Peacebuilding and Local Ownership

Post-Conflict Consensus-Building

Timothy Donais

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415741132
• eBook ISBN: 9781136307607
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Militär- & Seefahrtsgeschichte

This book explores the meaning of local ownership in peacebuilding and examines the ways in which it has been, and could be, operationalized in post-conflict environments.

In the context of post-conflict peacebuilding, the idea of local ownership is based upon the premise that no peace process is sustainable in the absence of a meaningful degree of local involvement. Despite growing recognition of the importance of local ownership, however, relatively little attention has been paid to specifying what precisely the concept means or how it might be implemented.

This volume contributes to the ongoing debate on the future of liberal peacebuilding through a critical investigation of the notion of local ownership, and challenges conventional assumptions about who the relevant locals are and what they are expected to own. Drawing on case studies from Bosnia, Afghanistan and Haiti, the text argues that local ownership can only be fostered through a long-term consensus-building process, which involves all levels of the conflict-affected society.

This book will be of great interest to students of peacebuilding, peace and conflict studies, development studies, security studies and IR.

1 Making sense of local ownership in peacebuilding contexts¹

Introduction: local ownership in principle and practice

The term local ownership has become increasingly central to the vocabulary of post-conflict peacebuilding. Emphasized by both theorists and practitioners, in general terms local ownership refers to the degree of control that domestic actors wield over domestic political processes; in post-conflict contexts, the notion conveys the commonsense wisdom that any peace process not embraced by those who have to live with it is likely to fail. The clear implication, as Necla Tschirgi (2004: 17) has suggested, is that peace cannot be imposed by external forces, military or otherwise, but must rather be nurtured through patient, flexible strategies carefully calibrated to the domestic political context. The empirical record of peacebuilding over the past two decades, however, suggests that while the principle of local ownership enjoys broad rhetorical acceptance it has proven inherently difficult to operationalize; modern peacebuilding operations, as a result, have tended to more closely resemble externally driven exercises in statebuilding and social engineering than patient, elicitive processes of peace nurturing.

Post-Dayton Bosnia provides a textbook example of this gap between rhetoric and practice. Wolfgang Petritsch, the international High Representative in Bosnia from 1999 to 2002, played an important role in promoting the idea that if peace was to take hold in Bosnia, then Bosnians in general – and their elected officials in particular – had to be front and center in the peace process. Petritsch’s call for local ownership, however, ran directly counter to the interventionist nature of his administration. Armed with the Bonn Powers, given to the High Representative in 1997 by an international community exasperated by the slow pace of peace implementation, Petritsch imposed literally dozens of pieces of legislation on such crucial matters as the state flag, a new currency, and the creation of a state border service. He similarly dismissed dozens of local officials, many of whom were elevated to office in elections organized by the international community.

Petritsch’s term as High Representative inaugurated a period of what has been termed protectorate democracy in Bosnia (Pugh 2001), in which the international community promoted democratic governance and local ownership while simultaneously reserving for itself most key decision-making authority. Reflecting on the record of Petritsch’s successor, Lord Paddy Ashdown, Gerald Knaus and Felix Martin (2003: 61; emphasis in original) likened the role of the High Representative to a European Raj:

In Bosnia and Herzegovina [BiH], outsiders do more than participate in shaping the political agenda – something that has become the norm throughout Eastern Europe, as governments aspire to join the European Union. In BiH, outsiders actually set that agenda, impose it, and punish with sanctions those who refuse to implement it.

While the notion of protectorate democracy is rife with contradictions, in the Bosnia example at least there is a case to be made that whatever progress has been made towards peace and stability has occurred because of, rather than despite, the assertiveness of the international presence. Indeed, as outlined in Chapter 5, the recent reversal of the peacebuilding momentum in Bosnia can be attributed in large part to a shift in the balance of power back to domestic political actors. So while Bosnia’s recent experience may yet prove to be an anomaly in peacebuilding’s overall balance sheet, it does suggest that overly simplistic prescriptions for local ownership miss important elements of the peacebuilding dynamic. Most obviously, local ownership in peacebuilding contexts is inherently problematic in cases where key local actors are less than fully committed to building peace.

