The perils of ‘going local’: liberal peace-building agendas in Nepal

The perils of ‘going local’:liberal peace-building agendasin NepalJason Miklian, Kristoffer Liden and Ashild Kolas

Responding to recent critiques, foreign aid

organisations are increasingly ‘going local’ in

their operations in order to integrate local

actors into their peace-building and aid

projects. This is done under the belief that

entering into partnerships directly with

grassroots actors will increase local

autonomy in joint ventures, thus

empowering locals as agents of change both

during and after the project period. But

despite its normative and conceptual appeal,

we argue that this model is not workable in

practice and cannot be under the current

structural conditions of the international aid

environment. This is due to a fundamental

disconnect between the conceptualisation

and rationale of ‘going local’ and the

structural and institutional frameworks

within which ‘local ownership’ is supposed

to be operationalised and implemented. This

paper uses the example of Nepal to illustrate

that this disconnect not only prevents foreign

aid organisations from reaching their stated

goals, but exacerbates the very problems that

‘going local’ is supposed to address.

International foreign aid agendas have undergone cyclical rounds of outside criticism,

inward reflection and reinvention for at least the past century. In the latest round of

attacks, the post-Cold War explosion of international peace-building operations was

ISSN 1467-8802 print/ISSN 1478-1174 online/11/030285-24 q 2011 Conflict, Security and Development Group

DOI: 10.1080/14678802.2011.593809

Jason Miklian is a researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO). His primary research interests are on

insurgency and counter-insurgency in South Asia, rare earth elements and the future of multinational peace-

building operations.

Kristoffer Liden is a researcher at PRIO where he is working on the political philosophy and ethics of liberal

peace-building. He is a PhD candidate in philosophy and member of the research school of the Ethics

Programme at the University of Oslo.

Ashild Kolas is a Social Anthropologist and Senior Researcher at PRIO. She has authored two books and

numerous articles, mainly on Tibetan identity and cultural representation. Her current work in India is on

conflict management and militancy in the hill areas of Northeast India.

Conflict, Security & Development 11:3 July 2011

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criticised for (among other things) advancing foreign (or Western) political agendas, ideas

and norms at the expense of ‘the local’.1 These political agendas at times constitute top-

down social engineering, and the building of a ‘virtual liberal peace’ often perpetuates and

even strengthens the conditions that justify foreign presence and support.2 In response,

policy-makers, practitioners and scholars have turned away from general templates of

‘liberal state-building’ and replaced it with the idea of supporting ‘local actors and

structures’.3 In the absence of a well-functioning state apparatus that can realise peace-

building objectives of socio-economic development, security, democratisation and justice,

this agenda of ‘going local’ entails the instalment of local non-governmental organisations

(NGOs), village committees and other non-state actors and institutions as central agents of

peace-building. Supposedly, this anchoring of peace in ‘local ownership and participation’

not only resolves the lacking efficiency of top-down approaches compromised among

others by local elites, it also remedies the essential legitimacy problem relating to moral and

cultural diversity.4

However, evidence from ‘grassroots’ peace-building programmes in Nepal demonstrates

that ‘going local’ is fraught with its own perils. Nepal makes a good case for the study of

international peace-building efforts as a country hosting foreign development aid

programmes for over 50 years. More recently, after 10 years of civil war between the

government and a Maoist insurgency, Nepal is also transiting through an integrative peace

process actively supported by a host of foreign aid organisations (FAOs) and international

NGOs (INGOs), including the United Nations (UN), through numerous agencies and its

mission to Nepal, UNMIN.5 Nepal also has a history as an ‘ideal’ country for FAOs, with

its forthcoming government, high rates of poverty, extensive network of local institutions,

welcoming populace and not least its ‘permanent complex emergency’ status. A 1996 quote

(just as the war started) rings true today: ‘In Nepal’s bikas (development) world it is always

desperate times. Overwhelming needs, impending crises and unachieved goals dominate

the agenda’.6 The perpetual sense of emergency was sustained during the decade-long war

and continues unabated five years after the signing of the 2006 Comprehensive Peace

Accord (CPA) between the Maoists and the Interim Government.

This article is based on fieldwork in nine districts of Nepal in November 2008,

September/October 2009 and November 2010. Using a mixed-methods approach,7 our

study combines interviews with onsite observation, primary and secondary literary

sources and quantitative data (mainly on the economics of aid). One hundred and twenty

interviews were conducted with representatives of multilateral agencies, international and

286 Jason Miklian, Kristoffer Liden and Ashild Kolas

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national NGOs, national and local government actors, politicians and community leaders

and urban and rural citizens. We are aware of our role as being on the margins of (or fully

within) the ‘aid industry’ that we are critiquing, which carries its own unique challenges.8

After describing the arguments and rationale for the turn to ‘the local’ in contemporary

liberal peace-building, this article draws on Nepal to highlight the problems and dilemmas

of ‘going local’ as seen from the perspective of different stakeholders, including FAO

practitioners, government representatives and civil society actors in Nepal. We then return

to the key concepts underpinning the promotion of ‘local ownership’ to illustrate how

these concepts are applied and analyse the concrete results of FAO efforts to ‘go local’.

We argue that FAO approaches to ‘going local’ address peace-building critiques through

three overlapping concepts, designed to enable ‘local ownership’ and integration of local

actors into peace-building processes. FAOs profess to believe that entering into partnerships

with local actors will increase their autonomy in joint projects, thus serving to empower

locals as national-level change agents both during and after the project period. Information

exchange and project planning are said to be mutual and hence designed for sustainable

development and capacity-building of local actors. Despite its normative and conceptual

appeal, we argue that this model is not workable in practice, due to a fundamental

disconnect between the conceptualisation and rationale of ‘going local’ and the structural

and institutional frameworks within which ‘local ownership’ is operationalised and

implemented. This fundamental flaw not only prevents FAOs from reaching their stated

goals, but exacerbates the very problems that ‘going local’ is supposed to address.

Justifying the turn to ‘the local’: partnership, autonomy,empowerment

Contemporary discourse and practices of peace-building are predicated on two iron-clad

assumptions; that non-violent settlements, reconciliation and reintegration are the

preferred ways for a community to rebuild after conflict and that Western (or

‘international’) expertise is beneficial for post-conflict societies to make the transition from

war to durable peace. Moreover, many international organisations believe in an almost

dogmatic way that durable peace can only be achieved through a peace process that is

‘locally owned’, requiring international actors to forge local partnerships for peace-building

to promote empowerment and autonomy.9 Early versions of ‘national ownership’ signified

a transfer of peace-building ownership from international to national or country-level

The perils of ‘going local’ 287

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actors. Ownership itself was viewed more as an end than as a means,10 parallel to the

emphasis on ‘bottom-up’ approaches in development cooperation.11 In recognition of the

fact that political elites often have interests disparate from the populace, ‘local ownership’

in FAO projects has since been relegated even further downwards to the community level.

