Session Rationale

The humanitarian system increasingly recognizes that localization is fundamentally about thetransfer of power and responsibility, not merely the transfer of funding. At the same time, the Humanitarian Reset places renewed emphasis on streamlined coordination, efficiency, and clarity of roles disaster risk management.

Yet in practice, decision-making authority, coordination leadership, and accountability mechanisms often remain concentrated within international humanitarian structures. Engagement with national and local actors—including governments, civil society, and the private sector—remains uneven, frequently fragmented, and insufficiently embedded in coordination design. These dynamics are particularly pronounced in protracted forced displacement contents, where durable solutions require sustained integration into national systems beyond immediate responses. This weakens efficiency, sustains parallel systems, and undermines the long-term sustainability of humanitarian action. Institutionalization must go beyond coordination frameworks, including alignment with national development plans, domestic budgets and development financing instruments to ensure sustainability and reduce reliance on parallel humanitarian systems.

This session examines therole of governments—local and national—as central actors in humanitarian assistance and the path to recovery, and explores how more deliberate, earlier, and better-structured engagement can improve coordination efficiency, effectiveness, and accountability to affected populations.

It does so (a) by highlighting the growing institutionalization of anticipatory action in public disaster risk management, even in challenging contexts. Anticipatory action has been pioneered by the humanitarian sector but is increasingly institutionalized as an approach in public disaster risk management, based on existing capacity and partnerships. Participants will share experiences, discuss barriers, and explore future pathways for integrating and scaling up anticipatory action within government frameworks.

Objectives:

· Highlight the growing institutionalization of anticipatory action into government frameworks and enhance understanding on what it means and takes to integrate anticipatory action into government systems

· Examine in contexts of forced displacement how anticipatory action and crisis response functions can be embedded with government systems in ways that strengthen long-term resilience, reduce displacement risk and enable transitions to recovery and development.

Guiding question

How can humanitarian action be designed to enable effective and efficient engagement of governments—local and national—alongside other national and local actors, in ways that improve humanitarian assistance, support transitions, and sustain outcomes for affected populations?