The difference between policy diffusion and ownership: women, peace and security in Ethiopia and Kenya

Are national action plans (NAPs) on women, peace and security (WPS) a good example of policy diffusion? Regardless of the WPS's strong roots in the African continent, WPS has become a global policy agenda with international norms, language and appropriate actions. Through empirical examples in Ethiopia and Kenya, this study interrogates the relationship between the scholarly notions of policy diffusion and ownership. The paper examines whether national processes of NAP development yield locally relevant policies that diverse state and civil society actors draw on. Ethiopia and Kenya present different circumstances for engaging with the WPS agenda and are in different stages of working with NAPs. Our study indicates three major obstacles for NAPs as means to foster WPS policy ownership in Ethiopia and Kenya: their institutional set-up, inherently top-down processes and reliance on donor and external funding. The NAP processes are heavily led by the cooperation between UN Women and the central government in both cases, with varying levels of non-state participation throughout the policy life cycle. Not only are NAPs often donor-driven, the governments tend to not allocate funding for implementing NAPs and rather use the document for fundraising. Yet, feminist and civil society organizations implement the WPS agenda on the ground and beyond the scope of NAPs. Therefore, working with NAPs can create parallel structures for WPS implementation: formal and informal ones. While the paper reveals opportunities for more participatory and bottom-up policy processes, the non-state actors also leverage NAPs in contexts where such democratic processes have not taken place or are not possible. These dynamics show that policy diffusion is not always accompanied by taking ownership; and vice versa, the local ownership of WPS is not necessarily informed by policy documents.