This paper undertakes the most systematic analysis to date of how institutional donors actually conceptualise and operationalise locally led development (LLD) and localisation in practice and whether current commitments represent genuine transformation, persistent stagnation, or risk of outright annihilation. Written at a moment of acute sector disruption, including the Trump administration’s 2025 withdrawal from international aid commitments, donor realignment, and accelerating funding contractions, the paper provides a timely baseline against which future policy shifts can be measured.
Murphy and McGandy situate localisation within a long arc of development discourse stretching from participatory approaches in the 1970s, through the Washington Consensus, post-Washington Consensus, and into what Gabor (2021) calls the “Wall Street Consensus”, a turn toward deep marketisation, financialisation, and public-private partnerships to close the $4 trillion SDG financing gap. It is within this “post-consensus” moment, characterised by the breakdown of prior ideological certainties about what development cooperation is for and who should lead it, that the paper examines the fate of LLD.
Their methodology combines Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis with Jessop’s Critical Political Economy (CPE), applied to 64 policy and strategy documents from 32 OECD DAC institutional donors, supplemented by civil society-related policies. Using a framework that interrogates the “where”, “ways”, “what”, and “who” of LLD, the analysis traces the performative dimensions of donor commitments, including explicit positioning on major international agreements such as the Grand Bargain (2016) and the USAID-led Donor Statement on Supporting Locally Led Development (2022) alongside what those documents omit, silence, and foreclose.
The findings reveal a consistent gap between reformist rhetoric and structural change. Localisation’s “dual character” is exposed: it signals responsiveness to longstanding critiques of donor hierarchy while largely reproducing existing decision-making arrangements. The vast majority of institutional donor policies affirm the language of ownership, partnership, and local agency without transferring meaningful power, financing, or decision-making authority to local actors. The three titular trajectories, transformation, stagnation, annihilation, are not merely rhetorical: the paper argues that without deliberate effort to catalyse disruptive rather than destructive forces within the system, the localisation agenda risks being quietly abandoned under the weight of geopolitical pressures, funding retrenchment, and institutional inertia.
