Local Ownership as Dependence Management: Inviting the Coloniser Back

Abstract

This article challenges the tendency to understand local ownership of statebuilding processes chiefly as a product of how international donors plan and implement reforms rather than of how such efforts are appropriated by local actors. Local ownership is typically described as a quality which is ‘supported’, ‘fostered’, ‘granted’ or ‘stifled’ by foreigners rather than something which is simply taken by the hosts of such interventions. Drawing on the case of British-led police reform in Sierra Leone, the article argues that local authorities exercised ownership by actively drawing their former colonizer into the security sector, thus deepening and prolonging the intervention. This contradicts two common assumptions about local ownership: (i) it is aimed at reducing international influence and (ii) it will be scarcer and more difficult to achieve the weaker the host state. Rather than to control how the police reform was designed and implemented, the principal function of local ownership was to secure a powerful ally in the ongoing civil war and to achieve an outward reorientation of national security.