‘Bottom up’ Statebuilding and Liberal Paradoxes

This paper offers an empirically grounded perspective on the dynamics and impacts of internationally supported local reconstruction programs on Somali society. Somalia is a context in which top-down approaches have repeatedly failed, while sub-national and local actors and institutions have demonstrated significant capacity to craft alternative governance arrangements. International actors have in recent years shown increasing interest in engaging such local governance arrangements. Thereby Somalia is not only an exemplary case with regards to failures of intervention, but is also at the forefront of the testing of new intervention approaches working upon and through governance beyond the state. This paper explores the agendas that underpin these emerging shifts and the accompanying dynamics and effects within local settings. The case for this analysis is the Community Driven Reconstruction and Development (CDRD) program, which has been rolled out across Puntland, Somaliland and south-central Somalia, with the aim of “supporting (…) hybrid governance” (CDRD concept note 2011) as a bottom up means of stabilization and peacebuilding. The chapter reviews how the CDRD framework draws on a progress narrative of locally attuned and emancipatory forms of engagements associated with ‘hybridity’. The analysis then moves on to examine the implementation of CDRD in practice. Through this analysis the chapter highlights a number of contradictions associated with interveners’ claims regarding sensitivity to local context and preferences, while their practices follow logics of seeking to re-engineer the local. This conveys an uncomfortable compromise based on the assumption that local agency and politics are obstacles to liberal state-based peace but pragmatically accepting 'good enough' outcomes. The paper connects this discussion with an analysis of how these interventions into local institutional spaces combined with the supply of resources become key elements in reconfiguring local and regional socio-political geographies and institutions.