The Legitimation Effects of Peacebuilding and Development Interventions—Strengthening Land Registration in Northern Uganda

Introduction

Legitimate authority—or the extent to which those that are in a position of authority are accepted by those they govern—has become an important concern of the international peacebuilding and development community. Legitimate authority is expected to enable the exercise of power through consent rather than coercion (OECD, 2010, p. 7). Voluntary compliance with leadership's decisions and regulations (even those not liked by those that are governed) is expected to reduce the costs of governance and makes services provision easier and more effective. Poor legitimacy, on the other hand, deprives the state of people's support, prohibits the state from acting (Bellina et al., 2009), and may predisposes it to revert to repression (Brinkerhoff et al., 2012). A loss of legitimacy is considered a major explanation for state failure and violent conflict (Goldstone, 2008; Rotberg, 2003).

(Re-)establishing legitimate state authority has thus become a priority of multilateral statebuilding and peacebuilding interventions in fragile and conflict-affected settings. This is notably to be achieved through strengthening the state's capacity to provide services (Lemay-Hébert & Mathieu, 2014; McLoughlin, 2014). Also, many international NGOs consider that they have a role to play in enhancing the legitimacy of local state and nonstate authorities. Some include nurturing legitimate authority as an explicit ambition of their peacebuilding and development programs. Others expect that (re-)establishing legitimate authorities helps assure aid effectiveness and sees contributions to peace and development merely as positive side-effects.

Organizations working at the interface of peacebuilding and development for long assumed that enhancing the state's potential to provide citizens with security, development, rule of law, participation, and accountability would result in better appreciation of that state (OECD, 2010). However, this relationship between service provision and legitimacy is not self-evident (Brinkerhoff et al., 2012). Although the provision of services may enhance the state's “output” legitimacy, it may also be seen to enhance state control, to pacify citizens, to prioritize certain groups, or to consolidate patronage (see McLoughlin, 2014). Moreover, the mechanisms at play are ambiguous (Bellina et al., 2009; Mallett et al., 2015). For instance, positive perceptions of the actions of one civil servant or agency do not necessarily extrapolate to the legitimacy of government as a whole (Brinkerhoff et al., 2012). State legitimacy tends to depend on subjective assessments and on context-specific expectations of authority. Especially in conflict-affected settings, there tends to be disagreement about whose rule to accept and how to evaluate the performance of rulers (Gippert, 2016; von Billerbeck & Gippert 2017).

Even less clear is how interventions by peacebuilding and development organizations to enhance the performance of public institutions actually impinge on legitimation practices, let alone how interveners can strategize on this (McLoughlin, 2014; Teskey et al., 2012). This paper engages with this latter puzzle. It presents the findings of a 2019-research project on interventions by peacebuilding and development organizations to enhance local land governance capacity in the Acholi and Teso subregions in Northern Uganda. The choice for analyzing land-related interventions was informed by our experience that issues of legitimacy strongly manifest themselves around land governance and its reform (Kobusingye, 2018; Maiyo, 2018; Van Leeuwen, 2017). How local state authorities in sub-Saharan Africa deal with land issues has important consequences for their appreciation and acceptance among citizens (Lund & Boone, 2013). Through land-governance practices, authorities may demonstrate their goodwill and capacities in service delivery, or instead feed distrust, perceptions of structural (ethnic) bias by the state, and even conflict.

Inspired by literature on the “grounded” (Clements, 2014), context-specific nature of legitimacy, the project explored prevailing dynamics and practices of legitimation of state and customary authorities in Northern Uganda, and how government reforms and interventions by international peacebuilding and development organizations affected these. The aim was also to explore how interveners may better take legitimacy into account. Ethnographic fieldwork and a series of workshops with practitioners demonstrated how peacebuilding and development interventions do not just enhance the legitimacy of particular authorities. Instead, our research brings out how interventions feed into competition for legitimacy between different stakeholders: particularly not only between state and customary authorities but also between men and women, and between state and development organizations themselves. Many of these impacts are unintentional and unforeseen. The conclusion thus makes the case for more sensitivity to how peacebuilding and development interventions play into competition for legitimacy and ends with some questions that might help interveners to assess such effects.

