Mission creep, insufficient accountability and limited success of humanitarian interventions in the 1990s have caused international donors and recipient states to call for local ownership of institutional reform and governance. In practice, this has frequently been equated with involving a limited number of non-state actors such as NGOs as “owners” of the externally-driven state-building process.
This raises the question which norms are pursued in state-building interventions as reflected in mission mandates and diffused into post-conflict domestic institutional and legal frameworks.
Based on a comparative analysis of state-building missions in fragile states and starting from the assumption that participation in governance implies a duty to meet standards of governance, such as human rights and providing effective structures of contestation and transparency, this paper sheds light on the involvement of NGOs in setting and applying these norms when they contribute to governance in the context of fragile states.
