Fwd: What Localization Taught Me About Democracy
David Jacobstein
From: Democracy Without Exception <democracywit...@substack.com>
Date: Wed, Jun 3, 2026 at 10:48 AM
Subject: What Localization Taught Me About Democracy
To: <davidjaco...@gmail.com>
What Localization Taught Me About DemocracyDavid Jacobstein on Learning from USAID’s Efforts
I worked at USAID for 15 years, until its demise in 2025. During that time, I watched localization—the idea that international development assistance should flow to agendas and solutions devised and led by local actors—move from an aspirational idea to a central organizing principle of development reform. We made progress toward that goal, but in my view ultimately failed to truly put local priorities and organizers in the lead. I’ve been thinking about that failure lately as I look at efforts across the United States to revitalize an ailing democracy. I think that USAID’s experience with localization holds an important lesson for the pro-democracy crowd in the United States: what we struggled to relinquish was not funding, but control. For as long as the United States has supported international development, officials have employed lofty rhetoric about the need to foster local leadership and allow local voices to shape their country’s development journey. However, while USAID signed agreements with each host country outlining the sectors that both were interested in working on, the specific objectives for USAID’s work were set either by Congressional earmarks from Washington or country strategies designed in Embassies. Likewise, most of the work was done through large international contractors and nonprofits working on discrete projects. In the 2000s, the pace of the push toward localization increased, with renewed calls for greater country ownership. The international development sector recognized that in order to achieve sustainable improvements in human lives, it needed to shift from simply providing goods and services (e.g. building hospitals and schools) to improving markets and networks (e.g. supporting local governments to deliver services). Doing this required building buy-in with local stakeholders and moving from a top-down approach to one that involved partnership with local governments, businesses, nonprofits, and civic groups. Reforms intended to move in this direction tended to focus on formal funding arrangements: streamlining regulations to enable funding to flow directly to host governments and local organizations, instead of passing through international nonprofits and contractors. While an understandable starting point, this overlooked the importance of restructuring programs to better align with local priorities. Indeed, the term “localization” came to mean adapting aid flows so that local actors received a larger portion of funding—rather than empowering local stakeholders to define project priorities. Local organizations got more of the money, but the projects were still largely designed by donors. Localization in Bosnia and its shortfallsA case in point is USAID’s work in Bosnia. On the surface, programming there fit the profile of a localization success story: most of the USAID portfolio was delivered through Bosnian NGOs. A number of strong professional organizations regularly critiqued draft legislation, issued shadow reports to the EU, and promoted democratic norms and values through public advocacy campaigns. These were significant gains, achieved collaboratively between the USAID team and its Bosnian partners, representing real wins that fostered a more open society. But when I travelled to Bosnia in the mid 2010s, USAID staff expressed more frustration than satisfaction. Just in the past week, there had been a protest in Tuzla around a land grab. Someone connected to the city administration tried to claim land and build a restaurant in a park that was valued by mothers who liked to walk with their strollers there. Groups of women began to protest—a big deal in a country known for apathy more than engagement! It seemed like a real opening for citizens to raise their voice and protest corruption. However, when two USAID-funded Bosnian NGOs showed up in Tuzla, they wasted no time trying to take charge. They sought to take the lead in organizing, telling the mothers where to go and how to protest, analyzing which laws were being broken, and generally asserting their control, rather than listening to the women and finding ways to serve. This did not go over well. The women of Tuzla quickly asserted that the NGOs didn’t speak for them; nonetheless, the women were sidelined from negotiations over what would happen next. The USAID team’s takeaway was that the partners they funded were not oriented toward serving citizens directly—they undertook actions paternalistically, on citizens’ behalf, largely without their input or knowledge. USAID funded organizations to press for reform, not to foster a more cohesive civil society, and so those organizations had learned how to deliver pressure campaigns, not support grassroot efforts. USAID had been able to influence the direction of their Bosnian partners, which yielded victories when the goal was to pressure the government to align with EU standards and the rule of law; but USAID staff now saw how that approach had not equipped these organizations with the skills necessary to support hyperlocal