771 © Te Author(s) 2020 P. Adey et al. (eds.), Te Handbook of Displacement, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47178-1_53 53 Local Faith Communities and Responses to Displacement Susanna Trotta and Olivia Wilkinson Introduction Academic interest in local faith communities (LFCs) and refugee response is relatively recent with a special issue of the Journal of Refugee Studies in 2011 (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2011a) marking a turning point. Te focus on LFCs allows scholars to look at the contextual specifcity of faith actors in their loca- tions, in interrelation with the other actors in that context and recognising the embeddedness of LFCs in the culture, politics, economics, and society of their place. A new era of ethnography (e.g., Ngo 2018), as well as cross-country comparison (Greatrick et al. 2018), has allowed for deeper understandings of the contextualised actions of LFCs for refugee response. In international humanitarian action, policy discourse has shifted attention to power imbalances between local and international actors and the need to ‘localise’ humanitarian response. Localisation was enshrined in the Grand Bargain commitments launched at the World Humanitarian Summit in 2016 and encapsulated in the phrase ‘as local as possible, as international as neces- sary’ (UNSG 2016). Yet there is a fundamental gap in localisation as local S. Trotta (*) Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany Joint Learning Initiative on Faith and Local Communities, Washington, DC, USA O. Wilkinson Joint Learning Initiative on Faith and Local Communities, Washington, DC, USA e-mail: olivia@jlifc.com