Analysing Legitimation Practices and Intervention

Normative understandings of legitimacy tend to describe legitimacy as an attribute of public institutions (Suddaby et al., 2017), which derives from some generic or universal “sources” (see McCullough, 2015). Legitimacy of public institutions is then seen to result from, for instance, their responsiveness to citizen concerns (“input legitimacy”), how decisions are taken (“throughput legitimacy”), and achievement of goals in line with citizen interests (“output legitimacy”) (Schmidt, 2013). In contrast, our analysis starts from an empirical, or “grounded” (Clements, 2014) understanding of legitimacy, which emphasizes its context-specific and dynamic nature. It considers legitimacy as an outcome of a process of legitimation that evolves in the daily interaction between citizens and their authorities (see e.g., Beetham, 2013; Duyvesteyn, 2017; Gilley, 2006; Roos & Lidström, 2014). From such an understanding, legitimacy should be studied inductively, by exploring how in a particular setting the acceptance of authority is influenced by locally evolving values, beliefs, and experiences with the practice of authority; and is embedded in particular history and institutional legacies (e.g., Lamb, 2014). Such an understanding highlights the constructed nature of legitimacy and the importance of perceptions. “Sources” of legitimacy are only effective to the extent that relevant constituencies consider them as such (Bellina et al., 2009). For instance, whether services provision contributes to state legitimacy may depend on prevailing expectations of what the state should provide, on subjective assessments of the fairness of services provision, or on whether people attribute the benefits they experience to the state (McLoughlin, 2014). How legitimacy is evaluated also depends on historically grown understandings of leadership and statehood, of rights and obligations of citizens and authorities toward each other, and of authorities’ legitimate reach of power, including the use of violence (Hansen & Stepputat, 2001; Hirblinger, 2015). Legitimacy judgments may rapidly change through particular events, or through citizens’ daily experiences with those in power. For instance, effective service delivery, or democratization of institutions does not automatically coincide with higher appreciation: citizens may develop new or incrementally higher expectations of their authorities (McLoughlin, 2014).

Legitimacy is relational, and both authorities and citizens are involved in its ongoing reformulation and reassessment. People's perceptions of legitimacy may result from rationales provided by powerholders themselves, while powerholders may strategically conform to changing expectations. Legitimacy is not only about discourse but also about practice. In addition to people's normative assessments of their authorities, what matters is empirical legitimacy: the extent to which people act in accordance with their assessments of their leaders and so demonstrate consent (Beetham, 2013). Furthermore, if legitimacy is in the eyes of the beholder, legitimacy assessments might substantially differ between citizens and their authorities, or the international development community (Gippert, 2016; Lister, 2003). Although citizens may have ideas about the meanings of legitimacy that differ from those of their leaders, they may also differ amongst themselves in how they assess their leaders (see Lamb, 2014). This might particularly be the case in societies divided by violent conflict.

The constructed nature of legitimacy implies that legitimacy might be influenced through the so-called practices of (de)legitimation, which we understand as more or less deliberate attempts to conform to, or change legitimacy beliefs and assessments (Bexell, 2014; Tallberg & Zürn, 2019). Practices of (de)legitimation have been particularly explored in International Relations literature, which for instance analyses the deliberate practices in global governance of naming and shaming; or efforts of donors to discipline recipient states to conform to international standards of human rights and accountability (Bäckstrand & Söderbaum, 2018; Bellina et al., 2009; Vaara & Tienari, 2008). Likewise, institutional and management scholars discuss ways of repairing “legitimacy gaps.” These include not only strategies to improve performance but also efforts to influence public perceptions and expectations, propagation of certain values, or interpretation of an institutions’ activities and identity (Bridwell-Mitchell & Mezias, 2012; Suchman, 1995). As mentioned above, statebuilding literature particularly considers how legitimation is a matter of supporting democratization and enhancing the capacity of the state to deliver basic goods and services, elections, and meeting the basic needs of citizens (Dagher, 2018; Lemay-Hébert & Mathieu, 2014).