priorities. What I saw in Bosnia was a microcosm of the ways that efforts to foster local leadership fell short. USAID higher-ups measured success by dollars spent on projects, and measured localization by dollars distributed to local organizations. In Bosnia the north star was EU accession, so every project needed to demonstrate how it brought Bosnia closer to the EU. Thus it was natural that USAID retained strategic (and often tactical) direction for those projects even as they tried to incorporate local actors into project delivery. This was ultimately the fatal flaw: USAID could imagine local actors running projects, but not steering the broader strategy to move towards those local actors’ vision for the future. Notably, the mismatch wasn’t between Americans and Bosnians. The staff who directed the projects were themselves Bosnian, and keenly felt the urgency for change. The drawbacks were only apparent when we started to envision our legacy: over time, USAID empowered Bosnian civic organizations that were highly capable at donor-driven advocacy, but less practiced at amplifying citizens’ own initiatives. Their instinct was to take charge and direct energy toward formal policy or legal changes, which left most citizens on the outside of change processes. They sought to solve problems technocratically, through hearings and plans, but couldn’t amplify protest, collaborate around a larger vision, or add much value to broad-based movements of engagement and solidarity. Local priorities and goals took a back seat when they didn’t overlap with USAID objectives, and the realities of donor funding crowded out local leadership despite the best of intentions. Bright spots in practiceTo be fair, there were a number of instances where USAID did support more strategic locally-led programs. From my vantage, the strongest locally-led programs emerged when outsiders could not impose predefined outcomes. This tended to happen when:
Among the most effective programs I saw were those designed to increase youth engagement and empower them to take on future leadership roles. In North Macedonia, I met student activists who ran a moot court competition for 10 years beyond the end of USAID funding because they thought critical thinking skills were central to resisting autocracy. In Kenya, I saw a youth congress where young people from all walks of life, ethnic backgrounds and religions shared experiences and built a sense of what might be possible in the next decade. There wasn’t any more urgent task to crowd out their ideas, because empowerment was the deliverable. Free from the pressure to achieve short-term, measurable milestones, youth empowerment programs could focus on the perceived value and satisfaction of participants and let them dictate more of how programs operated. A second category of strong, locally-led programs clustered around cross-sectoral governance work. Essentially, this meant pursuing governance improvements on topics prioritized by local communities, rather than starting with pre-defined focus areas. In practice, this turned out to be migrant resettlement and electricity access in Colombia, fair grading in schools in Kyrgyzstan, and greater community control over health clinic availability and tax revenue use in Senegal, to name a few examples. These projects were required to use community meetings and surveys to find out what issues people in specific towns or regions wanted to address and were willing to work on. Of course, such techniques were used in many programs, but in too many instances locally-defined priorities competed with specific goals or objectives set in USAID’s country strategy or earmarked into its funding. By contrast, in the projects I saw work best, the lack of a pre-determined overarching outcome created an authentic space for listening to and following local stakeholders’ ideas. The other most innovative programs I saw were where USAID had no choice but to stay humble about what could be achieved in a volatile context. I witnessed incredible local leadership in some of the most difficult operating environments, for instance in programs to support civic action in Belarus despite an oppressive regime and mistrustful public, or to empower communities to take action on health and natural resource management in Myanmar while the government alternately ignored or repressed them. What these had in common was a sense that USAID was fighting uphill, and that partners were hoping to “surf the tidal wave” and figure out how to defend human rights or deliver public goods in contexts where corruption and oppression were the norm. By necessity, we deferred more to local partners’ judgment, given the risks entailed in their work. We also had no independent expectations of targets that we should achieve by funding local partners; amidst oppression, it was a fool’s errand to define which rights we could safeguard or which public goods we could ringfence. We focused on finding the right partners to trust, rather than the right projects to fund. Learning from localizationDemocracy is not only a set of institutions to defend, but a habit of collective public action that citizens develop through practice. Hannah Arendt argued that politics begins when ordinary people act together around shared concerns. In Tuzla, the mothers protesting the seizure of park land were already practicing a