UN operations in Nepal initially regarded ‘local ownership’ as a method of increasing

effectiveness rather than an essential requirement for ensuring the success of operations,

defined by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s post-conflict guidance report highlighting

‘local ownership’ priorities.12 The report identifies two guiding principles for United

Nations promotion of the rule of law in post-conflict societies: the UN should base its

assistance on international norms and standards and the UN should facilitate nationally led

strategies and ‘local ownership’. Although the two principles are potentially contradictory,

the UN has remained silent on how the two should interact or which principles should be

privileged in case of a clash.13 Simply stated, the unresolved question is: ‘What should the

United Nations do when facilitating local ownership undermines international norms and

standards?’.14 Further, ‘local ownership’ has no clear definition in the UN beyond that ‘the

United Nations should ensure that nationals relate to the reform being undertaken’.15

As Chesterman points out, the term ‘local ownership’ can have various meanings

‘ranging from a sense of attachment to a programme or operation, to (rarely) actual

controlling authority’.16 On the use of the term in contemporary peace-building contexts,

Donais argues that ‘(L)ocal ownership [ . . . ] has come to be less about respecting local

autonomy and more about insisting that domestic political structures take responsibility

for—ownership over—the implementation of a pre-existing (and externally defined) set of

policy prescriptions’.17 In this way, the term itself is politicised at the local and national

levels and the vagaries of its meaning are often exploited in mission statements and project

proposals by aid organisations and those they fund to deprive the term of any coherent

strategic relevance.

Despite its lack of precision and openness to a wide range of interpretations, the UN

argument for ‘local ownership’ has not gone unnoticed. As the FAO industry has grown,

‘increasingly the consensus in the aid community is that peace-building, like development,

requires a core of “local ownership” if it is to succeed’.18 Donor networks repeatedly stress

the importance of ‘ownership’, listing it as one of five ‘partnership commitments’ in the

OECD’s 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness. Developing countries were advised to

draft and implement development strategies that clearly prioritise ‘effective leadership

over their development policies’.19 The importance of strengthening country ownership


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was reiterated in the 2008 Accra Agenda for Action, in which donors further promised to

deepen their engagement with civil society organisations. For at least a decade, both

practitioners and academics have pushed for community-oriented grassroots approaches

as an unqualified good to harness the valuable ideas that local actors are assumed to

provide.20 Now, ‘grassroots local ownership’ has become the preferred theoretical method

for international organisations to entrench and expand their peace-building programmes

in post-conflict countries. And the phrase ‘truly locally owned’ is also gaining traction,

usually in response to critiques of the wrong kind of locals owning the process or when

project partners are simply ‘yes men’. The problem with earlier efforts, goes the argument,

is that the organisations have not partnered with the ‘right’ people or that the projects have

not been local enough. This follows the new local ownership doctrine, which asserts that

you can never get too local. ‘Local ownership’ plus ‘local context’ are now regarded as the

twin pillars of ‘sustainable, successful’ peace-building.

Many academic critiques against FAOs attack their lack of comprehension or

implementation of local-level or ‘grassroots’ inputs. De Coning sees ‘the need to

operationalise the principle of local ownership’ as one of the biggest obstacles to

coherency.21 As argued by MacGinty and Richmond, local ownership is positive towards

building sustainable institutions and eventual liberalisation, despite a potential

romanticising of the local.22 We argue here that FAOs and funders have already over-

romanticised the local in their projects, reports and mission statements while being

hamstrung by their very organisational structures against providing the benefits to local

community actors that they promise. Evidence from Nepal suggests there are organisational

limits to how local FAOs can get, leaving local ownership as convenient rhetoric for

concealing the rigidity of institutional agendas. When their agendas clash with those of the

‘local’ that they represent, the latter are gently persuaded with reminders of what is

‘proven’, ‘fundable’ and ‘operationalisable’ and what is not. Examples abound of truly local

initiatives that are shoved out of consideration by foreign agencies, replaced by mandate-

fulfilling projects that at least one local partner has signed off on (to secure funding) but

are of questionable value to beneficiary populations.

Thus, the ‘local’ is set to take the blame in the next round of peace-builder self-critiques,

further legitimating Western peace-building interventions and leaving FAOs and funders

free to propose new buzzword-laden proposals without fundamentally changing their

mandates or operational frameworks. Further, the push for coherency and ‘delivering as

one’23 through the UN Peace-building Commission may simply be a mutually reinforcing


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power consolidation, diminishing dissenting voices at local levels, undermining their

authority to question the forward agenda for their country and community. Richmond calls

this coherence the further entrenchment of a ‘hegemonic peace’, where international

consensus crowds out local perspectives from peace-building discussions when motivations

clash.24 Going beyond UN peace-building efforts, this applies to every situation where

international agencies operating in local communities disregard local perceptions because

they differ too radically from the international organisation’s mandates, ‘best practices’ or

ability to document the project in a way that funders would consider a successful use of

resources. FAOs are stymied by the dilemma that choosing a local solution may undermine

the legitimacy of its own presence in the field, which is based on the assumption that the

post-conflict society needs international expertise. This creates powerful incentives for the

FAO to dismiss local approaches before even entering the field site.

Peace-building in Nepal: getting lost while ‘goinglocal’?25

During the war, the Maoists derided foreign aid as ‘imperialist’ in an attempt to recruit

those disenchanted from economic liberalisation programmes initiated by the World Bank

and IMF, which saw rural incomes fall while Kathmandu prospered.26 While the direct

effects of liberalisation programmes were probably insignificant to initial Maoist

recruitment, foreign aid was related to the rise of the insurgency in as much as it

contributed to increasing spatial and inter-group inequalities.27 FAOs have since

acknowledged the links between aid and conflict,28 recognising how aid delivery

mechanisms exacerbated the conflict.29 FAOs also reproduce caste inequalities within their

own organisations by recruiting staff mainly from upper caste and elite backgrounds, on

the grounds that they are English-speaking and like-minded.30 South Asian writers have

been equally critical of the ramping up of the aid machine in Nepal and the failure of a

half-century of aid in achieving aid agency goals. Some even claim that aid could be

abolished entirely to Nepal’s benefit.31

International aid constitutes over 25 per cent of Nepal’s annual state budget; more than

two billion USD per year. After targeting (particularly American) FAOs, the Maoists

embraced foreign aid as much as any other political party in Nepal after signing the

Comprehensive Peace Accord (CPA). This about-face is even more striking when coupled

with their continued rhetoric against the ‘imperialist’ United States and ‘expansionist’


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India. However, foreign aid is one of the largest ‘spoils of peace’ for politicians in Nepal, by

funnelling national-level aid to local NGOs that are often run by relatives of politicians.

