29.06.09 Why Peacebuilders Fail to Secure Ownership and be Sensitive to Context
NUPI Working Paper 755 | 31 pages.
Security in Practice 1 - 2009
>> Summary
The policies of the UN, the World Bank, OECD-DAC and most bilateral donors have converged around a liberal peacebuilding model, where rule of law, market economy and democracy are seen as central to build a lasting peace. There are also procedural principles that are included in this consensus that stipulates how
to proceed to build liberal democracies. The first principle is that external actors need to respect and secure local ownership
. The second is that that external actors need, wherever and whenever possible, to build on existing institutions and thus to take local context
as their point of departure. While the substantive elements of peacebuilding (i.e. democracy, rule of law, market economy) clearly define peacebuilding practice, the two procedural principles – ownership and context – are often neglected or marginalized. Extant research strongly suggests that this lack of attention to ownership and context go a long way in explaining why so many peacebuilding efforts are judged to be ineffective and unsustainable over time. This report seeks to understand why these two procedural principles are recognized as important yet seem to be of little import in shaping peacebuilding efforts. I offer an explanation that locates the problem in two key assumptions that are fundamental to how peacebuilding efforts are organized. The first assumption is that knowledge about universal features and mechanisms of the liberal peacebuilding is more important than geographically specific knowledge of the post-conflict country in question. The second assumption is that the international legitimacy of peacebuilding efforts automatically translates into domestic legitimacy of peacebuilding efforts in post-conflict countries. I show that these two assumptions lead peacebuilders to be both “blind” and “arrogant”. They are “blind” to local factors that are central to effective peacebuilding because their frame of reference is mainly drawn from universal templates for how to build peace which draws heavily on western experience, expertise and institutions. And they are “arrogant” as they believe that lack of domestic legitimacy is caused by misperceptions which can be addressed through quick impact projects and ad-hoc measures. The prevalence of these assumptions helps explain why respect for ownership
and sensitivity to local context
is preached but not practiced. The problem, then, is built into the widely shared yet mostly unrecognized assumptions and the attendant organizational forms and practices that define what peacebuilding is about.
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