Localized Leadership in Polycrisis
Designing a Systems-Based Learning Experience for Humanitarian Leadership
The Challenge
Humanitarian leaders increasingly operate in environments where crises no longer occur one at a time.
Conflict intersects with displacement. Climate shocks interact with economic instability. Political crises affect humanitarian access. Funding pressures reshape organizational choices. Communities simultaneously navigate multiple systems that humanitarian organizations often address through separate programs, mandates, or sectors.
This is the reality of polycrisis.
For the Humanitarian Leadership Conference in Doha, Qatar, Pathways Consulting LLC developed Localized Leadership in Polycrisis as a participatory learning experience exploring what leadership requires when crises are interconnected, uncertainty is high, and humanitarian decisions are shaped not only by needs on the ground, but also by the systems of power, financing, and institutional authority surrounding humanitarian action.
What does leadership look like when crises are interconnected, solutions are uncertain, and people closest to the problem must have meaningful influence over the response?
The Initiative
Localized Leadership in Polycrisis was designed as a 90-minute facilitated workshop for the Humanitarian Leadership Conference in Doha.
Rather than presenting localization as a policy concept or leadership as a set of abstract competencies, the session used systems thinking, facilitated discussion, power analysis, and scenario-based methods to help participants examine the environments in which humanitarian decisions are actually made.
The learning design incorporated:
- systems thinking;
- power mapping;
- empathy mapping;
- scenario-based reflection;
- localization principles; and
- collaborative sense-making.
The workshop was designed to move beyond asking only:
What should we do?
and toward a deeper set of questions:
- Who gets to decide?
- Who controls the resources that make action possible?
- How does funding shape what humanitarian actors can and cannot do?
- Whose knowledge influences the response?
- Where does decision-making authority sit?
- What changes when leadership and decision-making move closer to those experiencing the crisis?
The Design
The workshop was developed as an experiential learning process rather than a conventional lecture.
Its full design included a sequence of systems mapping, power analysis, empathy mapping, and scenario-based reflection. Within the available conference session, the greatest depth of discussion emerged around power, donor relationships, funding structures, and their influence on humanitarian decision-making.
Some components of the methodology were therefore introduced as tools participants could continue using after the session rather than completed as full exercises during the workshop.
The workshop itself demonstrated that learning processes must also adapt to what emerges in the room.
Entering the System
Participants were introduced to systems thinking as a way of looking beyond individual humanitarian problems and examining the wider environments in which those problems exist.
Rather than seeing a humanitarian challenge as an isolated event, participants were encouraged to consider the surrounding system:
Who is in the system?
Stakeholders, institutions, communities, humanitarian organizations, donors, governments, and other actors influencing the response.
How are they connected?
Relationships, incentives, funding flows, competing priorities, dependencies, and accountability structures.
Who shapes the choices?
Power dynamics, constraints, institutional mandates, resource control, and decision-making authority.
What does the system produce?
How interactions across the system shape humanitarian choices, outcomes, incentives, and possibilities.
This framing encouraged participants to move beyond linear problem-solving and consider how humanitarian outcomes are shaped by relationships between different parts of a system.
The discussion quickly demonstrated that some of the most influential elements of humanitarian systems are not always the actors closest to affected communities.
Funding arrangements, donor priorities, institutional mandates, and external accountability requirements can significantly influence what choices are available to humanitarian organizations.
Examining Power, Funding, and Decision-Making
Power emerged as one of the strongest areas of discussion during the session.
Participants examined how different forms of power operate within humanitarian systems and how those forms of power shape decision-making.
- Who controls funding?
- Who determines what funding can be used for?
- Who defines priorities?
- Who has formal decision-making authority?
- Who possesses contextual knowledge and community trust?
- Who is accountable to donors?
- Who is accountable to affected communities?
- What happens when those forms of accountability point in different directions?
The discussion paid particular attention to donor and funding power.
Humanitarian organizations may understand local priorities and recognize what communities need, while simultaneously operating within funding arrangements that determine eligible activities, timelines, reporting requirements, geographic priorities, or acceptable forms of intervention.
This creates an important leadership tension.
Organizations may formally possess responsibility for implementing humanitarian action while having significantly less control over the parameters within which that action occurs.
Participants explored how these constraints influence decisions throughout the humanitarian system and how financial power can translate into strategic and operational power.
Who shapes the conditions under which a decision becomes possible?
From Participation to Decision-Making Authority
The discussion of power also highlighted an important distinction between participation and authority.
Local organizations or communities may be invited into planning processes, consultations, coordination meetings, or implementation partnerships without necessarily having equivalent influence over the decisions that ultimately shape humanitarian action.
A person or organization can be present in a decision-making process while still having limited control over its outcome.
This distinction sits at the heart of localization debates.
If funding priorities, program parameters, and strategic choices have largely been determined before local actors enter the process, participation alone does not necessarily represent a meaningful redistribution of power.
The workshop encouraged participants to examine localization not only through questions of representation or implementation, but through questions of decision-making authority:
- Who defines the problem?
- Who determines the available options?
