Local Ownership in International Peacebuilding

Key Theoretical and Practical Issues

Sung Yong Lee, Alpaslan Özerdem, Sung Yong Lee, Alpaslan Özerdem

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138787544
• eBook ISBN: 9781317660279
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This edited volume empirically examines key theoretical and practical issues relevant to the promotion of local ownership in contemporary international peacebuilding.

This book attempts to provide comprehensive understanding of the issue of local ownership in international peacebuilding. By providing an empirical analysis of nine case studies, the volume aims to supplement contemporary academic discussions on local ownership, which have thus far mainly focused on its normative or theoretical dimensions. The case studies included here examine the peace operations in a wide range of countries - Afghanistan, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Cambodia, Cyprus, Kenya, Uganda, Sierra Leone, South Sudan, and Sri Lanka. The book seeks to address the weaknesses of conventional studies by:, empirical review of the achievements and limitations of previous attempts to promote local ownership; examination of the key concepts of local ownership; and analysis of structural and practical challenges. The volume concludes by presenting practical proposals for addressing the limitations of contemporary local ownership promotion. Through these means, the book aims to explore a key research question from both theoretical and empirical perspectives: How can international peacebuilding facilitate effective, active local community participation?

This volume will be of much interest to students of peacebuilding, development studies, global governance, peace and conflict studies, security studies and IR.

1
Introduction

Alpaslan Özerdem and Sung Yong Lee

How can the capacity of local actors be effectively promoted in international peacebuilding activities? This question has been repeatedly raised as a core agendum of both peace studies and development studies since the late 1990s, when the limitations of donor-centred programmes became apparent. Nevertheless, compared with the rapidly increasing quantity of outputs in academic discussions and practitioners’ activities, the achievements in both fields are less significant. The programmes for promoting local capacity building in many countries have gained very limited successes in practice. Moreover, the contemporary debates in academia are generally restricted to discussion of the normative or theoretical aspects of local ownership and lack a comprehensive analysis of the various aspects of the theme.

By the time the latest comprehensive peacebuilding programmes were implemented in Kosovo and Timor-Leste in 1999, the limitations of peace-supporting activities based on the liberal peace doctrine – Western standards and viewpoints on peace and peacebuilding were widely acknowledged. The forms and procedures of these programmes were largely determined by the West's perceptions on peace, which is generally called the Liberal Peace. Although the detailed ideas vary, these perceptions generally pursue democratic politics, institution-centred governance, a market economy, the rule of law, and human rights (Orr 2005; Richmond 2011). Such standardised interventions inevitably undermine traditional authority structures and the legitimacy and efficiency of new social institutions and cause various shortcomings of the traditional peacebuilding projects, which range from simple technical problems in electoral process to structural power inequalities (Futamura, Newman and Tadjbakhsh 2010; Mac Ginty 2011).

To address these limitations and create a more stable and consolidated peace, international organisations have begun to emphasise the importance of ‘indigenous ownership of peacebuilding’. Although the detailed arguments vary, many of the discussions advocating local ownership assume that it is indigenous people who “best know their own history, culture and political contexts” (UN 2006) and are best able to “identify, develop, and employ the resources necessary to build a peaceful, just, and prosperous society” (Bush 1996: 86). Based on such common beliefs, many international organisations, including the United Nations, World Bank, OECD, and most bilateral donors such as the DFID have confirmed their strong commitment to the promotion of local ownership (Sending 2009; Pouligny 2009). For instance, local ownership was considered an essential element of successful peacebuilding in the seminal documents issued by the UN and its agencies during the 2000s, which include No Exit Without Strategy (2001), Agenda for Peace, the Brahimi Report (2000), Responsibility to Protect (2001), In Larger Freedom (2005), and Governance for Peace (2012). In addition, some key themes of local ownership were developed in a series of international conferences; some of the important documents produced in the conferences are The Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness (2005), The Accra Agenda for Action (2008), and The Busan Partnership document (2011). Nevertheless, despite these positive movements, organisations are facing an array of challenges and struggling to move beyond rhetoric.

As local ownership has rapidly emerged as a buzzword in the international peacebuilding arena, the academic discourse on this theme has also grown. Many of the conventional discussions are based on the conceptual or normative contradictions between the doctrine of liberal peace and indigenous ideas of peacebuilding (Donais 2012). One group of studies argues for the need to treat local ownership as “a key principle of civil conflict management” (Ropers 2000, cited in Reich 2006: 27), insisting that the programmes that rely on liberal peace ideas are fundamentally based on European values and experience, and this means that they do not adequately reflect the indigenous authority structures, legitimacy, and methods of conflict resolution or local people's behaviour (Ignatieff 2003; Lee 2011; Lizée 1999; Paris 1997; Richmond 2006). As a result, it is argued that peacebuilding programmes to support local communities should develop their “inner resources of wisdom, courage and compassionate non-violence” (Curle 1994: 96; Edgren 2003; Lopes and Theisohn 2003; Shinoda 2008).

