Paper short abstract:

Legal pluralism is not a new phenomenon. Still, development agencies struggle to come to terms with the challenges involved. The paper describes such challenges and highlights some of the obstacles to mainstreaming legal pluralism into development practice.

Paper long abstract:

While "legal pluralism" as a buzzword can be found in almost all recent papers on development cooperation in the justice sector few concrete answers exist that help engaging with the challenges that legal pluralist contexts pose.

The proposed paper will describe the obstacles to mainstream legal pluralism into programme designs and implementing practices both from a practical as well as from a theoretical perspective. The former focuses on my experiences as a project manager for GIZ's programme "Promoting the Rule of Law and Justice in Sierra Leone" and highlights the difficulties implementing agencies face when acting with (state) partner institutions and on behalf of donors. The latter goes beyond this context and suggests that the complexity and the "politics" of legal pluralist settings conflict with the logics of contemporary development cooperation.