Context

Over the past decade, the push for localisation has put partnerships with local and national actors at the centre of aid policy reform.

While policy frameworks increasingly frame localisation in the language of partnership and shared responsibility, emerging evidence points to persistent gaps in how security risk management (SRM) is practised across international-local partnerships:

• Recorded attacks against aid workers have overwhelmingly affected national personnel.
• Most technical security resources are not tailored to specific local and contextual needs.
• L/NNGOs operate with markedly weaker access to dedicated security budgets, insurance, and protective resources than their international counterparts and duty of care commitments that protect international personnel rarely extend to their local partners.
• L/NNGOs remain significantly under-represented in the coordination structures through which collective security information, analysis, and access negotiation flow.

These patterns suggest that the rhetoric of equitable partnership has not yet translated into corresponding shifts in how exposure is distributed, how responsibility is allocated, and how security capacity is extended.

Aims of this article

While donors and system-wide structures play a key role in shaping risk distribution, intermediaries – notably international NGOs (INGOs) and UN agencies – can reinforce inequitable risk-sharing dynamics when partnerships transfer risk to local and national partners without providing the resources, flexibility, information, and support needed to manage those risks safely.

This article examines those challenges, drawing on risk-sharing literature and practitioner case studies from interviewed organisations at different stages of the journey. To this end, it asks:

• What intermediary policies, practices, and incentives create or reinforce barriers to meaningful security risk-sharing with local and national partners?

• Where are promising practices emerging, and what can be learned from organisations at different stages of the journey?

• What practical steps can intermediaries take to begin closing the gap between security risk-sharing commitments and operational reality?

Structure

Section 1 introduces the article.

Section 2 examines the practical barriers to equitable risk-sharing.

Section 3 turns to emerging practice, showing how different organisations are trying to make security risk-sharing more explicit, practical, and equitable in their partnerships.

Section 4 sets out practical pathways for intermediaries, drawing directly on the case study findings.