Politicians dole out projects and jobs to supporters and while in most cases assistance is

provided universally, politicians do not hesitate to tell recipients which party made the

assistance possible. Foreign aid thus became the resource won from the war, even though it

was not explicitly a resource that was fought over. The fundamental bureaucratic structures

of Nepal were not changed by the civil war; despite the monarchy’s removal, the governing

elite remains much the same and ‘has developed ways of working [ . . . ] that are essential for

contemporary development management, no matter which organisation or donor’.32 Local

researchers constitute what Denskus calls the ‘development caste’, as their ‘(p)ractical

considerations (future employment in the development industry) win over the necessity to

use academic insights and research to engage with the elites, inform civil society and

participate in a discussion about the future of the country’.33

The desire to go local permeated the UN mission in Nepal (UNMIN). UNSC Resolution

1740 established UNMIN to monitor the management of arms and armed personnel of the

Nepal Army and the Maoist Army, assist political parties in implementing their peace

agreements, assist in the monitoring of ceasefire arrangements and provide technical

assistance to the Election Commission in the planning, preparation and conduct of the

election of a Constituent Assembly. UNMIN’s limited mandate allowed other agencies to

carve out niches in areas that UNMIN couldn’t operate, including the reintegration of ex-

combatants (UNICEF and UNFPA), legal reform and capacity-building (UNDP) and

employment generation (ILO). As Suhrke illustrates, the UN Secretariat pushed heavily

throughout the process for a much larger UNMIN role, including ‘support to local

governance structures, conflict resolution on the local and national level and posting of

“social exclusion advisers” to the countryside’; further, ‘It all seemed perfectly legitimate

and in line with the requirements of promoting a sustainable peace’.34 However, there was

confusion at the UN when widespread Nepalese resistance to this proposal cropped up.

Nepalis in government, the media and civil society were concerned first and foremost with

ownership and the desire to avoid becoming a neo-protectorate state.

Ideally, multilateral agencies should have ‘delivered as one’ while tailoring programmes

to their sets of expertise. In practice, agencies competed for project funds with each other

and other FAOs. UN staff were not even sure if UNMIN or the Resident Coordinator was

the focal point for UN peace-building efforts.35 UN agencies also fought with the

government of Nepal for local supremacy and funding. For instance, when the UNDP


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planned to run a local constitutional support programme, it consciously marginalised the

government and political actors. The programme incorporated 20,000 community groups

and was marketed heavily, although it competed with a similar programme initiated by the

Ministry of Peace and Reconstruction. There was even competition between UNDP and the

Ministry for the same foreign funding for peace-building. The UNDP was subsequently

critiqued by political parties for its self-created role as intermediary between citizens and

constitution-makers and the programme’s sole lasting impact was ‘to generate employment

for Nepal’s sizable NGO-cum-consultancy sector’.36

Nepal hosts a tremendously complex network of overlapping caste, class, gender, ethnic

and religious identities.37 As ‘local ownership’ became a driving goal for FAOs, this raised

the obvious question of ‘who (or where) is the local’? There are a number of different

community-level organisations and programmes in Nepal, some run through local

government District Development Committees (DDCs) and/or Village Development

Committees (VDCs), others run jointly by international organisations and the government,

such as the UNDP’s Village Development Programme, a component of the Decentralised

Local Government Support Programme of the Nepal Ministry of Local Development. Still

other programmes are run by international organisations in partnership with local NGOs.

In all programmes, even concerted efforts for village-level inclusivity were fraught with

difficulties. Elite dynamics of caste and class remain at the micro-level, as illustrated by

Tripathi’s critique of the Village Development Programme’s failed inclusion of historically

disadvantaged Tharu ethnic people.38 Even in Tharu-dominated villages, Tharus were

crowded out by the same elite groups (Brahmin and Chhetri castes and those originally from

the Kathmandu valley) that dominate at the national level.39 The Asian Development Bank

and Swiss Agency for Development have encountered similar difficulties when attempting

to implement community-level projects.40 They have found that while the most

disadvantaged may benefit marginally from such programmes, the primary benefactors

are local elites who effectively control disbursement.41 Other studies find that even aid

projects successfully benefiting the local poor were still controlled by micro-level elites,

showing that going down to the village level alone does not erase power dynamics but further

consolidates them.42 For many organisations, the newest ‘solution’ is to attempt to cut the local

elites out of the process. This could build resentment by the elites towards aid beneficiaries,

encouraging further discrimination and disempowerment in the local political sphere.

Several laws and regulations have been passed to regulate the FAO sector in Nepal. The

1999 Autonomy Act stipulates that FAOs must work with Village Development Councils


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(VDCs). More recently, legislation has been passed to restrict direct implementation of

projects by donors and international aid organisations. FAOs circumvent these regulations

in several ways. To bypass the laws, local divisions and branch offices outside of

Kathmandu have been transformed into independent entities and re-registered as ‘Nepali’

NGOs. Another option (described by interviewed FAO representatives) is to set up a new

‘local’ NGO that is nominally independent but remains closely linked to the ‘parent

organisation’ through provision of funds, training and other support. The NGO

Federation of Nepal claims that some INGOs have changed their status to ‘local NGO’

simply by registering as such at a local administration office in order to compete for local

resources but ‘blurring the norms of accountability and responsibility of INGOs’.43 Rabin

Subedi argues the real intention behind registration as ‘local’ is not the ‘decentralisation’ of

operations, but rather to enable aid organisations to tap into the earmarked funds of

bilateral donors and that aid policies promoted and practiced by some of the self-described

‘democratic and credible donors’ ignore and undermine Nepali ownership while

increasing dependency, wastage, duplication and ineffectiveness.44

Liberal peace-building: government perceptions

The rhetoric of ‘going local’ has allowed FAOs to bypass the state apparatus and target

citizens directly. While possibly providing better services when successful, these efforts not

only ignore but undermine the prospects of local ownership and a ‘self-sustainable’ peace

rooted in a functioning and responsive state. This dynamic is exemplified by the fate of

three government attempts at local interaction in Nepal: Village Development

Committees, Community Forestry User Groups and Local Peace Committees.

