Localising Anticipatory Action: Why It Has to Empower Governments, Not Work Around Them

*Most localisation conversations in anticipatory action have focused on local NGOs and community organisations. That is part of the picture. The primary responsibility holder for disaster management in every country is the government's lead disaster management authority, and if our anticipatory action investments do not also build that authority, the architecture we are scaling will struggle to align with the Sendai Framework over the long run.*

*An anticipatory action trigger is initiated in a country whose National Disaster Management Authority holds the legal mandate, the institutional history, the relationships with sectoral ministries, and the constitutional responsibility to lead the response. Within hours, an inter-agency coordination meeting convenes. The international architecture is in the room. The NDMA is at the table. The conversation moves quickly. Decisions get shaped around the authority that is supposed to be at the centre of them.*

I have been in that meeting more than once. Everyone in the room is trying to act in good faith inside structures that did not anticipate this question. The argument I want to make in this piece is that the next stage of localisation in anticipatory action will need to do something the first stage did not quite do, which is build the authority of the institution constitutionally responsible for the response alongside the local actors who deliver on its behalf.

This is the longer-term argument I have been making across my work on national disaster data systems governments can own, on the politics of who owns continuity when the funding cycle ends, and on the evolution from DesInventar to DELTA Resilience as a sovereignty question. This piece applies the same logic to AA.

The Grand Bargain and the decade of localisation discourse that followed shifted funding and decision-making toward "local and national responders." In practice, "local and national" has most often translated into local and national NGOs and community-based organisations. The lead government disaster management authority has typically been engaged as a coordination stakeholder rather than as the institution with primary statutory responsibility for the response.

That has produced real progress on bringing implementation closer to communities, which is one of the goals localisation was designed to achieve. The next stage of the work is to bring the same commitment to building the authority that has the long-run responsibility to integrate anticipatory action into the country's broader disaster management vision. Without that, the implementation gains stay episodic and do not consolidate into a national capability that survives the funding cycle.

I have written related arguments before, in Building Disaster Data Systems That Governments Can Own and in the lessons from six countries. The pattern repeats in AA, and there is room to take it further.

It is worth pausing on why most anticipatory action financing flows the way it currently does. The choices are not arbitrary. Donors carry fiduciary obligations to the publics that fund them. Public financial management capacity in many disaster-prone countries is genuinely uneven, and routing fast-disbursing AA funds through systems that cannot guarantee timely use is a real risk for everyone involved, including the affected communities. Pooled instruments operated by UN agencies and INGOs can disburse in days, where treasury-routed flows often need longer cycles to clear. The current architecture is the considered answer to those constraints, and the people who designed it have been trying to make AA work in conditions where it could otherwise stall.

The constraint set is real, and any honest conversation about localisation has to start there. The structural consequence, however, is that the financing rails we have built largely bypass the institution that has the long-run responsibility for disaster management. If treasury never handles AA money, the government never builds the capacity to handle it at scale, and the next cycle of AA programmes has to route around government again. The pattern is self-perpetuating, and the longer it continues, the more we entrench the very capacity gap we keep using as a reason to route around government in the first place.

The good news is that the constraints and the long-run goal can be addressed at the same time. The next section is about how.

The answer to this structural challenge is not to abandon the funding pathways that currently make AA work at speed. It is to add a layer of investment, alongside the existing rails, that builds the lead disaster management authority's ability to play the convening and integrating role only it can play. Several practical steps would change the trajectory.

The first is dedicated investment in coordination capacity at the NDMA. Most AA programmes hold detailed coordination structures with their UN cluster co-leads and INGO partners but do not allocate budget for the government convenor's coordination function itself. Embedded technical staff inside the NDMA secretariat, multi-year staffing support for the agency's AA focal points, secondment arrangements that strengthen rather than substitute for civil-service positions, and protected operating budgets for the NDMA's own coordination role would meaningfully change the picture.

The second is a reporting architecture that goes in both directions. AA programmes report to their donors regularly and in detail. Reporting to the lead government disaster management authority, by the same partners, on the same operational events, in the same time frames, is far less common. A protocol-level requirement that AA programmes report into the NDMA as a core compliance condition would shift the information flow without disrupting the donor accountability layer. The NDMA in turn would need the technical capacity to receive, store, analyse and act on those reports, which is the second investment area and one that AA plans rarely budget for explicitly.