Rather than advocating a full swing of the pendulum from protectorate democracy to full local ownership, what may be needed instead is a more nuanced understanding of how international and domestic political forces interact in post-conflict situations, and what relationship between the two is most likely to be conducive to the goal of sustainable peace. If peace cannot be imposed – and it seems increasingly clear that it cannot, at least not beyond a minimalist, negative peace² – how can outsiders best promote the emergence of a just, durable peace in societies emerging from war? This book’s objective, then, is to unpack the notion of local ownership and to explore the tensions between external imposition and local ownership in peacebuilding processes. A core contention underpinning this study is that because the notion of local ownership has rarely moved beyond the level of rhetoric, little serious thought has been devoted to the question of what configuration of locally owned and externally driven is most likely to shift societies decisively from war to peace. Two key questions, then, animate the analysis that follows. First, what exactly is meant by local ownership, both in general and in the specific context of postwar transitions? Or, more precisely, who are the local owners and what, precisely, is to be owned? Second, can clearly elaborated principles of local ownership be both developed and operationalized in such a way as to contribute to the foundations of sustainable peace? If international actors, in other words, were serious about closing the gap between rhetoric and practice on this issue, what would this mean in practical terms, and would it actually contribute to peacebuilding?

The inherent difficulty of definitively answering the first question – different actors, as discussed below, understand local ownership in different and often contradictory ways – complicates the challenge of answering the second question, since different understandings imply different prescriptions for putting local ownership into practice. Despite these difficulties, however, the key argument to be advanced here is that operationalization will require much greater attentiveness to the imperative of reconciling the universal with the particular in the context of peace operations. More precisely, legitimizing peacebuilding in the eyes of local actors – and ensuring that peace processes are actively embraced by these same actors – requires tempering the current emphasis on the outside-in transmission of international norms and institutions with a greater recognition of the importance of local values, traditions, and practices, a greater responsiveness to locally articulated needs and priorities, and a renewed emphasis on approaches to conflict resolution that work within the constraints of domestic political realities rather than attempting to transform them. It also requires recognizing that both generically and across a range of sectoral issues, there is little alternative to “negotiated hybridity” – creative mergings of values, practices, and institutional forms across the international– local divide – if peacebuilding is to enjoy external support and internal legitimacy, both of which are essential to any successful peace process. In short, this work argues that peacebuilding is, or at least should be, about building consensus among the widest possible range of stakeholders concerning what kind of peace is to be built. While there are no neat or easy solutions to the dilemmas posed by considering the place of local ownership in contemporary peacebuilding practice, grappling with such dilemmas may be a necessary prerequisite to more effective, sustainable forms of peacebuilding.

Liberal and communitarian perspectives on ownership

Long before it entered the peacebuilding lexicon, the local ownership debate featured prominently in the literature on international development. As Maria Eriksson Baaz (2005: 6) has noted, whether formulated in the language of participation, empowerment, or ownership, “the need to create a more equal relationship [between donors and recipients] has been a recurrent issue in the history of development aid.” Indeed, as the effectiveness of the broader development industry came into question, along with the legitimacy of the broader theoretical edifice of modernization theory, the limitations of external donors as agents of sustainable change in developing country contexts became increasingly apparent. This recognition led, in turn, to a greater appreciation of the inescapably central role of domestic actors in the success or failure of development projects. In the words of Tony Killick (2005: 3):

[Local] ownership is important (a) because it raises the probability that reforms will be tailored to local circumstances, priorities and political realities, (b) because those who have to decide upon and implement the reforms are more likely to perceive the changes as being in their own, or their country’s, interests, and (c) reforms are more likely to be perceived by the public as legitimate than when measures are viewed as having been forced on the government from outside through the exercise of financial leverage.

Conclusions such as Killick’s, based in large part on the growing evidence of the questionable utility of external conditionality, define a relatively strong version of local ownership. In this version, the interests and agendas of local actors are viewed as more important, in terms of development outcomes, than those of international ones: in terms of the fundamental question of “whose agenda?”, the answer here is that in case of disputes between the priorities of recipient governments (the relevant local owners in this case) and the priorities of donors, the former should take precedence. However, the fact that this vision of local ownership has remained both contested and largely unimplemented suggests that while the local ownership debate has a comparatively longer history in development discourse than in peacebuilding discourse, this has not necessarily produced greater clarity in terms of either definition or practice.

