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Despite widespread endorsement of locally led development, donor agencies still struggle to translate local agency into cumulative change. Donor discourse increasingly emphasises localisation and community leadership, yet operational arrangements remain structured around upward compliance. The practical question is how local agency and institutional accountability can work together so that locally generated insights lead the way while portfolio coherence is maintained. This paper examines a form of connective work that helps make this co-existence possible. Drawing on the author’s more than 20 years’ experience as a practitioner and evidence from over 150 documented cases across sectors and regions, it focuses on invisible weavers – actors who keep cooperation moving under constraint by connecting fragmented institutions, routing insights across levels, and sustaining continuity when conditions change. These functions are often essential to maintaining cooperation, insights, and continuity across fragmented actors and institutions, yet they remain largely unrecognised in formal programme design, costing, and evaluation. Despite this, donors’ informal routines allow them to act on these insights, albeit in ad hoc ways. The paper addresses three practical questions: how such actors can be recognised, how their effectiveness and resilience can be assessed, and how donors can support this connective work more intentionally without formalising it into compliance. It traces how donor staff and local counterparts use judgement, continuity, and low-overhead practices to carry locally generated insights into organisational decisions. By reframing accountability as portfolio reliability and making these patterns visible, the paper shows that donors can ‘let go’ of rigid control without losing systemic coherence. It concludes with three practical ways to make these existing ‘workarounds’ more intentional and fundable, ensuring that local intelligence leads to durable change rather than having to re-set with every project cycle.