Strengthening Policy (2022). Reframed capacity as relational rather than a deficit to be filled.Conceptually the strongest US document on this, and now largely of historical interest. Worth reading alongside what happened afterwards, which turned the whole question into a live test nobody designed.
9. USAID Journey to Self-Reliance country roadmaps (2018 to 2021). Seventeen third party metrics scoring national commitment and capacity.Using third party data rather than self-report was the right instinct and I wish more frameworks did it. It measures countries. A country can move up the roadmap while every clinic inside it stays exactly as dependent as it was.
10. Gavi eligibility and transition policy. Gross national income thresholds trigger co-financing steps and eventual graduation.The clearest worked example of transition as a schedule, and predictability is undersold by its critics. A partner can plan against a schedule and cannot plan against a mood. The schedule is set by national income, and I have not found the point in it where anyone asks whether the delivery system underneath can absorb the step.
11. Global Fund sustainability, transition and co-financing policy (2016). Transition readiness assessments before funding steps down.Assessing readiness before withdrawal rather than after is the best single idea in this list and question eleven borrows it wholesale. Where I have watched it strain is services delivered by civil society rather than by the state, where a graduation schedule arrives at an organisation the state has no plan to fund.
12. WHO health system building blocks (2007). Six blocks: service delivery, workforce, information, medicines, financing, governance.Still the fastest way to work out which part of a system fails first, and I reach for it as a checklist more often than anything else here. Governance is one block of six. In the interviews I have been doing, governance is not a block. It is what decides the state of the other five.
13. Organisational capacity assessment tools (OCAT, Pact OCA and similar). Domain scoring of partner organisations, usually self-administered with a facilitator.The facilitated version can be a genuinely good conversation, and I have seen partners use the output to win internal arguments they had been losing for years. The scoring measures a partner against a template of a well run INGO and marks down informal process, which is frequently the reason anything works at all. This tool exists partly because of that, which is why there is a flag on every question.
14. Outcome Harvesting (Wilson-Grau and Britt, 2012). Works backwards from observed change to what plausibly caused it.One of the few methods that can register an unplanned local workaround as an outcome rather than as noise, and questions seven and eight are built on its logic. Labour intensive, which is why it appears in proposals more often than in budgets.
15. Most Significant Change (Davies and Dart, 2005). Structured collection and selection of participant narratives.Surfaces things no indicator was watching for, which is exactly what you want early. I have also seen it arrive at the end of a process as a box of quotes decorating findings that were settled months earlier. The method did not do that. The timing did.
Read together, the centre of gravity across all fifteen is funding directness and organisational capacity measured against an external template, mostly assessed before the handover happens. Very little of it asks whether a local actor can say no, and almost none of it separates a constraint the programme chose from one it inherited. That second absence is where the weighting here departs from the field.