Proximity is not power.

On 10 December 2025 I spoke at the DG ECHO Leadership Group Meeting in Brussels, part of the High-Level Conference of the Humanitarian Leadership Group on Supply Chain. HELP Logistics had supported that process through the year and co-facilitated the workshop on digitalisation. I had one paragraph in my remarks that mattered more to me than the rest of them, and I want to say here, in my own name, what I meant by it.

What I said was this.

Localization is often described as bringing operations closer to crises, but proximity alone does not create power. True localization requires both structural and leadership shifts: devolving systems and capabilities, and ensuring that local actors are co-architects of humanitarian response, not implementers of external vision. It is a rebalancing of legitimacy.

I said it on behalf of my organization because I believe it as a person. That is the only reason to take a job like mine. If I make a commitment in a room like that, it is because I argued for it before I stood up.

Here is the argument underneath it.

Since the Grand Bargain the sector has been moving operations closer to the people it serves. Offices in the countries themselves. National staff in senior roles. Programs designed in the region rather than in a capital eight time zones away. All of that is real, and none of it settles the question that matters, which is who is actually allowed to decide. An organization can move every desk it owns to within fifty kilometers of a crisis and still hold every decision worth holding. Proximity is a map. Power is a signature.

I have never heard anyone in this sector argue against localization out loud. It stalls anyway, because the machinery that decides was built somewhere else and nobody has changed the machinery. The evidence for that, and the three mechanisms doing the holding, are the position itself. What I want to do here is say what follows from it, including the parts I will not sign up to.

Start with a finding from a twelve-month study of interoperability across UN agencies, NGOs, donors and the private sector. Interoperability here means whether the systems different organizations run can actually work with each other rather than beside each other. The answer was not the one the question usually gets.

Interoperability is not limited by technology; it is enabled by governance and incentives.

Read that twice if you work in this field. It is the same shape as the localization finding. The obstacle is not capability. The obstacle is who is permitted to decide, and what they are rewarded for. You can buy any system you like. You cannot buy the authority to use it.

Our own annual survey says the same thing from the other direction. Seven in ten of the people who answer it work in field and country offices rather than headquarters, and the last published round found fewer than half of them seeing local staff promoted into senior supply chain roles, down on the year before. The knowledge is in the right place. The authority is not moving toward it.

What I do not stand for

It is easier to say what you believe than to say what you refuse, so let me be specific. Five things I will not argue for.

I do not accept capacity as the explanation. "They are not ready yet" has been the sector's answer for every year I have worked in it, and it is doing work that has nothing to do with readiness. It explains the delay without anyone having to give anything up.

I do not accept capacity building as a substitute for transfer. Training somebody to operate a system they will never be permitted to change is not development. Where it has become a permanent program rather than a finite one, it is worth asking whether it exists to build the local organization or to keep the international one in the room.

I do not accept technology as an answer to a governance problem. Digital maturity that leaves the decision rights exactly where they were is an expensive way to stand still.

I do not accept duplication defended as independence. Agencies still run their supply chains in parallel, and the interoperability study found the duplication sitting where it costs most, in procurement, in transport, in customs clearance and in the supplier data underneath all three. Running the same capability separately is not resilience. I said in December that resources should follow an organization's core mandate, using shared capability rather than rebuilding it in silos, and that shifting authority closer to local actors is part of the same sentence, not a separate initiative.

I do not accept consensus as thought leadership. A great deal of what the sector publishes is written to be agreed with. It costs the author nothing and changes nothing. If a position cannot lose you a room, it is a description.

And one thing I will not do, which is name the organizations. The mechanisms are the problem and the mechanisms are fixable. People defending them are mostly good people inside a structure that rewards the defense.

What it costs

A position that costs nothing is the consensus I just objected to, so here is where this one has cost me.

Opening an office in a new country needs somebody who has done company registration, local counsel and bank accounts before, and that person is rarely a national of the country you are opening in. So the early appointments were international. That is my own argument losing to a practical constraint, inside my own organization, with nobody else to blame for it.

What I did about it was slower than a policy would have been. Each office was built to be handed over. As they became stable, the people who opened them moved on, and the directors who took over were nationals who had come up through the organization, several of them having joined from outside the humanitarian sector entirely. It took most of a decade. It was not a policy, it was a philosophy I put into each office, and a philosophy holds only as long as you keep putting it there.

That is the version of this argument I have actually paid for, and it is why I do not think the sector's problem is conviction. Localization done properly is slower in the first year and only obviously right much later. That gap is where the mechanisms do their work, because every one of them is built to be judged on the first year. Anyone who tells you it is quick has not done it.

The full argument runs through Pathways and Power: who decides, whose name is on it, and what holds that in place.

Nathan Kunz, Strengthening Interoperability and Collaboration in Humanitarian Supply Chains. Advancing Inter-Agency Coordination across the United Nations, Research Report, May 2026. Funded by HELP Logistics.