The third is making NDMA staffing and operating costs an eligible line in AA financing. Most current AA plans do not provision the government staff who have to coordinate, supervise and report on activations. Without that line, the agency's involvement gets squeezed between the activities of better-resourced partners, and the institution that should be at the centre stays under-staffed. A small allocation per activation, paid through arrangements that do not disrupt civil-service salary structures, would unlock far more than its size suggests.

The fourth is treasury-adjacent financing models that build government public financial management capacity over time without exposing donors to the fiduciary risks they are right to be cautious about. National contingency reserves topped up with multi-year predictable donor contributions. Trust funds where government holds a meaningful share of the governance. Sovereign risk pools where the architecture already routes through government. African Risk Capacity for Africa and CCRIF for the Caribbean are examples of financing rails that built sovereign capacity instead of routing around it. The World Bank's Disaster Risk Financing and Insurance Program has been building this stack for over a decade, and the AA community could integrate with it more deliberately than we currently do.

None of these steps require dismantling the architectures that currently make AA work. They add a layer of investment alongside the existing flows that builds the authority every downstream actor relies on.

The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015 to 2030 is built around national ownership. Priority 2 is governance. Target E commits every country to having a national and locally adopted disaster risk reduction strategy by 2030, owned by government. The whole architecture of the framework assumes that risk knowledge, investment, preparedness and recovery are state functions, with the international community in a supporting role.

Anticipatory action that operates outside this architecture, even when it operates well within its own terms, does not build into Sendai progress at country level the way it could. Two systems develop in parallel: a Sendai-aligned national DRR architecture led by government, and an AA system led by UN agencies and INGOs, with partial integration. When the international system funds the second more readily than the first, the country ends up with faster short-term response capability and a slower long-term institutional foundation.

The same logic comes through in the G-DRSF argument about disaster managers and national statistical offices needing to become one operational community, and in the broader case for disaster loss data as the evidentiary backbone of climate adaptation. Sendai Monitor reporting, National Adaptation Plan indicators, NDC adaptation tracking and climate finance applications all run through the lead disaster management authority. Strengthening it strengthens every downstream commitment.

The strongest AA operations are government-led and multi-actor. The lead disaster management authority owns the overall plan. Sectoral ministries lead their respective clusters, with cluster co-lead arrangements with UN agencies where appropriate. INGOs and local NGOs run implementation against government-issued operational plans. CBOs hold the community-level intelligence and the last-mile delivery. International donors fund the overall envelope and align their accountability frameworks to the government strategy.

This model strengthens local civil society too. Local NGOs and CBOs are most effective when their work feeds back into government systems rather than running parallel to them. The data they collect, the trust they hold, the access they have, all become more valuable when integrated upward into the national disaster management architecture.

The IFRC's locally-led anticipatory action funding lines and the Start Network's locally-led work are starting to support this architecture explicitly. As that discipline spreads further into the wider donor community, the gap between localisation in principle and localisation in practice will close.

Most strong national AA systems sit inside regional architectures that no individual government can host alone. The SADC Disaster Risk Reduction Unit, ECOWAS emergency coordination, the IGAD Climate Prediction and Applications Centre (ICPAC), the ASEAN AHA Centre, African Risk Capacity and the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility all carry technical, financial and coordination capacity that smaller national disaster management authorities cannot maintain on their own.

The regional layer carries transboundary hazards (drought belts, cyclone basins, locust corridors), shared early warning systems and sovereign risk pooling. Government-led AA design has to include the regional layer explicitly, both because it adds capacity to the national level and because some hazards do not respect national borders.

The implication for AA implementers is that the architecture has three vertical layers (national authority, decentralised government, civil society) and a fourth horizontal layer (regional intergovernmental bodies). All four belong in the design. International humanitarian agencies are a support function across that architecture.

Building anticipatory action with government at the centre, alongside the local actors who deliver on its behalf, is the next stage of localisation. It is the design that links AA to Sendai, to National Adaptation Plans, to NDC commitments, to the broader DRR and resilience picture, and to the institution-building that survives the funding cycle.

The lead disaster management authority of a country is the institution that will still be there ten years after the current AA programme ends. The question every AA designer can usefully ask, before the protocol is signed, is whether the work being done is also building that institution's capacity to lead the next response. The answer is the test of whether the design is contributing to the long-run vision the country itself has set for disaster management.

*Tags: Anticipatory Action · Localisation · Sendai Framework*