- Who controls the resources?
- Who can change direction?
- Who can say no?
- Whose priorities ultimately shape the intervention?
Empathy Mapping as a Tool for Systems Practice
The workshop design also included empathy mapping as a method for examining how different actors experience the same humanitarian system.
Because of time constraints and the depth of discussion around power, donor relationships, and funding structures, participants did not move through the full empathy-mapping exercise during the session.
Instead, they were introduced to the method and encouraged to use it within the systems in which they operate.
The tool invited participants to consider what different stakeholders might:
Its purpose was not simply to encourage interpersonal empathy.
Within a systems-thinking framework, empathy mapping provides a structured way of identifying how actors occupying different positions within the same system may understand the problem differently.
A donor, international organization, national organization, local civil society actor, frontline worker, government institution, and crisis-affected community may all be responding to the same humanitarian context while experiencing very different incentives, pressures, constraints, and consequences.
How does this system look from another position within it?
Whose understanding of the system currently carries the most influence over decisions?
The method therefore complemented the workshop's broader examination of power by connecting institutional structures with lived experience.
Scenario-Based Reflection as a Continuing Practice
The broader workshop design included an evolving humanitarian scenario through which participants could test decisions as circumstances changed.
The intention was to reproduce one of the defining features of polycrisis: decisions are rarely made in a stable environment.
New pressures emerge. Funding changes. Political conditions shift. Humanitarian access changes. Stakeholder relationships evolve.
Time limitations meant that the full scenario sequence could not be completed during the conference session.
Participants were instead introduced to the approach as a practical method they could adapt within their own teams and organizations.
Scenario-based reflection can help humanitarian actors examine not simply:
What would we do?
but:
- What assumptions is this decision based on?
- What happens if one of those assumptions changes?
- Which actors gain or lose influence under different conditions?
- How might funding constraints affect the choices available to us?
- How could the system respond in ways we did not anticipate?
In this sense, the exercise became not only a workshop activity but a transferable way of thinking.
Localization as a Leadership Question
One of the workshop's central propositions was that localization cannot be reduced to geography.
Localized leadership is not simply leadership exercised by someone physically closer to a crisis.
It requires examining who has meaningful authority to interpret the problem, define priorities, allocate resources, and shape the response.
A humanitarian response may be locally implemented while remaining externally directed.
A national organization may deliver programming while having limited influence over strategy.
Communities may be consulted extensively while still lacking meaningful decision-making power.
And a local organization may hold formal responsibility for implementation while the boundaries of possible action have already been shaped by funding conditions established elsewhere.
This makes localization inseparable from questions of financing and power.
Localization is not simply a question of where humanitarian action happens, but of where authority sits within the system that produces that action.
Why Polycrisis Matters
The concept of polycrisis provided a useful framework because it encouraged participants to move beyond single-issue thinking.
Humanitarian leaders rarely encounter problems that fit neatly within one sector.
- Food insecurity may intersect with displacement.
- Conflict may influence market systems.
- Climate shocks may alter migration patterns.
- Political decisions may change humanitarian access.
- Funding restrictions may reshape organizational priorities.
- Institutional accountability requirements may compete with community priorities.
These relationships mean that leadership requires more than technical expertise within a single area.
It requires an ability to understand the system surrounding the problem and the structures of power that shape possible responses.
What the Workshop Demonstrated
The Humanitarian Leadership Conference session demonstrated Pathways Consulting LLC's ability to translate complex concepts into participatory learning experiences while adapting facilitation to the conversations that emerge in the room.
It also demonstrated an approach to facilitation in which the objective is not to force completion of a predetermined sequence of activities.
The depth of participant discussion around donor power, financing, and decision-making became an important part of the learning itself.
Rather than cutting that discussion short simply to complete every planned exercise, the session created space to explore the issues participants were actively interrogating while introducing the remaining tools as methods they could take back into their own contexts.
Practice Implications
The workshop model can be adapted for organizations working across humanitarian response, international development, peacebuilding, civil society strengthening, philanthropy, and international partnerships.
The context can change while the underlying learning architecture remains consistent.
Participants are encouraged to move from asking:
What is the solution?
toward asking:
- What system are we operating within?
- Where does power sit within that system?
- How do funding relationships shape our choices?
- Who has decision-making authority?
- Who experiences the consequences of those decisions?
- Whose knowledge matters?
- What would need to change for leadership to become more locally grounded?
Practice in Action
Localized Leadership in Polycrisis reflects a broader Pathways Consulting approach to facilitation and organizational learning.
Complex humanitarian challenges rarely require better technical answers alone.
They require the ability to recognize interdependence, examine institutional constraints, surface assumptions, understand multiple perspectives, and interrogate how power shapes what becomes possible.
At the Humanitarian Leadership Conference in Doha, the workshop created space for humanitarian practitioners to examine those dynamics, with particular attention to the relationship between funding, donor power, humanitarian decision-making, and localization.
It also equipped participants with systems-thinking tools—including empathy mapping and scenario-based reflection—that they could continue applying within their own organizations and operating environments.