Localisation, Gatekeeping and the Problem of Closed Development Networks

I tried to work where I live, and it was harder than it should have been. At first I thought this was just my own frustration, perhaps the wrong organisations, the wrong timing, or the wrong approach. But the more I worked with institutions further from home, the more I started to see a pattern that sits well beyond my own experience.

Development has spent years arguing for localisation, and much of that argument is right. Decisions should sit closer to the people and places they affect. Local organisations usually understand context better than distant institutions do because they know the history, the relationships, the informal rules, and the things that rarely appear in strategy documents but still shape whether anything works.

The problem is that we often treat “local” as if it automatically means open, representative, or democratic. It does not. Local ecosystems can become tightly networked, with the same people knowing each other, recommending each other, serving on the same boards, appearing on the same panels, moving through the same funding relationships, and calling on the same organisations when something needs to be done. Over time, familiarity starts carrying its own value and can become a form of currency.

That is not necessarily corruption. Most of the time it is much more ordinary than that. Networks exist because trust is useful, particularly in development where people are dealing with public money, long-term partnerships, political sensitivity, and complex implementation. But there is a point where the network stops being one part of the system and begins to function as the system itself.

Development literature has several concepts that help describe this. Elite capture refers to situations where resources or decision-making are dominated by a small group. Network closure describes systems where access is strongly shaped by existing relationships. Over-embeddedness points to the risk of actors becoming so tied into the same networks that new information, new ideas, and new entrants struggle to get in. Institutional lock-in is what happens when patterns become so established that the system reproduces them almost automatically.

Seen together, these concepts describe a fairly simple problem. Relationships that initially help a system function can eventually make it less permeable. Trust can start behaving like a qualification, and an idea is then judged not only on whether it is good, but also on who brought it, who knows them, who has worked with them before, and whether they arrived through a recognised route.

That dynamic is especially visible in development because so much opportunity travels through relationships. Funding, partnerships, consulting work, coalition membership, board appointments, and access to decision-makers are rarely allocated through completely open processes. The problem starts when the same networks keep reproducing themselves and the system becomes very good at recognising what it already knows while becoming less capable of seeing what is emerging outside it.

This is also where transformation becomes more complicated than representation. We tend to look at who sits on the board, who gets funded, who leads the organisation, and who benefits from the programme. Those are important indicators, but they do not always tell us much about the deeper architecture of legitimacy. A more revealing question is who gets taken seriously without needing an introduction, who is allowed to originate rather than only implement, who gets to build something new rather than plug into something old, and who is treated as credible before someone established has vouched for them.

Localisation can therefore become surprisingly conservative. A donor can move money from London to Cape Town and call that localisation. A global institution can appoint a South African intermediary and say decision-making has moved closer to the ground. Both statements may be technically correct, but if access is still controlled by a small and familiar network, very little may have changed in practice. Power has moved geographically while remaining concentrated relationally.

That is what I have started to recognise in my own work. Some organisations further from home have been more willing to engage the proposition on its substance because they are less invested in the local hierarchy around it. They do not necessarily know who is supposed to matter, which organisations have traditionally held influence, or which relationships are considered important. The conversation can therefore begin with the work itself and whether there is something useful to build together.

This does not make external organisations inherently more open or more progressive. Every ecosystem has insiders, favourites, habits, and politics. But distance can remove some of the assumptions that come with familiarity, and that can create space for ideas and institutions to be assessed on different terms.

There is a particular tension here for people who are deeply rooted in a place but sit outside the networks that allocate opportunity within it. They may understand the local context exceptionally well and still find themselves treated as peripheral because they are not sufficiently embedded in the right relationships. In those cases, being local does not automatically translate into access.

When that happens often enough, the result is not always that people leave physically. More often, their ideas, partnerships, and institutional relationships begin to form elsewhere. Recognition arrives from outside, credibility is built elsewhere, and only later does the local ecosystem begin to see what was there all along.

That pattern should concern anyone interested in building healthy development ecosystems. Closed networks do not only exclude people. They also reduce variation, narrow the range of ideas that can enter, and make systems less adaptive over time. Familiarity becomes confused with quality, and established relationships begin to crowd out experimentation.

A healthy local development system therefore needs both trust and permeability. It needs strong relationships, but it also needs clear routes for people without inherited access to enter. It needs institutional memory, but it also needs enough openness to allow new actors, new institutions, and new ideas to emerge without first being absorbed into the existing network.

The more useful test of localisation may therefore be whether power becomes more open as it moves closer. If decision-making shifts geographically but the pathways into that decision-making remain narrow, then localisation has changed the address of the system without necessarily changing how the system works.

For now, I have learned to ply my trade where the work is received with curiosity rather than filtered through familiarity. Increasingly, that has meant building further from home, even when the work itself remains deeply rooted here.

Craig

This is how we #GrowZA