How external interventions to strengthen local authorities may impact local legitimation practices has not yet been extensively studied; let alone how interveners may strategically engage with local legitimation practices (see McLoughlin, 2014; Teskey et al., 2012). Some insights are provided by work on conflict sensitivity (e.g., Wallace, 2011). This literature underscores that development assistance—notably institutional strengthening (Eickhoff & Mueller, 2017)—may have legitimation effects. It may, for instance, endorse violent or unjust governments, leaders, or institutions. It may also uplift the role and standing of peace-minded individuals and organizations, and nurture legitimate practices of governance, including transparency, participation, and accountability. An important lesson from this literature is that interventions may have unintended consequences for legitimacy, which may nonetheless affect their acceptance, sustainability, and contribution to building peace. As we will see in the below case study, interveners might deliberately engage in acts of (de-)legitimation, for instance by prioritizing certain authorities, propagating certain criteria for assessing legitimacy, or endorsing efforts by different public authorities to convince people of their legitimacy. Yet, frequently their engagement has unintended legitimation and delegitimation effects, and our case study underscores the important consequences of these.

The paper particularly contributes to the literature by highlighting how interventions shift the relative legitimacy of different authorities. Literature on legitimacy tends to focus on the dyad of citizens and their leaders, and relations of legitimacy developing between these two groups of actors. However, in our research, we are inspired by writings from political anthropology on institutional multiplicity. Particularly in fragile and conflict-affected settings, diverse state and nonstate institutions play complementary and sometimes parallel roles in governing the lives of citizens (Di John, 2008; Von Benda-Beckmann, 2008). Legitimacy is often contested among those different authorities. Each of them brings along with their own ideas about legitimate norms, rules, and practices of governance, and by their performance try to convince citizens of their legitimacy, and delegitimize others (Hagmann & Péclard, 2010). In this institutional competition, citizens play a vital role in endorsing certain norms, practices, and institutions, thereby legitimizing them (Von Benda-Beckmann, 2008). Such institutional multiplicity and competition and how it reallocates authority between diverse (non)state authorities have particularly been studied around land governance in sub-Saharan Africa (Hagmann & Péclard, 2010; Lund & Boone, 2013). This institutional competition is also a key dynamic of local legitimation practices in Northern Uganda. Awareness of contestation for legitimacy among different state and nonstate authorities helps to better understand the legitimation effects of peacebuilding and development interventions. As we show in the case study, interventions not only enhance the legitimacy of certain authorities but also impact struggles for legitimacy between authorities, by changing their relative legitimacy.

Support to Land Certification and Legitimacy Struggles in Northern Uganda

Establishing legitimate land governance constitutes a key challenge for post-conflict peacebuilding and development in northern Uganda. In the Acholi and Teso regions, state legitimacy is contested and was an important factor in the insurgency of the Lord's Resistance Army (see Saito & Burke, 2016). Weak governance structures, tensions between customary and statutory authorities and the rules they apply, as well as the legacy of a North-South divide originating in colonial times (see Allen & Vlassenroot, 2010; Kandel, 2016), create a situation in which state and nonstate authorities compete for authority and legitimacy. The complexity of “legitimacy” possibly most strongly manifests itself around the Ugandan land governance system and government attempts to reform it. Many rural dwellers feel insecure about their land rights, due to long-term war-related displacement and conflicting claims on land, large-scale land concessions by the government, and lack of clarity about the status of customary tenure (Mabikke, 2011). This leaves space for both customary and state authorities to compete with each other about who is in charge of land governance and what rules apply, and to search for support for their claims amongst local landowners (see Kobusingye, 2018).

The extent to which the Ugandan state and its bureaucracy have managed to reduce tenure insecurity is questionable. State presence, including effective institutional structures for land administration, is limited in these regions due to legacies of violent conflict, and their peripheral location. Land dwellers, therefore, incur high costs to obtain titles. Conversely, people have limited confidence in statutory land governing institutions, which are believed to be involved in irregular land acquisitions by larger commercial landowners, investors, political elites, or particular communities. Many people in the Acholi region believe the war and related displacement created conditions for state institutions and political elites to appropriate their land (Kobusingye, 2018). Many residents in Teso region, who practice mixed farming, believe the same about the migration of neighboring pastoralist communities into their ancestral lands (Muchunguzi, 2013).