While Gerry Helleiner and Brian Tomlinson echo Killick in arguing that the essence of local ownership in development contexts is that “the recipients drive the process” (cited in IMF 2001: 5), the notion of local ownership as local control – of agenda-setting, of funds, and of program design, implementation and evaluation – has never been fully embraced by the donor community. That this is so is hardly surprising, since taken to its logical conclusion the strong version of local ownership relegates the donor community to the role of writing checks and hoping for the best; given perennial donor concerns about inadequate local capacity and excessive local corruption, such a shift in development practice would strike more than a few donors as misguided, irresponsible, and terribly naïve. And while the notion of partnership emerged as a middle ground, implying joint decision-making between insiders and outsiders – with the values and priorities of each counting for something – an alternate vision of local ownership also emerged which equated ownership with “buy-in.” As one development practitioner bluntly characterized this weaker version: “ownership exists when they do what we want them to do but they do so voluntarily” (cited in Helleiner 2001: 5). In this version, local ownership is about convincing or cajoling local actors to accept the wisdom and utility of what remain externally defined policy prescriptions, and represents little more than a repackaging of business as usual within the development community, in which the weight of donor money and donor norms produces a donor-driven development agenda. The debate over international development continues to operate largely within this space between strong and weak versions of local ownership, with discourse leaning towards the stronger version and practice tending to favor the weaker.

In very much the same way, coming to terms with questions of local ownership in peacebuilding processes requires, first and foremost, acknowledging at least two competing visions of peacebuilding. The first of these, which has in recent years come to be known as the liberal peace, sees peacebuilding as an effort “to bring war-shattered states into conformity with the international system’s prevailing standards of domestic governance” (Paris 2002: 638). As Oliver Richmond (2007: 462) has argued, the core ideas underlying the liberal peace – democratization, economic liberalization, neoliberal development, human rights, and the rule of law – have exerted a dominant influence over the ways in which contemporary peacebuilding is both conceptualized and practiced. This is unsurprising given the prevalence of these notions within Western industrialized democracies (which comprise the core of the modern-day international community), the assumption that liberalism underlies much of the peace and prosperity enjoyed by the West, and the weight of Western influence within contemporary peacebuilding processes. According to this perspective, peacebuilding is about transforming war-shattered polities into functioning liberal democracies, where the liberal-democratic framework is seen not only as the gold standard of good governance, but also as the most secure foundation for sustainable peace.

The liberal vision of peacebuilding insists that global norms surrounding principles of good governance do exist and should carry weight. Conversely, local values, traditions, and institutions tend to be dismissed in post-conflict settings as a cause of the conflict rather than as a potential resource for peacebuilding, as a problem to be eliminated rather than a foundation to be built upon. Self-determination in peacebuilding contexts, accordingly, is not an unlimited field of possibility, but rather a right balanced by responsibilities to respect and uphold international norms. In the aftermath of 9/11, the heightened awareness of the dangers that failed, unstable, or war-torn states pose to other states in the international system have bolstered the arguments of those who insist that responsible membership in international society requires domestic politics to be organized in a particular, and specifically liberal, manner.

The second vision of peacebuilding, affiliated with eminent conflict resolution practitioners such as John Paul Lederach, is associated with what has come to be known as peacebuilding from below. As Ken Bush (1996: 86) has summarized this perspective, “the challenge of rebuilding wartorn societies is to nurture and create the political, economic and social space within which indigenous actors can identify, develop, and employ the resources necessary to build a peaceful, just, and prosperous society.”

As opposed to its liberal counterpart, this second perspective is communitarian in character. While proponents of the liberal peace make claims to universality in contending that liberal practices and institutions are both appropriate and desirable at all times and in all places, communitarian approaches stress the importance of tradition and social context in determining the legitimacy and appropriateness of particular visions of political order, justice, or ethics. Rather than relying on a universal template, communitarians stress that any viable resolution to the problems of order and good governance must “derive from and resonate with the habits and traditions of actual people living in specific times and places” (Bell 2009).³ Peacebuilding communitarians uphold, consequently, the right of societies to make their own choices, regardless of the degree to which such choices correspond with emerging international norms, which are viewed from this perspective as more Western than universal.

