Local ownership — genuine community control over development priorities and resources — is the precondition for sustainability and the condition most consistently undermined by external development funding.
What Local Ownership Actually Requires
Local ownership — the condition in which communities have genuine control over the development priorities they pursue, the interventions they implement, and the resources they manage — is universally described as a development objective in the policy frameworks of most major development institutions. It is also the condition most consistently undermined by the operational practices of those same institutions. The programme that tells communities what they will receive, sets the implementation standards they will meet, and maintains accountability to external funders rather than to community members, has not created local ownership — it has created the language of local ownership around a programme that remains externally controlled.
The Dependency Trap
The dependency trap in development — the condition in which communities lose the capacity for self-directed development action because external resources have substituted for local institutional development rather than supporting it — is the opposite of local ownership. The community that has received extensive external support for its health services without building the institutional capacity to manage health services has become more dependent on external support, not less. The path to local ownership runs through the sometimes slower, sometimes more expensive process of building local institutional capacity to manage functions that external support could provide more quickly and visibly in the short term.
Local ownership is built by giving communities genuine control and genuine resources, and then getting out of the way. The development institution that maintains control while calling it partnership has not built local ownership — it has built a managed dependency with better vocabulary.
Discussion