form of democratic action before civil society organizations funded by USAID arrived to direct them. Similar tensions can emerge when national organizations attempt to channel community energy into predefined advocacy campaigns. Making space for local agency is possible: for instance, in the United States, Indivisible regularly runs national campaigns and calls to action, but each local chapter is free—and indeed encouraged—to shape its own priorities, strategies, and tactics aligned with the movement’s values. The promise that we can both invest in longer-term local leadership capacity and achieve targeted immediate results is a siren song to be resisted, as much in the United States as abroad. Democracy depends on citizens developing the capacity to act together without being managed into action. Lots of funders aim to support local problem solving as part of a broader pathway to democratic resilience. But seeking synergy or win-wins between donor and community priorities in that process can often undermine it. The desire to align grassroots energy neatly with institutional strategy too often reshapes the former. The challenge for funders and the broader democracy support community is not simply to mobilize people more effectively, but to resist crowding out the very forms of agency they hope to strengthen. And the most frequent culprit isn’t ill intent, but a fixation on the big picture at the expense of the fabric of local reality. Democratic capacity is not built through expertly managed interventions. It is cultivated slowly through trust, participation, and the experience of acting together in public life. In other words, strengthening democracy is less about teaching people how to participate than making space for them to discover that they already can. David Jacobstein has worked for more than two decades at the intersection of democracy, governance, and social change. As a Democracy Specialist at USAID, he helped shape the agency’s approaches to political economy analysis, locally led development, and capacity strengthening, co-authoring the Local Systems Framework and Local Capacity Strengthening Policy. He now writes and teaches about systems change, democratic renewal, and what the field of international development can teach about strengthening civic life and democratic institutions. He remains fascinated by how our assumptions about change shape the way we pursue, evaluate, and sustain it. © 2026 Democracy Without Exception |
Nicholas Demeter
I'm presently working with the Uganda commissioner for M&E in the office of the PM, to organize evaluations of all manner of GoU development initiatives (as per their mandate). I plan to engage him next week to discuss Ebola, so consider this a call for ideas for how to best approach this highly delicate situation so that it can be a learning experience for future Ebola outbreaks and possibly some advice that can further this most important of AdaptDev discussions.
Warm Regards from Kampala!
Cell/WhatsApp +256-780-923-638
David,
Thank you putting these reflections down on paper. Localization is considered one of USAID’s bright spots, so it’s brave to question it. This resonates with my own experience strongly. And, as an evaluator, I’m dismayed by how MEL is used to retain control over programs, even those that are touted as “downwardly accountable” or “empowering locally led development.” I’m thinking of two recent evaluations that I’ve led – one funded by USAID and second by another European bi-lateral. In both situations, the rhetoric was there in spades as were a number of the performative elements of “localization.” However, the evaluation experienced significant pressure to enforce the donor’s control and tell the donor’s story. In both cases, the partners told me, “This evaluation is harming us.” We resisted the weaponization of the evaluation, but it was a real struggle.
A colleague and I are conducting (IRB-approved) research to document one of the situations as a case study. Results should be ready in the fall. In the meantime, I posted my recent musings on evaluation and democracy on my LinkedIn here.
Count me an ally in this conversation. Because we need to learn from these missteps and build back better. The world needs a vibrant, robust and equitable system of global collaboration to address the challenges that we are facing.
Best wishes,
Heather Britt, Monitoring & Evaluation Services
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From: local-syste...@googlegroups.com <local-syste...@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of David Jacobstein
Sent: Wednesday, June 3, 2026 5:34 PM
To: Local Systems Community 2.0 <local-syste...@googlegroups.com>; adap...@googlegroups.com
Subject: [Local Systems Community 2.0] Fwd: What Localization Taught Me About Democracy
Hi all,
Sharing something I wrote for the Democracy Without Exception substack - a great source for interesting thinking linking international and domestic democracy experiences. Does it resonate with you? Let me know!
Best,
David
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Democracy Without Exception <democracywit...@substack.com>
Date: Wed, Jun 3, 2026 at 10:48 AM
Subject: What Localization Taught Me About Democracy
To: <davidjaco...@gmail.com>
David Jacobstein on Learning from USAID’s Efforts
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