Customary institutions claim they may better protect local land than state actors, as they are closer to local people than the state, have knowledge of the local context, and conform to local norms. Yet, their actual capacities have reduced. In Acholi, past settlement patterns and land ownership were organized along with clan structures, and clan leaders and family elders had important roles in granting user rights to families, and resolving disputes. Yet, war-related displacement and social disintegration have reduced the involvement of clan leaders in land administration and increased commoditization of land and individualization of land ownership. Meanwhile, the legitimacy of clan leaders has declined as a result of unclear lines of succession, corruption, and irregular land sales under their authority. It is precisely for such reasons that statutory land administrators claim that they can do a better job. Similarly, in Teso, the centrality of clan structures has gradually decreased in importance over time. Clans in Teso are even less consolidated than in Acholi and are further subdivided into numerous subclans with overlapping and contested claims of autonomy, hierarchy, and authority. Consequently, some clans only consist of a few families. Nonetheless, in both settings, there is still a significant local endorsement of customary leadership, particularly when clan leaders are younger, well-educated, and behave morally.

Since 1995, the Ugandan government has implemented a series of important land reforms to address tenure insecurity and the so-called “historical injustices” in the land sector. These reforms notably promote the formalization of tenure, decentralization of land administration, and the legal recognition of customary tenure as a category of ownership. They enable the acquisition of collective family or individual Certificates of Customary Ownership (CCOs) for land under customary tenure, and a simplified procedure for acquiring land titles; both facilitated through decentralized government bodies, the so-called “Local Councils” or LCs. Decentralization also recognizes customary authorities and their role in (collectively) managing land and dispute resolution; while customary leaders can be elected as members into the Local Councils. Yet, the implementation of the reforms has been limited. The amount of land titles given out by these decentralized bodies remained low, as few people could afford the costs of the procedure (which still included detailed surveying and/or demarcation of the land), or feared potential implications, such as taxation (see e.g., Van Leeuwen, 2014; 2017). The number of CCOs given out was even more limited. After a few inconclusive pilots around the year 2000, they were never systematically propagated by the state and were at times discredited by state officials (see LEMU, 2008). Moreover, for the decentralized land administration, the provision of titles was more lucrative (Van Leeuwen, 2014). It should also be noticed that the reforms effectively restrict customary arrangements: customary authorities need to conform to state legislation; while rather than customary authorities, the statutory Local Councils administer the CCOs.

Over the last few years, a number of peacebuilding and development organizations have engaged in programs to enhance local capacities for land services provision, notably the acknowledgment of customary land ownership. In this paper, we explore the experiences of two of such organizations: the Dutch NGO ZOA that operates in Acholi subregion, and whose mandate ranges from relief and peacebuilding to land rights and food security; and the German development organization GIZ that works in Teso subregion, which specializes in rural development, reconstruction and peacebuilding, and local governance and civil society. The ambitions of their programs were two-fold: enhancing local tenure security to reduce hunger and poverty, and help resolve conflict and contribute to long-term stability; and building state administrative capacities and so reestablish local administration in Northern Uganda.

Legitimation Practices in Settings of Institutional Multiplicity

Empirical findings bring out diverse ways in which interventions in the field of land governance both enhance and decrease the legitimacy of local state and nonstate authorities. Interviews and workshops identified three particular dynamics that we like to highlight. First, interventions directly helped establish new responsibilities for certain leaders and institutions and enabled them to fulfill these satisfactorily through institutional strengthening. Interventions notably enabled state institutions’ functioning and execution of certain tasks, through capacity-building, or providing offices, transport, and finances. Support for local land registration increased the institutional and implementing capacity of local government, thereby enhancing “output legitimacy”. But support also contributed to the presence and visibility of the state and to people's perception that the state is “closer to us”. This did not necessarily result in more state legitimacy. Instead, this resulted in fears for increasing state control and taxation among some interviewees. Second, interventions also promoted (and discouraged) certain methods and practices of land governance and thereby enhanced “input” and “throughput” legitimacy; notably by strengthening accountable and inclusive governance. Our findings illustrate, for instance, how interventions advanced inclusion of women both in land governance institutions and in the certificates. Third, interventions played a role in feeding local debate on norms, expectations, and conventions of public authority, and on how their legitimacy is to be assessed. For instance, interveners promoted particular notions of what “good” land governance looks like. A grounded understanding of legitimacy that focusses on developing perceptions and appreciation of the performance of local public authorities, helped to bring out these dynamics of legitimation.

