ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the unfulfilled promises of the Northern-led process of aid localization and the opportunities that this process has nonetheless created for local actors from the Souths. While agreeing that the self-reliance paradigm in which localization discourse is embedded mostly equates to a re-adjustment of Norths–Souths power relations in subtler forms of governmentality, the chapter examines how local actors, especially civil society organizations (CSOs), actually find leverage and resources in the discourse that precisely frames localization and power transfer for the purpose of reclaiming an enhanced agency. The argument builds on two case studies involving, respectively, women’s rights organizations in Jordan and CSOs involved in Syrian refugee education in Lebanon. Although they clearly demonstrate that localization is an everyday struggle for local actors rather than a lived reality, both reveal the different ways in which actors from the Souths mobilize their contextual knowledge to try to assert themselves as necessary and full-fledged partners and not only as implementers.
