Contribution short abstract

This study rethinks humanitarian and development divide through a decolonial lens. It shows how principles can police legitimacy, shrinking local agency and turning localisation tokenistic. Haiti, Gaza and Rohingya illustrate. It calls for shifting decision power, resources and risk to local actors.

Contribution long abstract

This paper revisits the humanitarian-development divide through a decolonial lens by arguing that humanitarian principles function not only as ethical commitments but also as a governance language that allocates authority, legitimacy, and knowledge within unequal humanitarian aid architectures. With developed the concept of principled depoliticisation to explain how being principled can, under specific institutional and geopolitical conditions, narrow what can be said and done thereby constraining locally driven, cohesive responses to polycrises.

The paper traces a three-part mechanism: First, epistemic gatekeeping shapes who defines needs, what counts as valid evidence, and whose priorities become programmable. Second, discursive depoliticisation reframes claims around rights, redistribution, and accountability as politicisation, access risk, or unprofessionalism. Third, procedural gatekeeping, through compliance burdens, risk management, and administrative requirements, limits local organisations' decision space even when they are central to implementation. Together, these dynamics narrow local development agency, pushing localisation toward tokenistic partnership and weakening humanitarian-development cohesion.

These claims are analyzed across three crisis settings. In Haiti, post-disaster response practices, in Gaza, discourses about access constraints and illegal controls and in the Rohingya response, recurrent funding shocks and externalised decision-making.

The paper concludes that rejecting humanitarian and development siloes is necessary but insufficient: more cohesive, equitable, locally driven responses require decolonising the principle regime itself by redistributing decision-making power, resources, and risk, and by pluralising the normative grounds through which principled action is authorised.