Another group of studies offers a more cautious view, warning that the ‘romanticisation’ of local cultures may lead to serious problems (Mac Ginty 2011; Futamura and Notaras 2011). These studies demonstrate that indigenous cultures do not necessarily provide good sources of stable peace and sustainable development. Instead, such studies contend that simply transferring the ownership of peacebuilding programmes to a local population is risky and likely to end in failure owing to the specific contexts of war-affected countries with a long history of colonisation or economic inequality (especially as regards their economic position globally). For instance, Ramsbotham, Woodhouse, and Miall contend that the indigenous communities in many war-affected societies are characterised by “power asymmetry, patriarchy and privilege”, with local patrons and organisations tending to seek their own interests rather than the sustainable development of the entire community (2011: 236). In addition, Reich (2006: 13–14) argues that there are a large number of “mushroom NGOs” that try to earn their incomes from external donors and make efforts to “fulfil the needs of outsiders more adequately than supporting inside development needs”.

A more pessimistic view warns that the emphasis on local ownership is merely another way of justifying external actors’ intervention. This strand of thought emphasises that the processes of setting strategies for local empowerment have been mostly controlled by international peacebuilding agencies or scholars in the North. As a result, there is little empirical evidence for successful handovers of ownership of development initiatives to local actors. Hence, it is argued that local ownership has been pursued either “to downplay the intrusiveness of the intervention and to maintain a continuing international presence” or to support “a premature departure of international staff once mission fatigue has set in” rather than strengthening the capacity of local actors (Pietz and von Carlowitz 2007: 7).

Despite the significant contributions of these conventional studies, however, contemporary discussions generally lack a more fundamental consideration of the meaning of local ownership. In fact, only very recently have relatively extensive discussions begun about such questions as “Among the various actors in war affected societies, who should be considered local?”, “What should be owned by the local actors?”, and “What is the ideal relationship between external aiders and locals?” As the traditional academic studies have not precisely clarified these concepts, researchers in peace and development studies do not have a solid foundation upon which to expand their understanding and analysis of local ownership. Moreover, even though peacebuilding based on the concept of liberal peace remains the dominant form currently, not many practically useful measures to address its limitations have been presented thus far.

Another important issue is that there are few empirical studies that examine the long-term effects of local empowerment programmes on a war-affected society. In a sense, this has been unavoidable since most contemporary international post-conflict peacebuilding programmes were implemented during the 1990s. Since the capacity of human beings cannot be enhanced within a short time period, it has been argued that evaluating such programmes would be somewhat premature (Donais 2012). In fact, in contrast to the international community's strong pledge of support for local ownership, this community's actions for nurturing local ownership have been less noteworthy. Though many programmes have encouraged more proactive roles for indigenous people, the “real transfer of responsibilities to local structures, politicians and stakeholders” has rarely been carried out (Pietz and von Carlowitz 2007: 6). As there are a large number of structural, cultural, or practical factors that hinder indigenous people's advanced ownership of their peacebuilding programmes; most of the successful stories observed in contemporary peacebuilding feature close cooperation between local stakeholders and international agencies rather than local control over the programmes.

At the same time, however, the lack of comprehensive empirical evidence on the effects of such programmes has significantly limited the scope of the discussions about local ownership. Greater efforts must be made to combine, compare, and contrast these scattered ideas, though an increasing number of empirical studies and practical reports regarding the achievements and limitations of local ownership promotion are being released and these empirical studies obviously make significant contributions to the on-going academic debate.

To address the gaps in conventional academic output, this publication attempts a comprehensive exploration of a key research question – How can international peacebuilding facilitate effective, active local community participation? By aggregating and integrating nine chapters, each reflecting a different approach, the publication offers insights from a variety of perspectives. The first part of the book addresses the progress of international local ownership promotion in the light of contemporary academic discussions. Based on their different analyses, the four chapters commonly call for a re-evaluation of the conceptual grounds of contemporary international peacebuilding. In the second part of the book, the aim is to supplement contemporary academic discussions about local ownership, which have thus far focused mainly on normative or theoretical dimensions, by providing empirical analyses of peace operations in a wide range of countries, including the following: Afghanistan, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Cambodia, Cyprus, Nicaragua, Uganda, Sierra Leone, South Sudan, and Sri Lanka. The chapters review the major strategies taken by peace-supporting actors to promote local ownership in many national and local peacebuilding initiatives and evaluate the achievements and limitations of these efforts. Furthermore, the chapters identify cultural, structural, social, and practical factors that promote or prohibit the progress of local ownership. These analyses provide a solid foundation for further discussions in both academic and practitioner communities.

