Beyond Municipalities: Understanding Authority in Low-Income Urban Neighbourhoods in Jordan and Lebanon

The World Humanitarian Summit in 2016 produced a ‘Grand Bargain’ between a range of major international donors and multilateral agencies. It embraces an efficiency and effectiveness agenda to bridge humanitarian financing gaps and advocates for improved coherency and complementarity of humanitarian and development interventions in crises contexts. Integral to the Grand Bargain is a localisation agenda that seeks to make ‘principled humanitarian action as local as possible’ and engage ‘with local and national responders in a spirit of partnership’. Based on research in Jordan and Lebanon, there are key considerations for designing and implementing humanitarian and development interventions in low-income urban areas governed by multiple public authorities.