Paper short abstract:

Using Guinea-Bissau as an example, the paper illuminates quality and contents of what is being diffused by external actors and subsequently adopted, rejected, transformed and/or returned by various local actors involved in the security sector reform process.

Paper long abstract:

Over the past fifteen years security sector reforms as part of larger peacebuilding interventions have been implemented in some African countries. When doing so, donors, frequently refer to the concept of "local ownership" to underline the agency of people and institutions in the respective countries concerned. Based on data collected in an ethnographic field research in Guinea-Bissau in early 2013 I will demonstrate how "local ownership" is conceptualized both in theory and in practice. Using Guinea-Bissau as an example, I will illuminate quality and contents of what is being diffused by external actors and subsequently adopted, rejected, transformed and/or returned by various local actors involved in such reform processes. Despite official commitments to "local ownership" - a buzzword in current development discourse - the involvement of local actors in Guinea-Bissau's security sector reform has been only realized in a few projects. For instance, an EU security sector reform mission was discontinued after a coup - and due to a lack of - and despite explicit official references to -"local ownership". Thus, what does the plurality of local owners - i.e. local beneficiaries of the reforms; locals employed by the missions; local members of the security sector - expect of such reforms, what is their vision of "security" in particular and of such reforms in general, and how do they perceive the foreign experts, their (often paternalistic) attitudes, and their assumptions of and ways of dealing with such reforms? How do their understandings and expectations differ from "Western", "universal" ones?