Save the Children Denmark in collaboration with Global Focus is happy to invite participants to the event Beyond the Bargain: Local Leadership in a New Global Reality on Thursday, April 16th 2026, 12-16.30.
2025 saw the start of an historically tumultuous and frenetic period, with significant geopolitical shifts leading to fundamental changes to the structures and assumptions underpinning the globalised aid and development sector. Rapid and extensive slashes in funding, not only from the US foreign assistance, but across donor governments has seen local organisations – and the INGOs working alongside them – on the frontlines of delivering aid to communities dramatically impacted. Their realities and that of the sector in which they operate have irrevocably changed, and yet with change comes an opportunity to truly work in solidarity with global south actors to inhabit substantial and meaningful transformation. If the past 15 months have shown us anything, it is that Local Leadership is not just a utopian ideal, but it is a tangible and essential for sustainable structural transformation to the sector.
The purpose of the event is to contribute to the conversation on how to shift power between global north and global south actors in the development and aid sector through insights, experiences and perspectives on local leadership from the global south.
This event will bring together actors working primarily in Danish civil society to share experiences and perspectives and to discuss questions about the state of the local leadership agenda midst a rapidly changing geopolitical landscape. Focusing on local leadership seen from the perspective of GS based local leaders, this event will bring Danish civil society actors together to explore how local leadership is understood and implemented by global south actors and is a driving force to achieve our collective ambitions in protecting a rights-based agenda.
The event presents new research from an SCD/RUC funded PhD project that explores how humanitarian actors in the Global South understand and transform the Grand Bargain Localisation commitment to their existing humanitarian structures and initiatives.
Furthermore, we will facilitate discussions on the contextual significance of shrinking civic space in various contexts, and how activism and youth leaders impact and lead and influence the future they want to see despite challenges to their rights and agendas.
This event will be organised into three short panel discussions, each followed by informal plenary discussions among the participants to invite reflection and ideation around how we as Danish civil society actors can leverage our positions to further local leadership. The event will start with a presentation on the SCD/RUC funded PhD research and end with a networking hour, featuring a musical performance. Also showcased around the event space will be the work of Danish and diasporic youth artists from DFUNK – the Danish Refugee Council's youth network in Copenhagen and across Denmark – who use creativity to amplify their voices and stories, and to advocate for social change.
The session will be hosted at Send Flere Krydderier, a social economy enterprise with the aim of cross-cultural exchange and creating access to economic opportunity for ethnic minority women in the Danish labor market.
