The protection of children in different contexts has a long history and there are many concepts of “childhood”, “violence” and “authority” - neither of them possible to be summarized under one unifying notion. Many development actors that promote child protection base their efforts on “western” narratives and norms of childhood assuming their validity in all context of their implementation - thereby neglecting local concepts. The dynamics and tensions between these local and global notions and their meanings in different settings, as well as how these factors affect the production and representation of success and failure of child rights policy, request renewed attention in multi-layered arenas. Discursive processes actively contribute to this differing representation and, especially local ones, are still not being focused on enough. In local contexts child protection measures are often considered “corrupting western concepts” that lead children to misbehave, condemn practices that are not considered “violent” but rather as disciplining and that contest traditional authority, by organisations appointing children a large and in society uncommon participatory role. Many outcomes of positively meant intervention are unpredictable and bring about situations that do not work with “input/output”-agendas of development organizations. Often situations arise that bring about new conflicts and tensions within frameworks of ambitious intervention. The possibility of an alteration of forms of governance through the application and focus on child protection is connected to the issues of power relations and how the exercise of power may transform herein. The local normative orders child protection rights are embedded in within different societies and how these are intertwined with global networks of power and meaning that go beyond this locality, are in this regard to be equally considered. Anthropology of development and childhood needs to be relocated within international development practice to unpack overlooked conflicting notions of concepts and contradicting realities.
