WEBINAR: Localized Anticipatory Action: Panacea and Pitfalls

December 19, 2023, 9:30–10:30 a.m. ET

Localization aims to help those planning and executing anticipatory action better meet the needs of people affected by a disaster more quickly.

Since the 2015 World Humanitarian Summit, practitioners, funders, communities, and researchers regularly discuss the strengths and challenges to localization. To a large extent Localized Anticipatory Action (LAA) has been considered as a new panacea for effective disaster risk reduction.

Increasingly actors use LAA, be it discursively or in practice, but without a deeper understanding of how and when this really helps reduce disaster risk. LAA does not take place in a vacuum; as with many other interventions, they are planned and implemented within a sphere of competing agendas and power structures.

Rather than blindly promoting them, AA stakeholders should discuss the principles and practice of localized anticipatory action to gain a clearer understanding of what it can address and where it might remain limited.

In this webinar we will hear from researchers, practitioners, and local voices regarding the merits and challenges as well as practical examples of LAA.

This webinar is presented by the Academic Alliance for Anticipatory Action and was made possible through support provided by the Office of Acquisition and Assistance, Bureau for Management, United States Agency for International Development (USAID), under the terms of Cooperative Agreement No. 720BHA21CA00044. The opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of USAID.

PANELISTS

Luis Artur
Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo, Mozambique

Samuel Munyuwiny
Consortium for Re-imagining Humanitarian Action (CRHA) in Kenya

Evan Easton-Calabria
Feinstein International Center at Tufts University and Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford

MODERATOR

Susan Njambi-Szlapka
Ph.D. student at the University of Edinburgh and the Jameel Observatory