Given the externally driven nature of the contemporary peacebuilding enterprise, the universe of cases of communitarian peacebuilding is necessarily much smaller than that of liberal peacebuilding. Almost without exception, communitarian forms of peacebuilding have emerged only in cases characterized by relatively little external involvement. Volker Boege and colleagues, for example, argue that the relative stability of Somaliland – which is particularly striking in comparison with the prevailing anarchy in the rest of Somalia – has been in large part “due to the involvement of traditional actors and customary institutions that are rooted in the traditional clan-based Somali society” (Boege et al. 2008: 13). In Bougainville, a similarly peripheral example of war-to-peace transition, a relatively stable, legitimate order has emerged as a result of a bottom-up process in which decisive roles were played by local elders and councils of chiefs (Boege et al. 2008: 14). Post-apartheid South Africa and post-genocide Rwanda may also be considered examples of societies crafting their own peace in the aftermath of conflict. While Mandela’s South Africa followed a fairly conventional liberal peacebuilding path, the level of public participation in the transition process – from the crowds generated by hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to the two million public submissions received in response to calls for public input into the country’s constitutional reform process (Kritz 2007: 418) – strongly suggest a peace process that was owned and operated by South Africans themselves. Paul Kagame’s Rwanda, in contrast, offers an example of a domestically driven yet illiberal peacebuilding process. Unwilling to follow international dictates in the genocide’s aftermath, Kagame’s Tutsi-dominated government has pursued its own path of tightly controlled authoritarianism, which has not only prevented renewed conflict but has also clamped down on corruption and generated one of Africa’s highest sustained rates of economic growth (Grant 2010). The Rwandan miracle, such as it is, is not without its critics: despite the prominence of its home-grown gacaca reconciliation process, questions remain about the extent to which the country’s ethnic conflict has been resolved rather than merely suppressed, while opinions remain divided as to whether Kagame himself is a benevolent dictator or an incurable despot (Grant 2010).

The concept of local ownership is the core issue around which liberal and communitarian perspectives diverge, since both posit very different conceptions of the relationship between insiders and outsiders in peacebuilding contexts. While liberals see local ownership emerging out of a commitment by domestic actors to take ownership over a largely predetermined vision of peacebuilding, the communitarian vision implies a far more substantive vision of local ownership, in which reform processes “must be designed, managed, and implemented by local actors rather than external actors” (Nathan 2007: 4). Liberal and communitarian perspectives – which directly parallel the debate between weak and strong forms of local ownership in development discourse – invariably collide in specific peacebuilding contexts, where both outsiders and insiders claim legitimate political authority. Indeed, in the absence of effective mechanisms of accountability it is often an open question which of these sets of actors better represent the best interests of post-conflict societies. Ultimately, peacebuilding situations raise hard questions about the meanings and limits of state (as distinct from national) self-determination in the aftermath of violent conflict or state failure, about the prerogatives, responsibilities, and legitimate expectations of the outside actors who intervene in such situations, and about the character of sovereignty in states emerging from war. Even more fundamentally, examining peacebuilding through a local ownership lens necessitates more serious reflection on questions of agency in post-conflict processes: who are the relevant agents, what are their agendas, and how might these agendas be reconciled in such a way as to produce sustainable peace?

Obstacles to ownership

From the perspective of most contemporary peacebuilding operations, local ownership has been much more about the responsibilities of good governance than about the freedom to choose among alternate socio-political and economic organizing principles. Caroline Hughes and Vanessa Pupavac argue, in fact, that local ownership in practice is not about autonomy, but rather about responsibility. In other words, “while responsibility for politics is to be placed back on the shoulders of local people, this is a disciplined politics, regulated by international norms” (2005: 883). Far from restoring autonomy to local societies, this can be viewed as a fundamentally disempowering form of local ownership, where internal political forces are expected both to uncritically adopt and to actively implement an external blueprint for post-conflict transformation.

As peacebuilding has evolved and become increasingly institutionalized in the post-Cold War era, several key factors at the international level have combined to push peacebuilding practice in a liberal direction. The first of these is the extent to which liberal internationalism has emerged as the contemporary commonsense of peacebuilding. As Roland Paris (1997: 56) has argued, the wisdom of “transplanting Western models of social, political and economic organization into war-shattered states in order to control civil conflict” continues to be taken as self-evident by most international agencies engaged in peacebuilding, even though the liberal paradigm does not have a particularly impressive track record in postwar settings. Nevertheless, the absence of credible, coherent alternatives leaves the basic tenets of liberal internationalism unchallenged to such an extent that peacebuilding often comes to resemble a bureaucratic exercise in installing the basic pillars of the liberal democrat...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Title-page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Acronyms
• Map of Bosnia and Herzegovina
• Map of Afghanistan
• Map of Haiti
• Preface and acknowledgments
• 1 Making sense of local ownership in peacebuilding contexts1
• 2 The liberal peace and the ownership question
• 3 Elite ownership Elections and beyond
• 4 Civil society and societal ownership
• 5 Bosnia Ownership through imposition?
• 6 Afghanistan Peacebuilding, political culture, and the limits of social engineering
• 7 Haiti Ownership and the political economy of peacebuilding
• 8 Conclusion Towards peacebuilding as consensus-building
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index