When the war began, FAOs were instructed and willing to funnel aid through District

Development Committees (DDCs) and/or Village Development Committees (VDCs),

both of which represent the base level of local government in Nepal that citizens are most

likely to interact with. However, as the conflict deteriorated, the Maoists targeted VDCs as

a symbol of the government and competitor for the social services that the Maoists wished

to provide themselves. By 2006, over 1500 VDC regional headquarters buildings were

destroyed and the VDC human network was non-existent in most districts due to Maoist

pressure and diversion of government funds to conflict-related expenditures. By mid-

2009, some 75 per cent of VDC posts remained unfilled in the poorest and least accessible

districts, due to a lack of political will to fill the positions and resistance from VDC


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secretaries working in adjacent districts, who by law pocketed 25 per cent of each VDC

budget that they were ‘overseeing’ in the post-conflict period for ‘administrative’ purposes.

Community forest user groups (CFUGs) were not as affected during the conflict as the

VDCs. Even the Maoists, initially hesitant to support the CFUGs, increasingly empowered

them at the expense of the VDCs, to the point where in some cases CFUGs substituted for

the VDC itself.45 Now CFUGs are not only viewed as peace-building tools in their own

right, but are also projected to expand their work into the rural development and

community empowerment projects traditionally done by local government through the

VDCs.46 However, VDC secretaries view these efforts as an encroachment upon their

duties and harbour a good deal of resentment against the CFUGs while acknowledging

that they are providing benefits to the community, which the VDCs are at this time often

incapable of providing because of infrastructure and manpower limitations.47

Although FAOs are required to cooperate with VDCs, many VDC secretaries are unaware

of which FAOs are operating in their area due to the lack of punitive action against FAOs if

they ignore the VDC. Even when FAOs seek out a VDC secretary, the secretaries often resent

the ‘false consultation’ given the lack of real input requested or flexibility to change should

they offer suggestions.48 In an effort to provide oversight, the Local Development Ministry’s

Monitoring and Evaluation Section was charged with evaluating how FAO projects are

implemented, if they are being implemented effectively and to scuttle bad projects. The six

staff members each oversee some $350 million in annual aid flows.49 The section has never

so much as publicly chastised a project, let alone pulled funding. In practice, employees

merely read and file the monthly FAO reports without the time or ability to do anything

further. The bureaucrats say since FAOs have more resources they will be able to provide

better services, in effect forcing the government to engage in a services competition with

FAOs in those places where their legitimacy is already questioned. In a country where 75 per

cent of aid bypasses government completely,50 this is no idle threat.

For some ‘successful’ FAO projects, including the World Food Programme’s ‘food for

work’ project in northwestern Nepal, locals have stopped going to the VDC entirely, as all

essential services have been replaced.51 FAO success highlights to citizens the government’s

failure to provide promised essential services. This erodes trust in the government,

particularly in areas where a large number of FAOs operate.52 The joint secretary of Local

Development in Nepal lamented this situation, noting that FAOs have the funding and

networks to provide more expansive programmes to local populations during short

project periods.53 When they leave, locals expect government agencies to pick up the slack.


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When the government fails to do so, the locals blame the government. As Mihaly

forewarned in 1963, well-publicised aid creates a ‘revolution of rising expectations’.54

In an effort to reintroduce government without the conflict baggage of the VDCs, Local

Peace Committees (LPCs) were created in 71 out of Nepal’s 75 districts after establishing

the Ministry of Peace and Reconstruction in 2007. Although LPC secretaries receive a

salary from the government and LPCs are regulated and mandated by the Ministry, they

are formally non-governmental organisations. As per the LPC terms of reference, the 12

member teams must include representatives from all major political parties, civil society,

conflict-affected people and women. The LPC makes consensus-based decisions and elects

its own coordinator for six-month terms. As described by several LPC secretaries, their

main purpose is to monitor the CPA, mediate local conflicts (including those involving

criminal groups as well as disputes between citizens and local authorities) and recommend

conflict victims for monetary compensation from the government.55 LPCs are hampered

by limited funds and lack of training and human resources, but they are not allowed to

seek non-governmental funding or enter into FAO partnerships, at least partially in

recognition of how FAO aid in previous projects has corrupted local government ventures

in the past.

Liberal peace-building in action: citizenry perceptions

In present-day Nepal the UN’s omnipresent white SUVs with enormous antennas

mounted to their hoods (cheekily termed ‘white rhinos’ by locals) are viewed cynically as

‘where the peace-building money trail ends’. Locals feel that UNMIN and FAOs built high

expectations that go unmet, namely that aid is not related to what is needed the most, that

the aid effort is as wasteful as it is visible, that aid should be going through the government

instead and that there is less faith in the government because of this situation.56 FAO

efforts to supplant local government during the vacuum created by the conflict were

regarded as ineffective, lacking transparency and done without input; one offered solution

was to enforce laws requiring any FAO operating in the country to have measurably

sustainable projects.57 However, with perpetually high unemployment rates it should be

no surprise that locals working with FAOs are much more concerned about job prospects

than their employer’s lofty ‘big picture’ goals.58 For many, the jobs themselves are the ends,

not simply the means for FAOs to implement peace-building programmes or stepping

stones to a ‘greater good’ for the community that they know is a false flag.


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In Nepal’s vernacular newspapers (particularly the flagship Kantipur), ads for international

positions pepper the pages, competing with the ubiquitous ‘study in X developed country’

sales pitches that compete for the best and brightest.59 Like most small developing countries,

the lack of domestic opportunities combined with familial demands to improve life decimate

the educated ranks, but ramping up FAO positions and ‘indigenous’ NGOs has created a

different kind of brain drain. Those who previously would have aspired for government

positions now prefer the NGO sector, compounding the weaknesses of local governments that

lack qualified personnel. Villagers complain that VDCs are useless and prefer contacting

NGOs or even establishing their own NGO as a way to get services or promote change in the

community. The trend started in the 1990s, with 30,000 NGOs in Nepal by 2000.60 The

number has since increased exponentially; some advocates claim that there are now over

250,000 NGOs in Nepal.61 Personal wealth creation is often a principal goal of NGO

entrepreneurs, but the benefits are also institutionalised; beyond financial windfall, NGO

work also counts for bonus seniority in Nepal’s Civil Service.

