The Norwegian Institute of International Affairs has published a paper on local and national ownership in post-conflict Liberia. Difficulties in implementing policies aimed at fostering local and national ownership in peacekeeping activities have been the starting point of the paper, in which extra attention is paid to training programmes for those working in peacekeeping operations.
These programmes, aimed at sensitizing people to the inherent difficulties of local ownership in post-conflict environment, emphasise how difficulties relating to local ownership can be solved in different contexts, on a case-by-case basis. By offering an ethnographical account of practices of local ownership in Liberian ministries, problematizing the role played by international embedded experts, the authors argue that “where you stand may actually depend on where you sit”. They write that borrowing capacity from the outside can be needed in difficult post-conflict environments, where local ownership is problematic. “In the end, the important question may be not who does the work, but whose perspectives underlie the policies that are adopted and implemented."
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Source: Africa Portal