Local knowledge in international intervention

Objectives:

International interventions are common in today's world. States, intergovernmental organizations and non-state actors routinely engage in a wide range of activities - development aid, disaster relief, humanitarian assistance, and peace operations - that aim to change political, economic and/or social conditions in sovereign states other than their own. The effectiveness of these interventions depends crucially on how well intervening actors understand local realities, perspectives, and priorities.

Yet while there is near universal agreement among scholars and practitioners about the importance of local knowledge in peacebuilding - and in other international interventions - there is no consensus on what local knowledge is, much less how best to access it. In practice, moreover, intervenors not only struggle to integrate local knowledge in their decision-making but also face incentives not to do so. In short, while local knowledge is vital to the success of international interventions, it is notoriously difficult for outsiders to acquire and intervenors are inconsistent in whether, how and why they seek to access it.

The essential task of this project is to theorize and empirically study the mechanisms by which international interveners can gain local knowledge about the societies in which they operate.

The Peacebuilding and Local Knowledge Network (PLKN) brings together a diverse group of scholars and practitioners to foster more informed public discussions about local peacebuilding interventions, with the aim of contributing evidence-based recommendations to influence the development of more effective and responsible local peacebuilding policies and practices.

Project team:

Sarah von Billerbeck, The University of Reading

Katharina Coleman, The University of British Columbia

Steffen Eckhard, Universität Konstanz

Benjamin Zyla, University of Ottawa

Funding:

The Peacebuilding and Local Knowledge Network (PLKN) is funded by the Canadian Research foundation SSHRC for a period of three years

Related publications:

Eckhard, S. (2020). Bridging the citizen gap: Bureaucratic representation and knowledge linkage in (international) public administration. Governance, online first. doi:doi:10.1111/gove.12494

Eckhard, S. (2019). Comparing how peace operations enable or restrict the influence of national staff: Contestation from within? Cooperation and Conflict, 54(4), 488–505. doi:10.1177/0010836718815528

Eckhard, S. (2014). Bureaucratic Representation and Ethnic Bureaucratic Drift: A Case Study of United Nations Minority Policy Implementation in Kosovo. American Review of Public Administration, 44(5), 600-621.