When new regulations made it mandatory for FAOs to partner with Nepalese NGOs to

carry out operations, this created new funding opportunities for local NGOs as well as

more competition for FAO partnerships. For FAOs, local partner selection is determined

by a range of considerations, including location, reputation, personal contacts and

political agendas. USAID, for example, tries to partner as politically ‘equitably’ as possible,

dividing projects between NGO partners affiliated with Nepali Congress (NC) and the

Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist Leninist) (CPN-UML) and farming out

projects that would benefit Maoist supporters to others due to political restrictions on

American aid supporting the Maoists.62 As the policy of selecting partners based on

political affiliation became widespread, political actors were encouraged to start and build

new NGOs to take advantage. For example, the Madheshi Janadhikar Forum, an ethnic

party based in southern Nepal, opened a branch in the far north-western Mugu district,

where no Madhesis live. The primary reason for doing so was to obtain earmarked donor

funds delivered in the interests of ‘political neutrality’ in the district.63

Local NGO actors in Nepal have little concern for the problem of ‘too little aid, too

many donors’, as the OECD states,64 but complain about lack of long-term emphasis and

too much project funding going to international employees living in developing countries

while drawing developed country wages.65 NGOs partnering with FAOs express serious

misgivings about FAO requirements and developments since the war ended. They claim

that in practice, increasing ‘transparency’ has meant only more paperwork and less time


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helping those in the field (or for trying innovative or otherwise indigenous implementation

processes), while at the same time doing little to reduce fraud in a country where receipts can

easily be manufactured for non-existent supplies, travel or work.66 Partner NGOs must also

write reports in English for the funder’s benefit and are often not given funds or time to write

in Nepali. Beyond the implications of local dissemination, local NGO leaders see this as a

lack of respect for the community in which they work and a lack of trust in their ‘partner’ to

write a report to ‘international standards’. There are also complaints about the

‘Englishisation’ of workshops owing to the international presence, resulting in a loss of

depth and meaning of core concepts and poor high-level discussion within Nepali

communities, due to the difficulties of mandating discussion in a foreign language. Even the

term ‘peace’ holds extremely divergent meanings, applications and responsibilities between

the Kathmandu valley and rural areas.67 The same holds true for funding proposals, which

must be done in English. This system not only skews results towards NGOs with better

linguistic ability over service-provision skills, but renders key indigenous aspects of post-

conflict peace-building as inoperable because of language and cultural incompatibilities.

A system designed for abuse?

Foreign aid for peace-building tends to arrive in large volumes just after conflict. In 2007,

foreign aid for Nepal reached USD 598 million,68 not including aid from China and India.

The aid inflows are so much larger than any other sources of funding that local elites used

it to consolidate power through the distribution of NGO contracts and delivery of NGO

services. The ‘NGOisation’ of politics has drawn political leaders since the mid-1990s,69

but more visible is the politicisation of almost all NGOs in Nepal. Most national and even

local-level NGOs have direct or indirect ties with one of the three major political parties

(Congress, UML, Maoists). Political leaders have created NGOs to cash in on the influx of

funds, reward political supporters and use NGO networks to serve as the grassroots

mobilisation tools of their party. Some NGOs are merely political fronts, siphoning off

donor aid for overt political objectives.70 Even local start-up NGOs that want FAO funding

must often first affiliate with a political party before they can gain access to regional

development heads that will approve the permits for work.

While most FAOs are aware of these activities and can terminate a relationship if these

patronage systems are discovered, no donor interviewed could illustrate a single example of

a cancelled project. FAOs need tangible gains and organisational growth, making them


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reluctant to admit to a ‘failed’ partnership. There are too many potential negative

consequences to admissions of anything but success, including negative impressions upon

donors, the risk of losing future bids for funding and public relations problems for all parties

involved. FAOs thus tend to take a laissez-faire approach to the local politics of foreign aid

delivery in order to ensure that future funding flows are not jeopardised.

This is not to say that civil society in Nepal during and after the war is limited to the NGO

community.71 The Jana Andolan II movement comprised of large sections of Nepal’s middle

and upper-middle classes was explicitly critical of donor–NGO relations, which has become

the focus of some critical Western voices.72 However, the marginalisation and subsequent

hijacking of many of Jana Andolan II’s goals by politicians using them for their own ends has

not only jeopardised the movement’s lasting impact but also increased the negative

impressions of FAOs and their perceived willingness to allow and even encourage this

ideational expropriation by, in many cases, the same politicians who were in power before the

war began. That said, FAOs are rarely (if ever) publicly chastised by civil society organisations

for fear of being blackballed from future funding opportunities in a country where

opportunities are few and even one project tie-up can mean years of operational ability.73

Liberal peace-building partnerships in practice:institutionalised inequality

This is not to say that FAOs give their local counterparts a free hand. The notion of

‘partnership’ between internationals and local actors in the delivery of aid has been

critiqued as a discourse employed by FAOs to establish legitimacy (especially when they

operate in areas with a colonial heritage) by creating the perception that they enhance

indigenous development processes.74 Local ownership discourse repeats the fundamental

rationale of partnership discourse: ‘it is the adaptation of the power framework and the

creation of a slightly changed reality, which serves to hide the fundamental power

asymmetries within development activities and essentially maintain the status quo’.75

In Nepal, local partners are in most cases NGOs that are subservient to the international

agency for funding. Porter’s findings of ‘partnership’ cynicism of local staff are echoed in

Nepal, where locals resist the role of ‘partners’ and prefer to be viewed as contributors.76

From a legal perspective, the rights of local (community level) actors vis-a-vis FAOs are

not well defined. While national structures are beholden to local rule of law frameworks,

the legal requirements for international organisations are often unclear.77


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Despite language in FAO reports and statements about ‘equal partnerships’, in Nepal

this is a paternalistic relationship. De Coning states that:

Under pressure from the internal/external power imbalance, internal actor

representatives make the common mistake of telling the external actors what

they think the external agents would like to hear, rather than sharing with them

their own perceptions and opinions of what kind of support they think they

need and the priorities as they perceive them.78

This asymmetrical relationship provides a vivid example of Donini’s assertion that local

NGOs are pushed to ‘mimic the structures and behaviour of their northern counterparts’ if

they want to secure a ‘partnership’ with their erstwhile benefactor.79 We take this argument

one step further. Local actors, particularly in states like Nepal that have a long history of

foreign aid involvement, are savvy and experienced enough in the field that they tell external

actors what they know the external actors want to hear, as they are all too aware that if they

spend their meetings critiquing projects instead of nodding in agreement, external actors

will simply partner on their next project with a more compliant local that does not make

implementation of their project so ‘ineffective’, time-consuming or otherwise difficult.

