Seán Rafter
The framework

Pathways and Power

Three questions. Ask them about any relationship where one party carries the work and another holds the power.

1. Who decides?

Not who is accountable. Not who is consulted. Who can say yes or no without asking.

2. Whose name is on it?

Who is credited. Who presents the work. Whose expertise the record attributes it to.

3. What holds that in place?

The funding structure, the compliance regime, the governance framework.

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The failure

Organizations answer the first two questions at headquarters, assign the responsibility somewhere else, and leave the third question untouched. The result is responsibility without authority: people held to outcomes they are not permitted to decide.

What is at stake

Legitimacy. Not the formal kind that comes with a title, but the working kind, the relational credibility that decides whether people follow a decision or wait to see whether it holds. The three questions determine who has it.

What the research found

Sixteen interviews for my MBA thesis at Kühne Logistics University, across international NGOs, UN agencies, donor bodies, local organizations, federated organizations and academia. Decision authority stays concentrated in global roles. Local actors carry operational responsibility without authorship or decision-making authority. Compliance systems, built to manage fiduciary risk, harden the arrangement; of 264 coded references, the conditions layer drew 101, the largest dimension in the study.

LEADERSHIP BEHAVIORS Authoritarian Humble Risk-averse Change-oriented shape POWER DYNAMICS Trust Legitimacy Accountability Control 1 · Who decides? determine LOCALIZATION OUTCOMES Agency Authorship Decision-making authority Visibility 2 · Whose name is on it? MODERATING CONDITIONS — ENABLE OR CONSTRAIN Funding structure Institutional trust Civic space Compliance environment 3 · What holds that in place?

Not only an aid problem

Any organization that has asked a team to own an outcome while keeping the decisions upstairs is running this structure. The vocabulary differs. The mechanism does not.

Where this came from

On my early deployments I carried a small digital camera and a portable printer that produced photographs a little bigger than passport size. The battery was poor. In a village whose name I have lost, I took a photograph of some children and handed it to them, printed, a minute later. They were astonished. Then everybody wanted one and I had to start doing groups, and I used up every cartridge I had.

I have thought about that day for a long time. A photographer takes the picture away. That afternoon I gave it back, and it was the best day I had in the field. Twenty years later I wrote a thesis arguing that humanitarian systems fail because the outsider keeps the authorship. I may be reading too much into an afternoon with a printer. It does not feel like it.

Download

Sixteen recommendations for moving authority. For donors, international NGOs and local actors, each scored on feasibility and impact, each mapped to the question it moves.

Sources

Rafter, S. (2025), Leadership and Governance Shape Localization: A Qualitative Study of Organizational Power, Decision-Making, and Legitimacy. MBA thesis, Kühne Logistics University, Hamburg.

De Boeck, K., Besiou, M., Decouttere, C., Rafter, S., Vandaele, N., Van Wassenhove, L.N. and Yadav, P. (2023), "Data, analytical techniques and collaboration between researchers and practitioners in humanitarian health supply chains", Journal of Humanitarian Logistics and Supply Chain Management, Vol. 13 No. 3, pp. 237-248.