Local ownership has been a buzzword in international peacebuilding over the past two decades. Since the late 1990s when the limitations of mainstream liberal peacebuilding models became evident, various ways to promote local ownership as an alternative or supplement to the liberal models have been explored in both academic debates and the field practice of peacebuilding. The assumption is that peacebuilding will be more legitimate and sustainable when local people control and/or influence the design and implementation of their own peacebuilding programmes. In field practice, the UN recognised national/local ownership as âthe single most important determinantâ of effective peacebuilding (UNSG 2002) and acknowledged that no international initiative âimposed from the outside can hope to be successful or sustainableâ (UNSG 2004). Major seminal documents of the UN in this period emphasised local ownership as a central feature of its peacebuilding, some of which include No Exit Without Strategy (2001), the Brahimi Report (2000) , Responsibility to Protect (2001) , In Larger Freedom (2005) , and Governance for Peace (2012) .
Supporting this new direction, many international organisations and international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) working in the peacebuilding sector have developed and applied various strategies to enable local actors to participate in their own peacebuilding programmes at both national and sub-national levels. Such commitment was reconfirmed in the documents issued in major international conferences of peacebuilding actors, such as the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness (2005) , the Accra Agenda for Action (2008) , and Busan Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation (2012) . By the mid-2000s, the promotion of local ownership emerged as âa key principle of civil conflict managementâ (Ropers 2000, cited in Reich 2006, 27).
In academic debates, an extensive discourse has developed to explore how local peacebuilding actors develop their own models of post-conflict reconstruction , and examine various dimensions of local ownership from conceptual, theoretical and empirical perspectives. Although detailed arguments vary, these studies by and large rectify the perceived âhubrisâ of liberal interventions and support context sensitive bottom-up approaches that respect and reflect local/indigenous knowledge (Richmond 2008; Mac Ginty 2008; Smillie 2001; Campbell et al. 2011; Donais 2012; Mac Ginty and Richmond 2013). While rooted in the practice/discourse of international development, the term âlocal turn â is now one of the central debates in the peacebuilding discourse.
Nevertheless, the contemporary ownership development programmes tend to focus primarily on local capacity building programmes operated by external donor agencies. The local partners for capacity building were selected from the elites who could foster liberal themes. Although these programmes have encouraged more proactive roles for indigenous people, they inevitably contained many paternalistic elements and the real transfer of responsibilities to local structures, politicians and stakeholders has rarely been carried out. Hence, they failed to demonstrate how local actors can develop real ownership under the external actorsâ paternalistic advocacy. Pointing out this limitation, studies state that the previous attempt for local ownership had frequently been not much more than lip service (Boege et al. 2009a), more about localsâ ownership based on externalsâ ideas (Suhrke 2007), and limited to institutional ownership only while the decision making power still belong to the internationals (Reich 2006, similar views are discussed in Wetterberg et al. 2015; Sommers 2002; Harris 2004; Hasselskog and Schierenbeck 2015; Richmond 2010). Some studies contend that the concept of local ownership itself is being co-opted to meet donorsâ demands and justify a continued international presence (Scheye and Peake 2005; Chesterman 2007; Pietz and von Carlowitz 2007).
Between 2012 and 2014, I had a chance to review the local ownership promotion programmes implemented by international agencies (mainly the UN agencies) in nine different countries, and the key findings are in line with the above critiques. The project discovered that the reviewed programmes have adopted innovative and interesting features, and subsequently, the level of local participation in various peacebuilding activities was significantly improved. At the same time, it was obvious that the power disparity in favour of international donors clearly persisted. While most donors studied as part of this project made many efforts to acknowledge the local counterpartsâ perspectives and needs, they still assumed that the promotion of local ownership requires the development of local capacity through the advocacy of external supporters as a prerequisite. Hence, our conclusion was that donors still played the role of agenda setters and the role of local peacebuilding actors tended to remain that of âcustomersâ who are selecting one of the options provided by external actors or who give feedback and comments on the ongoing programmes (Lee and ÓŚzerdem 2015).
Ideas for Local Ownership in Asian Peacebuilding were developed in this context. Since the end of the Cold War, there has been approximately. For the first ten years, liberal peacebuilding was uncritically implemented. In the following fifteen years, many international peacebuilding programmes were involved with various efforts to address the limitations of such liberal models and to respect and reflect local contexts. However, as of the mid 2010s, the outputs of such efforts were highly limited, and efforts to address the very structural issue failed.
If this is the case, is it ever possible for authentic local ownership to be developed under the strong influence and advocacy of external intervention? Studies have pointed out various issues ranging from perceptual limitations of the donor community to practical challenges in the post-conflict contexts, which should be transformed in order to promote real local ownership (Donais 2012; Thiessen 2013; Shinoda 2015; Mackenzie-Smith 2015). However, if such perceptual and technical issues are addressed, can the power disparity between donors and local peacebuilders be overcome? Moreover, if this is possible, through what strategies do local peacebuilders develop their own models of peacebuilding? How different are they from the liberal models? What are their significance and limitations as locally-owned peacebuildings?
As will be discussed in the following sections, while the importance and necessity of the local turn has been emphasised and explored in the contemporary academic discourse, in-depth studies on these contexts have not extensively been undertaken yet. Many of the empirical studies until today come with sizeable caveats: the recognition of limitations such as co-operation and limited data-sets. Moreover, many of them rely on description of local contexts incorporated in certain peacebuilding programmes and their achievements, assuming that such cultural reflection was indeed a critical factor. Hence, many important questions related to local ownership of peacebuilding, including the central question of this book, still remain barely analysed.
Thus, Local Ownership in Asian Peacebuilding primarily aims to investigate and analyse the empirical evidence observed in Cambodia and Mindanao, which will further develop the ongoing academic debates on local turn . Based on the authorâs field studies in both countries, this study examines specifically how local agencies in Cambodia and Mindanao (the Philippines) have developed their own models of peacebuilding under the strong influence of external intervention. It identifies four distinct patterns in the development of local peacebuildersâ ownership: ownership inheritance from external advocates, mobilisation of alternative funding sources, incorporation of local perspectives within conventional models of collaboration, and utilisation of religious /traditional leadership. This book then analyses each pattern, focusing on its operational features, its significance and its limitations as a model of locally-driven peacebuilding.
In addition, this book intends to report up-to-date information on the peacebuilding development in the two Southeast Asian countries. While a wide range of examples from the peace processes in Africa, Europe and Latin America have been recognised and discussed, the contem...