The increasing desire for micro-level project management and project access stems from

the belief that national-level actors are often corrupt, ineffective, unwilling to listen and

ignorant of the ‘best practices’ known by international organisations. Consequently, the

move is to partner with ever-smaller organisations that provide ever-decreasing resistance

to FAO roadmaps for project implementation. At the same time FAOs are becoming

increasingly professionalised, patterning their projects, funding, outputs and goals after

those of transnational corporations. Murphy lamented this shift a decade ago.80 FAO

commercialisation has increased since, supplanting the ‘voluntary spirit’ that used to

underpin this sector.81 The ‘development finance’ system pressures FAOs to forever increase

donor funding; to wit, a 26 per cent increase in total humanitarian and development aid

from 2002 to 2007 was considered insufficient and ‘far short’ of expectations by the OECD.82

Like corporations, there are inherent needs to increase the breadth, depth and scope of their

organisation. Communications, branding strategies and other marketing tools previously

considered unfamiliar or anathema to aid work now consistently appear in internal strategy

documents and annual reports without a corresponding critical assessment of what this

paradigm shift in organisational attitude means. Continuously improving the efficiency of

operations and documenting it along standards dear to the donors, may leave little patience


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for the actual capacities and preferences of ‘grassroots actors’. Furthermore, public

institutions upon which any self-sustained peace eventually relies are too often viewed as

dysfunctional and corrupt, unworthy of cooperation.

Autonomy in practice: ‘choice’ in an asymmetricalsetting

In an immediate post-conflict setting, even experienced local actors are happy to take

international aid in any form they can get, making the drafting of ‘development strategies’

both extremely pliable and heavily influenced by the foreign ‘experts’ who have swooped in.

The conceivability of saying ‘no’ in such a situation is restrained by the context, personal

abilities, needs and access to power. With all of these factors working against national-level

decision-makers and the inherently unequal power dynamics at play, to consider national

actors as ‘partners’ with an equal say in the agenda is disingenuous at best.83

Further, to tack the additional millstones of ‘autonomy’ and ‘accountability’ around the

necks of local partners is a convenient way for FAOs to pass at least half of the buck. OECD

guidelines tie aid to the principles of international agreements that the host country has

signed, without reflection upon the fact that the original signatory may in fact be either the

overthrown power from the war or an interim government, forcing the current leadership

to implement what they might find a distasteful document on behalf of their political

enemies (that perhaps had no intention of implementing it themselves) to get aid. In this

way, conditionality is still very much a part of aid, setting the agenda before actors even

come to the table. Notably, the very existence and functionality of donor funding

diversification that Ohanyan describes as essential to bolstering local NGO autonomy (and

their voice) is derided by both the Accra Agenda for Action and OECD as aid

fragmentation, which is a serious obstacle to making aid more effective.84

In Nepal, just as donors ‘flag the views’ of FAOs operating on the ground in an effort to

maintain overall project control, so too do FAOs usurp local governments in the name of

‘efficiency’ and ‘coherence’.85 The increasing trend is for power concentration (likely to

exclude the host government) and policy coherence, which ensures donor accountability

and managerial efficiency at the expense of NGO autonomy and operational freedom—

harming NGO learning, responsiveness and internal development.86 When they take on

donor roles, FAOs themselves ‘flag’ local NGOs they partner with, usurping their autonomy

and project control through the same ‘efficiency’ and ‘coherence’ arguments. This is not to


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say that Western organisations have a duty to fund programmes that are beyond the scope

or mandate of their charter, but simply to illustrate that following the money can predict

the agenda of current and future aid flows. Local actors may have input on the form and

implementation of a given project, but it is far more difficult to change the agenda itself.

Empowerment in practice: uncertain outcomes

Like much of the Global South, FAOs in Nepal now provide essential services that used to

be the sole responsibility of the state. As Donais argues: ‘(f)ar from restoring autonomy to

local societies, this can be viewed as a fundamentally disempowering form of local

ownership, where internal political forces are expected both to uncritically adopt and to

actively implement an external blueprint for post-conflict transformation’.87 Further,

expansive post-conflict decentralisation may hamper the essential reconstruction of a social

contract between the individual and the state and when absent serves to increase the

corruption within a country to exacerbate vicious cycles of ineffectiveness and inequality.88

Despite claiming to adhere to the principles of the Paris Declaration, many FAOs continue

to defend projects and activities in areas where they bypass local government with refrains

that are generally a variation of ‘if we don’t help, nobody will’. Professing to create

‘empowerment’, FAOs then carry out ‘grassroots peace-building’ projects that are supposed

to give local actors the opportunity to drive their own reconstruction efforts. However, if

local actors offer solutions that do not find favour with their funders, they are overlooked,

dismissed and even ridiculed as simple, unrealistic or naive. Further, if solutions are not

‘quantifiable’ in some way, they are often also discarded due to the difficulty in which FAOs

can empirically ‘prove’ to their funders how successful a given project was by the number of

villages served, number of stoves delivered, number of bags of rice eaten, etc.

Community level ‘empowerment’ programmes by international organisations should

be recognised as social engineering projects, as they deliberately challenge local elite

superiority, redistributing it to the otherwise disadvantaged (including lower caste,

women and youth). In some cases, ‘empowerment’ of civil society groups encourages

contestation of government institutions. For instance, a USAID programme to build

Youth Mobilisation Committees in the Terai actively encouraged NGOs to operate

independently of the government. USAID claimed that: ‘The relatively low budget of these

activities largely escaped political party influence and funding was seen as non-political,

so communities could have a real say in the projects they wanted without fighting the


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local bureaucracy’.89 While technically there are laws to prevent misuse of funds and

breaches of NGO political neutrality, in reality USAID in Nepal has never come up against

any resistance to projects and has never seized operational funds due to misuse.90

Ultimately, ‘empowerment’ as a strategy of FAO assistance disrupts and impairs

existing social fabrics. This can be a positive development in the lives of individuals, but

may also provoke resistance from the privileged as well as are excluded.91 There have been

cases of ‘pro-poor’ aid projects targeting traditionally disadvantaged Dalit and Janjati

social groups that intentionally bypass poorer members of the same villages who happen

to belong to a different caste or religious group. As one Dalit NGO director lamented:

‘INGOs today are all so focused on Dalits, Janjatis and Madhesis—but why can’t they just

commit to helping the poor?’.92 Further, projects aiming at ‘social inclusion’ of

marginalised groups through quotas and similar measures are institutionalising social

divides. In the long term, this may work contrary to the intention of ‘empowering’ these

groups, concretising division in the country and encouraging ethnic politics.

