How do local organizations at the forefront of refugee responses in conflict-affected environments contextualize global governance frameworks on displacement, and how do they position these frameworks within their “lifeworlds”? This paper addresses these questions through the case of the Global Compact on Refugees (GCR), a policy framework designed to bridge global and local scales of power. Adopted by the United Nations in 2018, the GCR aims to operationalize responsibility-sharing in protracted refugee situations. It highlights host and refugee communities as central actors in the global refugee regime. Despite the Compact’s prominence in global policy discourse, there remains limited understanding of how grassroots actors engage with its localization agenda. Drawing on field research and semi-structured interviews, we examine how local and refugee-led organizations recontextualize and engage with the Compact in complex conflict environments such as Lebanon. Lebanon has inspired extensive research on the nexus between conflict, humanitarianism, and displacement, making it a critical site for rethinking the theory and practice of localization. We develop the notion of experiential localization to unpack the fog and friction that grassroots organizations navigate across scales of power. Our findings show that unequal access to information and knowledge about the Compact, alongside critical interpretations of its potential to close the rhetoric-practice gap and expand refugee inclusion, are central to reframing localization as an experiential and bottom-up process. Far from being passive actors in the political haze surrounding global governance, local organizations recontextualize the policy and practice of localization through their meaning-making narratives.