© OECD

A practical guide for change

In its Practical Guidelines for Supporting Locally Led Development, the OECD recognizes locally led development (LLD) as an approach that places local actors at the center of shaping and driving their own development trajectories. However, the OECD DAC also acknowledges that for many development partners translating commitments to local leadership into policies, programme design, funding practices and institutional behaviour remains a work in progress. Long-standing power imbalances, operational constraints and institutional systems continue to influence how resources and decision-making power are distributed across the development system.

The guidelines aim to inspire and support DAC members in addressing these challenges by offering a set of nine action areas that provide DAC members with practical options to address key bottlenecks in implementing locally led development. Rather than prescribing a single approach, they serve as a flexible “menu of options” that can be adapted to different institutional and country contexts. These options support improvements in policies, financing, institutional capacity and management systems to better enable local leadership and accountability.

The action areas are not ranked, recognizing that some require long-term structural change while others can be adopted more immediately as entry points for reform, behavioral change and peer learning. Taken together, they frame locally led development as a system-wide issue of governance and power, rather than simply a technical question of funding or delivery methods.

A call to action

In the accompanying Call to Action on Locally Led Development coordinated by Peace Direct, an ever-growing number of signatories call on development partners to integrate the OECD Guidelines into their policies, programmes, and partnerships. More specifically, following the 9 action areas of the OECD Guidelines, signatories ask development partners to  

  1. Be clear on your intentions and definitions for locally led development. This includes translating commitments into clear policies and strategies, establishing a shared understanding of locally led development across your institution and being explicit about roles, responsibilities, and power dynamics within each partnership.
  2. Implement meaningful co-creation of development solutions. This means recognizing local actors as co-decision-makers in setting priorities, shaping approaches, and defining success; systematically engaging diverse local actors to embed local knowledge, expertise, and lived experience in policies and programmes; and working with and through existing local networks and processes.
  3. Develop equitable partnership approaches. This means setting clear expectations for equitable partnerships across different partnership types and actors, engaging in long‑term partnerships to build trust, capacity, and shared ownership and ensuring intermediaries uphold equitable partnership approaches.
  4. Improve human resource management. This means empowering country-level decision-making, ensuring local perspectives inform headquarters strategies, aligning staffing, incentives, and recruitment with LLD objectives, and prioritizing local and regional expertise.
  5. Provide quality financing to local actors. This means providing long-term, predictable and flexible financing, including core and overhead support for local partners, intermediaries and networks; combining national budget support with decentralized or subnational financing where conditions allow; and tailoring financing modalities and requirements to local contexts and capacities to ensure inclusive access.
  6. Redefine roles for international intermediaries. This means setting clear expectations and requirements for intermediaries to support local leadership, redefining intermediary roles over time, shifting towards advisory, facilitation and capacity-support functions, and embedding locally led development commitments in partnership agreements with intermediaries.
  7. Simplify due diligence and equitable risk sharing. This means harmonizing and aligning due diligence standards to reduce duplication, using passporting for mutual recognition across funders, adopting simple, proportionate reporting requirements, and promoting risk sharing rather than risk transfer.
  8. Promote locally led monitoring, evaluation and learning. This means engaging with and strengthening partners’ existing Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning systems, ensuring evaluations are culturally appropriate and grounded in local leadership and expertise and including local perspectives into evaluation reporting and adaptive programming.
  9. Promote and practice transparency and accountability. This means establishing transparent reporting systems to track and publish how much ODA reaches local actors directly and through intermediaries, assessing the quality of funding and partnerships established, and embedding locally led accountability commitments in partnership agreements and performance frameworks.

Why these OECD Guidelines matter

The launch of the OECD DAC Practical Guidelines for Supporting Locally Led Development represents an important opportunity to move beyond commitments and towards meaningful implementation of locally led development. By encouraging development partners to examine their own systems, practices and power relationships, the guidelines provide a roadmap for creating more equitable partnerships and strengthening the leadership of local actors.

As a signatory to the call to action, Global Responsibility welcomes this initiative and supports efforts to ensure that development cooperation is increasingly driven by the priorities, expertise and leadership of local communities and organizations. Strengthening local ownership is not only a matter of effectiveness – it is essential for building more just, accountable and sustainable development partnerships worldwide.

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