No way out?

The tendency of FAOs to push aside local government institutions has existed since at least

the end of the Cold War and the (re)birth of the liberal peace-building project. National

ownership goals often directly contradict local or regional goals and the concept of

‘ownership’ itself has been critiqued by the Paris Declaration’s own 2008 evaluation as

‘notoriously difficult to define and measure’.93 Now, a key OECD goal in going ‘beyond

Accra’ is to ‘find innovative ways of funding civil society and women’s groups for both

advocacy and service delivery’.94 In short, it is deemed essential to expand the programmes

that do not deliver aid through local government. There has been much written on local

concern (both local government and local citizens) on the parallel structures that FAOs

operate, in some cases with projects explicitly designed to serve partner, rather than

government, goals.95 Power et al. go so far as to suggest that FAOs would operate best if

they cease field operations entirely.96

FAOs are essential tools for Western governments to forward the universal norms

associated with the liberal peace-building project and institutionalise ‘peace’ through a

human security lens: due to their unofficial nature, access to the ‘local’ and hazy

relationship with sovereignty. Even as the discourse of development agencies has employed

the language of ‘local ownership’ and incorporated this terminology into their mandates


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and strategies, the power dynamics of relationships between FAOs and their local partners

have not been equally transformed.97

Tiptoeing through the grassroots promised to be the way out of the impasse of liberal

peace-building. In Nepal, weighty FAOs have trodden on the grass and squashed it,

looking for where to go next. In the revisionist literature on peace-building, three ways are

emerging: ‘re-liberal’, ‘social’ and ‘multicultural’ peace-building.98 Both of the latter two

heavily emphasise the value of ‘local’ perspectives, with social peace-building serving as a

middle ground between absolute local autonomy (multicultural) and the supremacy of the

liberal ideal promoted by the ‘re-liberal’ approach in a more coercive mode than recent

neo-liberal peace-building. Rejecting the illusory ‘localism’ of the former approach, ‘social

peace-building’ would allow for a balancing between the inherently normative peace-

building agenda of FAOs and the support of existing political actors and state structures

(instead of relying on a ‘re-liberal’ utopia of replacing these). However, even this ‘social’

model is predicated on the belief that peace-builders will listen to local actors when there

are conceptual or moral conflicts and more importantly that the peace-builders have the

internal power and will to change their own agendas and perceptions based on this

information.99 In general, it presupposes that international actors do not exploit their

hegemonic power for the promotion of their ‘local solutions’. The case of Nepal shows that

despite peace-builder rhetoric that already includes elements of both the social and

multicultural critiques, the barriers to implementation in practice can be too significant to

be overcome. This raises the question of which international institutional, legal, economic

and political measures it would take to change the rules of this game and whether this

‘social’ third way out is also a dead end without such groundbreaking reform.

Endnotes1. Richmond, ‘A Post-Liberal Peace’; Tshigiri, Post-Conflict

Peace-building Revisited.

2. MacGinty and Richmond, ‘Myth or Reality’.

3. MacGinty, ‘Indigenous Peace Making’; Liden, ‘Building

Peace Between Local and Global Politics’.

4. Shaefer, ‘Local Practices and Normative Frameworks’.

5. Whereas a decoupling of ‘humanitarian’ and ‘develop-

ment’ aid organisations and the activities of the UN

would have been appropriate in the past, mission creep

of aid activities by all sides and increasing mandate and

mission coherencies makes lumping of all actors into

FAOs appropriate for the purposes of this paper.

6. Des Chene, ‘In the Name of Bikas’.

7. Small, ‘How Many Cases Do I Need?’.

8. Mosse, ‘Is Good Policy Unimplementable?’; Mosse and

Lewis, ‘The Aid Effect’. The most notable challenge to

research and interviews was in ensuring interviewee

confidentiality and encouraging them to share experi-

ences, as many initially felt that we would merely take

our information to tell specific funders that certain

NGOs would be ‘difficult’ to work with in the future or

that funding should be cut completely. Perhaps

ironically, these problematics were much more pro-

nounced in Kathmandu than in the rural villages where

most aid projects are implemented.

9. Tadjbakhsh and Richmond, ‘Conclusion’.


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10. Donais, ‘Empowerment or Imposition’; Joseph ‘Owner-

ship is Over-Rated’; Chesterman, ‘Ownership in Theory

and in Practice’.

11. Power et al., ‘Operationalising Bottom-up Learning in

International NGOs’.

12. UNSC, ‘Rule of Law’; United Nations ‘Capstone Doctrine’;

Sending, ‘Why Peacebuilders Fail to Secure Ownership’.

13. Vig, ‘The Conflictual Promises of the UN Rule of Law

Agenda’.

14. Ibid., 153.

15. Ibid., 150.

16. Chesterman, ‘Ownership in Theory and in Practice’, 4.

17. Donais, ‘Empowerment or Imposition’, 7.

18. Surkhe, ‘UN Support for Peace-building’.

19. OECD, The Paris Declaration.

20. Porter, ‘NGOs and Poverty Reduction in a Globalizing

World’.

21. De Coning, ‘The Coherence Dilemma’, 97.

22. MacGinty and Richmond, ‘Myth or Reality’.

23. United Nations, ‘Delivering as One’.

24. Richmond, ‘The Dilemmas of Subcontracting the

Liberal Peace’.

25. Although only the case of Nepal is detailed here, our

conversations with academics and practitioners in many

other parts of the world suggest that the situation of

Nepal is far from unique in the aid world and parallels

are most striking with other small, poor, post-conflict

states.

26. Gobyn, ‘From War to Peace’; Sharma, ‘The Political

Economy of Civil War in Nepal’.

27. Gates and Miklian, ‘Strategic Revolutionary Phases’;

Bonino and Donini, ‘Aid and Violence’. Probably the

most relevant example is that of USAID’s marijuana

eradication programme in the Rolpa district in the early

1990s. The project was ‘successful’ in its immediate goal

but vastly increased inequality in the region through

large cash payouts to farmers, which exacerbated the

existing police corruption and military abuses that

birthed the Maoist movement. USAID admits their

project’s role in fanning the flames of war, but has not

fundamentally altered (or even reviewed) their project

implementation framework to reduce the likelihood of

similar outcomes from current projects and as of early

2010 had no plans to do so. Author interview, senior

USAID official.

