During the next two years, the Humanitarian Policy Group is adopting a ground-level view to explore and analyse what local humanitarian action means in practice and how it will affect international response. 

HPG's Integrated Programme of research for 2017-19 'From the ground up: understanding local response in crises' critically analyses key aspects of this debate including:

1. As local as possible, as international as necessary: understanding capacity and complementarity in humanitarian response
   This project seeks insights into how capacity is understood in the humanitarian sector; what capacity exists among local, national and international actors in specific contexts, and what incentives, power structures and relationships promote or inhibit better collaboration and complementarity.
    
2. The tip of the iceberg? Understanding non-traditional sources of aid financing
   This project seeks to situate assistance from the formal humanitarian system within the wider range of resources available to crisis-affected people, including from family and friends, community and national organisations, local and national governments, faith communities and the private sector.
    
3. Informality and protection: understanding the role of informal non-state actors in protecting civilians
   This project explores the role of informal non-state actors in protection: how they define it and provide it (or not), how affected communities see their impact on protection, and the extent to which affected communities distinguish between formal and informal actors in terms of actual protection outcomes on the ground.
    
4. Dignity in displacement: from rhetoric to reality
   This project proposed here connects our extensive work on displacement with an analysis of what constitutes dignity in humanitarian assistance. It adopts a local lens to explore whether, and in what ways, humanitarian interventions really do uphold and further the dignity of displaced people.