Although detailed arguments vary, all the chapters of this volume critically examine a number of conceptual, theoretical, and practical themes that have been the subject of extensive academic discussions over the previous two decades. To outline the parameters of these, this introductory chapter briefly overviews the contemporary debates on six themes that are frequently discussed in the following chapters.

Definition of local ownership – who is ‘local’?

One of the most fundamental issues in contemporary academic discussions about local ownership is the lack of a clear definition of what actually constitutes the ‘local’. Over the past 20 years, there have been few comprehensive discussions on its precise meaning and where its practical significance and implications lie. Thus, the concept has remained vague and unoperationalisable (Reich 2006; Wilen 2009; Saxby 2003). Both ‘local’ and ‘ownership’ have been interpreted in various ways based on the interpreters’ own assumptions, and this has caused many misunderstandings between practitioners and academics. Hence, the question of ‘Who owns what?’ has gradually attracted more attention in many academic studies.

Who, then, are the ‘locals’ who should own the peacebuilding process? In most of the peacebuilding programmes implemented or supported during the 2000s by international organisations, the first targets for the transfer of ownership were local power groups, political leaders, or civil society organisations. In particular, the issue of leadership capacity building was considered key to the successful promotion of local ownership (Pouligny 2009: 177). In Timor-Leste, for instance, the Portuguese-speaking elites, including President Gusmão, were selected by UNTAET as peacebuilding partners, while the UNDP attempted to create a large number of civil-based organisations in Cambodia that would take the lead in decentralised governance.

Nevertheless, the limitations of such a narrow definition of ‘local’ became clearer as these local ownership programmes developed further. Practically speaking, finding ‘positive leadership’ that can represent various local actors’ ideas well is extremely difficult in countries that have experienced protracted violent conflicts (Peake, Gormley-Heenan and Fitzduff 2004). Political elites and community leaders tend to utilise local ownership as a political propaganda tool to protect their own interests, which often differ from those of local communities. In addition, many civil-based organisations endeavour to comply with international standards rather than reflecting local needs in order to attract greater funding (Reich 2006; Richmond 2011). However, the traditional approaches of external actors toward locals have meant that they have been unable to devise effective measures to address such problems. More fundamentally, this definitional problem leads to an oversimplification of the nature and composition of local actors and signally fails to recognise the various and frequently contradictory needs and perspectives of sub-groups within the ‘local’ population (Donais 2012; Smith 2004).

Hence, more recent discussions have set out the need for a broader definition of ‘local’ to include the local population or local community (rather than merely local elites) and to reflect the diversity of local actors. These discussions present the utilities of such inclusive definitions from different perspectives. For instance, some studies argue that such an inclusive approach is useful in pursuing a common goal of contemporary peacebuilding: democratic governance fostering a truly legitimate social process that reflects the fundamental ideas (William 2000). Others emphasise that reflecting the diverse interests of local actors is more useful in supplementing the weaknesses of Western-centred peace activities (Lemay-Hébert 2011). Still other studies pay more attention to the practical benefits of enhancing the roles of non-state actors who have been marginalised in contemporary peacebuilding (Benedix and Stanley 2008).

Nevertheless, the definition of ‘local’ is still subject to on-going discussion, as the meaning varies depending on the local context and history. Moreover, both the character and composition of local communities tend to change due to the course of the development of conflicts and social movements, which include, for example, the displacement of people, recruitment and training of young people as combatants, breakdown of traditional rural communities, and emergence of new types of organisations (Pouligny 2009: 178).

Definition of local ownership – what ‘ownership’ should locals own?

The other conceptual component that needs to be examined is ‘ownership’. In principle, it is widely agreed that the process of peacebuilding should be eventually owned by local actors. However, there is little consensus on the matter of the extent to which local populations should take ownership of peacebuilding.

Following a literal meaning of ownership, some studies adopt a maximalist definition, regarding ownership as an actor's ‘full control’, ‘autonomy’, ‘dictatorial power’, or ‘full participation’. Edomwonyi (2003) asserts that peacebuilding activities should be locally formed and driven, while Chopra and Hohe (2004) and Olawale (2008) emphasise that local people should take full responsibility for all peacebuilding procedures, from facilitat...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figure and tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Local ownership: development and challenges
• Part II Practice of local ownership promotion
• Index