Localisation and Locally Led Development in the Post-consensus Era: Transformation, Stagnation, or Annihilation?

As the polycrisis of global ecological, political, economic and societal breakdown interacts and unfolds across sites and scales, the need to reform and reorient the international development cooperation regime is urgent. Locally led development (LLD) emerged as a panacea for development ineffectiveness across successive policy paradigms from the Washington Consensus to the Wall Street Consensus. Why such a scalar reorientation is gaining renewed traction, whether this signals a substantive shift towards transformative change in how development is conceptualised and practiced, and how this will influence the development paradigm, remains underexplored. To address these questions, this paper critically analyses the policies and practices of thirty-two institutional donors to assess the extent to which localisation and LLD are recognised and operationalised, enabled and constrained in practice. We offer insights on the current conjuncture and the potentialities within LLD to catalyse disruptive rather than destructive forces and transform development in a post-consensus era.