Every international development organisation I work with is moving authority closer to the countries where the work happens. Fewer have moved the capability that embeds that authority. A country leader who can approve a programme design but has nobody to design it with has been given a signature, not a decision. That gap is where most of my work happens.
I recently led the redesign of an INGO headquartered in Europe. The brief arrived looking like a cost and structure job. It became a capability question within weeks, because as soon as you ask where the skills should sit, you find that nobody has ever decided. Skills have accumulated where they were first hired, and the organisation chart is a record of that history rather than a statement of intent.
What has changed within the INGO sector
For a long time, the argument about local leadership was mostly moral, and organisations could take it at their own pace. Money has forced the pace. The collapse in United States aid funding, deep cuts to the United Kingdom aid budget and reductions across several European donors have removed a large slice of sector income in a short time. That has consequences for capability specifically, and they are not good ones.
Cuts fall on the layers that are easiest to remove rather than the ones that are least needed. Specialist depth goes first because it is expensive and its absence is not felt for a year. Organisations appear leaner, flatter and quietly less able to do the technical work they exist to do and describe the result as localisation.
Meanwhile the demands are moving in the opposite direction. Funders want to reach national organisations directly. Pooled and country level funds are growing.
Governments where the work happens are more assertive about who leads and who speaks. All that asks more of the country and regional levels, not less. So, capability requirements are rising exactly where capability has historically been thinnest.
The misalignments I see
Capability sits where the history is, not where the strategy is. Every organisation I look at has capability concentrated in the place it was founded, and weakest in the delivery or implementation layer. That is never a decision anybody made. It is thirty years of hiring in the place where the hiring was easy.
The middle tier is asked for most and given least. Regional layers are usually the first to be stripped in a restructure and the first to be leaned on in a strategy. I have seen regional leadership expected to broker, assure, and support across a dozen countries with almost no standing capability of their own.
Compliance capability crowds out delivery capability. Reporting, assurance, and donor requirements attract funding in a way that technical depth does not. Over time the organisation gets better at being audited and worse at delivering the work.
What made the difference
Design principles agreed early and written so that each one could guide decisions. That is what made them useful. Most principle sets read well and then play no part when two credible options are on the table.
The principle that carried the most weight said decisions should be made close to delivery and based on evidence, and it named what had to move and from where. Not a general aspiration to be closer to delivery, but a clear statement that decision making and technical expertise had to move away from head office. Putting the two together in one sentence is what stopped this becoming another delegation exercise.
Flexibility was written in as a requirement rather than a hope, and it produced design choices where capability is sized to need rather than to history. And a shared specialist resource any country can draw on without carrying fixed posts. A small programme stops being defined by what it can afford to employ and starts being defined by what it can reach.
The demand for something simple and enabling resulted in combining functions, removing duplicate approval layers, joining up systems. Every approval layer consumes senior capability on checking rather than doing, and duplicated functions mean two teams each holding half a capability and neither holding a whole one.
What to take from it
Your organisation chart already tells everyone where you believe the work and decisions should happen. Look at where specialist skills are held, where budget is signed off, and who can say no. If all three sit in the same place, that is your real operating model, whatever the strategy says.
List the five capabilities your strategy depends on most and mark where each one sits today. Most organisations find at least two of them in the wrong place, and one of them nowhere at all.
Check what your last round of cuts removed. Not the posts, the capabilities. If nobody can answer that, the reduction was financial rather than designed.
And cost capability as you place it. A structure that cannot be funded is a conversation, not a plan, and in this current climate it gets cut by somebody with no interest in the design logic.
One last thing, and I would say it to any board and management commissioning this work. Everything above is the part you control. Whether it counts for much also depends on donors funding capability, and on whether you are willing to build capability in the country based programmes rather than only headquarters. The internal alignment is necessary.
The organisations that will matter in ten years are not the ones with the best words about localisation. They are the ones that put the capability where the accountability already sits and did it deliberately rather than because the money ran out.