By Trisha Alexis De Leon
The decay of global hegemony shows that things cannot go back to the way they were before. Major world events, such as COVID-19 and the US-Israel war on Iran, are eye-openers: over-reliance on global interdependence can pose great liability, especially for under-resourced and marginalised communities.
We also cannot ignore other challenges at play: genocides in Gaza and the Democratic Republic of Congo and targeted attacks against on-ground actors, including the recent shooting incident in Negros Occidental, Philippines, form a stark reality in the world.
More and more leaders are realising the importance of diversification and domestic resilience. The question is how to get there. While Locally-Led Development (LLD) has become a well-established commitment, there is a significant gap with the actual experience of local civil society organisations—a gap punctuated by cuts in the US development aid in 2025, forcing actors into a funding environment that poses a greater threat to their agency and their autonomy.
CIVICUS’s Local Leadership Labs (LLL) recognises this. In its journey of radical shift, the programme discovered a natural affinity towards honing existing leverage points instead of starting from scratch. For example, Trend Asia’s Structural Legal Aid Training understands that local communities know what is best for them—they just need the support to enhance their legal knowledge so that they can stand up better for their rights. In the same vein, Innovation for Change East Asia’s (I4C-EA) Narrative Builders centres on “demand articulation” for LLD.
Convening partners also identified that fostering inclusive and participatory collaboration involves a gradual mindset change. Many organisations are learning to view stakeholders as co-creators, not just audiences or beneficiaries. For example, Femme Forte Uganda intentionally identifies those with no visibility and stands up for them in rooms where they may not be present. Meanwhile, the Africa Philanthropy Network (APN) takes on a more large-scale approach by identifying key actors and building communities of practice.
It is important to note, however, that decentralisation is a two-way street: while CIVICUS and its partners are mindfully working towards all-encompassing inclusion, local communities are starting to grow confidence as active participants of change, not just recipients of goodwill.
Equipped with knowledge to establish clear, replicable, and adaptable learning systems, local communities co-created frameworks to build tangible, meaningful and transformative change. This is where multi-level support is of increasing importance, especially from major civil society groups. International actors must step up and:
- Make ecosystem-building intentional. The most significant unintended outcome of this programme is partner organisations exchanging skills independently. Communities’ implementation of prototypes without external instruction was also not designed for. A future LLL could build structured conditions for cross-partner solidarity and skill exchange from the start.
- Build a funder relationship pathway alongside community enabling. This project revealed a notable design gap between enabling local actors and connecting them to sustained resourcing. A future iteration should explicitly support partners to navigate direct funder relationships—not by positioning CIVICUS as intermediary but by accompanying partners as they enter those spaces with evidence and confidence.
- Protect the lab conditions as structural commitments. The flexibility and permission to experiment—which partners named as generative—must be built into programme architecture as explicit, named features visible to funders and partners alike; not dependent on facilitation style to maintain.
- Reconsider compliance requirements at grassroots level. The three-source comparison requirement for fund use was identified by Indonesia untuk Kemanusiaan (IKa) as a persistent barrier for community-level actors. Compliance requirements designed for INGOs cannot be applied unchanged to grassroots actors and still claim to support Locally-Led Development.
- Document community co-investment. Spaces, time, food, transport, social capital, and communities’ contributions that do not appear in any budget line also do not appear in any evaluation. A future programme should build documentation of these inputs into the design from the start.
LLL may have concluded, but the work has just begun.
Download our latest compendium
Explore various prototypes turning Locally-Led Development into action, co-created by our partners, Femme Forte Uganda, Trend Asia, CAPAIDS Uganda, Indonesia untuk Kemanusiaan (IKa), the African Philanthropy Network (APN), and Innovation for Change – East Asia.