28. DFID, ‘Development Dilemmas’.

29. Ibid., 11, encourages ‘work with local level and emerging

structures’ instead of the government as one answer for

both Nepal and South Asian post-conflict peace-

building in general.

30. Bonino and Donini, ‘Aid and Violence’, 7.

31. IDS, Foreign Aid and Development in Nepal; Khadka,

Foreign Aid, Poverty and Stagnation in Nepal; Khadka,

Foreign Aid and Foreign Policy; Singh, Foreign Aid,

Economic Growth and Politics in Nepal; Gurugharana,

‘Poverty Alleviation in Nepal’; Sharma, ‘Introduction’. A

recent high-level workshop concluded that ‘the changing

paradigm of development from welfare to rights-based,

supply to demand-oriented, urban-centric to rural-

based and paternalistic to inclusive governance have all

increased costs for this impoverished country’, while

benefits remain wanting. See Dahal, ‘Forward’.

32. Denksus, ‘The Fragility of Peace-building in Nepal’, 58.

33. Ibid., 59.

34. Suhrke, ‘UN Support’, 18.

35. Author interviews, Kathmandu, November 2010.

36. Suhrke, ‘UN Support’, 47.

37. For a concise overview, see Pradhan and Shrestha,

‘Ethnic and Caste Diversity’.

38. Tripathi, ‘Inclusion of Indigenous Tharu People in

UNDP Supported Village Development Program’.

39. For more on southern Nepal ethnic dynamics and Tharu

and Madhesi identity, see Miklian, ‘Nepal’s Terai’.

40. Asian Development Bank, ‘Nepal’.

41. Pradhan and Shrestha, ‘Ethnic and Caste Diversity’.

42. Gronow et al., ‘Nepal Swiss Community Forestry Project’;

Koponen and Sharma, ‘Unravelling the Politics of the Aid

Regime’.

43. http://www.ngofederation.org/index.php?option¼com_

content&view¼article&id¼13 [Accessed 17 June 2011].

44. Subedi, ‘Politics of Aid’.

45. Nirmal et al., ‘Maoist Conflict, Community Forestry and

Livelihoods’.

46. Ibid.

47. Author interviews, November 2009.

48. Also see Donini and Sharma, ‘Humanitarian Agenda

2015: Nepal’, 37–38 on this point.

49. Author interview, Department of Local Development,

Kathmandu, November 2009.

50. Donini and Sharma, ‘Humanitarian Agenda 2015:

Nepal’.

51. Author interviews, Mugu and Kathmandu, November

2009.

52. Donini, ‘Local Perceptions of Assistance to Afghanistan’.

53. Author interview, Kathmandu, November 2009.

54. Mihaly, Foreign Aid and Politics in Nepal.

55. Author interviews, Kathmandu, November 2010.

56. ‘Faith’ per se was a rare commodity in local government

even before the war, but now even the responsibility of

ownership has shifted in many communities, especially

those that also received assistance during the Maoists’

parallel government efforts.


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57. Ojha, ‘Institutional Arrangement for Provision of Basic

Goods’.

58. Author interviews, June and November 2009.

59. Countries include not only commonwealth stalwarts like

the UK and Australia but also more accessible countries

like Ukraine, Mongolia and China.

60. Siwakoti, ‘Foreign Intervention in Politics’.

61. Author interviews, NGO sector representatives,

Kathmandu, October 2009.

62. Author interview, USAID senior official, October 2009.

63. Author interview, former CA member, Mugu, October

2009.

64. OECD, The Paris Declaration, 38.

65. Interestingly, as of 2009 Chinese aid and development

projects in Nepal required Chinese employees to be paid

at the same rates as their in-country counterparts.

66. Author interview, local NGO heads (roundtable

discussion), October 2009.

67. Donini and Sharma, ‘Humanitarian Agenda 2015: Nepal’.

68. OECD, Development Co-operation Report 2009. Figures

available at: www.oecd.org/dac/stats/dac/dcrannex

[Accessed 12 December 2010].

69. Siwakoti, ‘Foreign Intervention’.

70. Author interview, NC leader, Kathmandu, October 2009.

71. Thanks to anonymous reviewer for many of the points of

this paragraph.

72. Heaton Shrestha, Celayne, ‘Let’s do a rethink. The

process of NGO-isation and de-NGO-isation of Nepal’s

civil society’. Kathmandu Post, 4 January 2010. Heaton

Shrestha, ‘It’s Time for a Re-Think’.

73. Anonymous reviewer makes a valid point as to how

severe the repercussions of critical comments are in

reality, but our impression from speaking with NGO

heads is more of a ‘why rock the boat’ mentality—the

potential of funding cuts combined with the belief that

the system will simply find a replacement instead of

engage in introspection are powerful forces to keep quiet.

74. Lister, ‘Power in Partnership?’; Duffield, Global Govern-

ance and the New Wars; Duffield, Development, Security

and Unending War.

75. Lister, ‘Power in Partnerships’.

76. Porter, ‘NGOs and Poverty’.

77. Sending, ‘Why Peacebuilders Fail to Secure Ownership’.

78. De Coning, ‘Coherence’.

79. Donini, ‘Local Perceptions’, 160.

80. Murphy, ‘International NGOs’.

81. Reimann, ‘Up to No Good?’.

82. OECD, Development Co-Operation Report.

83. Tadjbakhsh, ‘Liberal Peace and the Dialogue of the Deaf ’.

84. Ohanyan, ‘Policy Wars for Peace’; OECD, Paris

Declaration; OECD, Evaluation; OECD, Development.

85. Natsios, ‘NGOs and the UN System in Complex

Humanitarian Emergencies’.

86. Ohanyan, ‘Policy Wars’.

87. Donais, ‘Empowerment or Imposition?’, 7.

88. Divjak and Pugh, ‘The Political Economy of Corruption’.

89. USAID, ‘Mobilizing Nepali Youth’.

90. Author interview, senior USAID official, Kathmandu,

October 2009.

91. Pugh et al., ‘Conclusion’.

92. Author interview, senior NGO leader, Kathmandu, April

2010.

93. OECD, Evaluation, 12.

94. OECD, Development, 99.

95. Ohiorhenuan, ‘The Challenge of Economic Reform’.

96. Power et al., ‘Operationalising Bottom-Up Learning’.

97. Fisher and Zimina, ‘Just Wasting Our Time?’; Ziai,

‘Development’.

98. Liden, ‘Building Peace’.

99. Liden, ‘Peace, Self-Governance’.

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The perils of ‘going local’: liberal peace-building agendas in Nepal

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