Rethinking Community Driven Recovery

There is a growing recognition within the international aid system that humanitarian responses and development solutions must be better tailored to local context and interlinked in order to be effective, but that despite efforts undertaken since the 2016 World Humanitarian Summit, the system is still far from being fit for purpose for this. Specifically, most aid continues to be designed as so-called ‘travelling’ or ‘parachute’ models that often do not deliver responses tailored to local needs and are also often thought out without the meaningful participation and buy-in of affected people. In addition, top-down state centric approaches to development are often insufficient in many fragile and protracted crisis contexts, where state presence and capacity are often weakest, and the effectiveness of peace-building efforts often suffers because approaches do not sufficiently factor in local causes to conflicts. 

In recognition of this, Acted and its sister organisation IMPACT Initiatives developed AGORA, an area-based approach that works through local territories to ensure meaningful community engagement, programme impact and scalability. AGORA has the potential to enable a wide range of programmes and can also complement top-down development approaches in fragile contexts. The objective of this Capstone project is to provide actionable recommendations for the further development of the AGORA methodology, based on an overview of the experience of past and current Community Driven Recovery/Development as well as other area-based nexus approaches.