Peter Batchelor’s moment takes place in Iraq in 2013, during one of the most volatile periods in the country’s recent history.

Peter is a South African development practitioner with more than 30 years of experience working with the United Nations, governments, NGOs, and academia. He has led UN teams at headquarters level in Geneva and New York and in field settings across the Middle East, Africa, Asia Pacific, and the Caucasus. He is currently an Associate Fellow with the Geneva Centre for Security Policy and previously served as an economic adviser to the Mandela government in South Africa.

As UNDP Country Director in Iraq, Peter was working in a context where the international community remained largely confined to Baghdad’s Green Zone under constant security threat. Yet it was in Kurdistan, in northern Iraq, that he encountered a model of development cooperation that would stay with him for the rest of his career.

Together with the Kurdistan Regional Government and Minister of Planning Dr. Ali Sindi, Peter helped establish a joint UN–government trust fund. The arrangement was simple but unusual. The regional government provided the financial resources and defined its own development priorities. The role of the United Nations was not to lead implementation, but to accompany the process through technical expertise, international experience, and capacity building.

What made the moment significant for Peter was not the mechanism itself, but the shift in ownership it created.

Development priorities were no longer shaped primarily by donor agendas or externally driven project logic. The regional government was firmly in the driving seat—from identifying priorities to financing, implementation, and monitoring. International actors were there to support, not direct.

Looking back across decades in development work, Peter describes this as one of the clearest examples of genuinely locally led development that he experienced.

What changed for him was his understanding of the conditions under which it becomes credible.

The decisive factor, he explains, was ultimately something deeply human: trust, relationships, and mutual respect. Difficult conversations about priorities, corruption, inclusiveness, costs, and technical quality were possible because the relationship itself was credible.

This also shaped how expertise was used. Rather than replacing local knowledge, international consultants worked alongside local counterparts in a process of accompaniment and capacity building. Expertise became collaborative rather than extractive.

Peter’s moment reveals a tension that runs through much of humanitarian and development work. International actors often speak about local ownership, yet funding structures, visibility demands, and project control frequently remain external.

In Kurdistan, that assumption no longer held.

What emerged instead was a different understanding of partnership: one in which local actors define the direction, and international organisations contribute by listening carefully, accompanying responsibly, and strengthening capacities without displacing ownership.

For Peter, the lesson remains highly relevant in today’s changing aid environment.

His conclusion is strikingly simple:

“Listen, listen, listen.”