Yet, institutional strengthening, the promotion of certain land governing practices and the propagation of criteria for legitimacy, did not just enhance the legitimacy of specific authorities. These interventions also fed into the institutional competition and played into legitimacy struggles between and among state and nonstate authorities, and even the intervening organizations themselves. First, institutional strengthening contributed to a shift in the division of roles and responsibilities for land governance. Fieldwork in Acholi and Teso shows how, by working primarily with statutory structures or establishing their own dispute resolution structures and ignoring existing ones, interveners decreased the responsibilities and legitimacy of customary land administration. This resonated with ongoing practices of the state in disqualifying customary land governance (see Van Leeuwen, 2017). Second, interventions did not just normalize certain practices of governance, but effectively favored certain institutions over others. During land registration, for instance, “ownership” was limited to immediate family members only, thereby excluding extended family and clan leadership, thus diminishing their oversight roles in land allocation. Likewise, some of the changes in methods (digital tools) and rationale of land governance (the bureaucratization of land administration) promoted through intervention effectively enhanced state authority. Third, interveners purposefully or unconsciously propagated certain norms of (gender)equality and the need for youth inclusion in managing family land that differed from local or customary notions. Thereby they undercut the legitimacy of customary institutions and propagated the state as principal agent in land governance (e.g., Hirblinger, 2015; Van Leeuwen, 2014, 2017). Alternatively, in several instances, the engagement of interveners resulted in them gaining legitimacy at the cost of state institutions.

Many of these reconfigurations in the relative legitimacy of different institutions were unintentional. While interveners might have had the ambition of strengthening both state and customary institutions, interventions effectively endorsed state control of land governance. They ratified the notion that in the end, the (local) state should be responsible for land tenure administration, and not customary authorities; and that household heads should be in charge of their lands rather than clan leaders. They normalized a bureaucratization of land governance, and inclusion of citizens into the “system of the state,” hence making not only land but also the citizens residing on the land “legible” to the state through the capture of personal information and data. Likewise, we observed instances of how interveners unwittingly increased their own legitimacy at the cost of that of the local state. This was the case when credits for services provision were attributed to interveners, even if state representatives had played an important role in their realization (cf. McLoughlin, 2014). This resulted, for example, from the use of interveners’ logos and project vehicles. In some instances, interventions propelled a shift in legitimacy that was unforeseen or even contrary to their intentions. Where the CCOs reaffirmed the notion that family heads should be in charge of the land, this reduced the opportunities for sons and daughters to be included in land governance or precluded the inclusion of female relatives on certificates for family land. Furthermore, interventions may be opportunistically appropriated as part of struggles for legitimacy. In some of the communities where the projects were implemented, political leaders appeared to take credit for the CCO projects, in the hope of gaining votes, at the expense of their counterparts from communities or administrative regions outside the project areas.

Conclusion

How peacebuilding and development interventions precisely impinge on local legitimation practices remains underexplored. In this paper, from a “grounded” understanding of legitimacy, and inspired by literature on conflict sensitivity, we analyzed how this worked out in programs to strengthen local land registration in conflict-affected Northern Uganda. In a situation where legitimacy is contested among different state and nonstate authorities, interventions not only just enhance the legitimacy of certain authorities but also unintentionally change their relative legitimacy.

These findings provide a rather discomforting answer to the question of how peacebuilding and development interventions can deliberately impact the legitimacy of land governing institutions: in practice, this may be very difficult, due to the limited predictability of the outcomes of legitimacy struggles. At the very least, however, the findings underscore the urgency for intervening organizations to become more sensitive to the actual (de)legitimation effects of their interventions, and how their interventions feed into the relative legitimacy of different local institutions. To nurture such sensitivity, at the start of programs, interveners should better document their legitimacy assessments, and their rationales for working with certain actors (and their exclusion of others), and for conforming to certain conventions, (customary) norms, and values, or not; and think through how their choices might create tensions. Documenting this at the start enables reflection throughout the project cycle on choices made, helps monitor legitimation effects, and prevents unintended outcomes. In a series of workshops that we organized as part of the research project, in discussion with peacebuilding and development practitioners, we arrived at a series of questions that might be helpful for such an assessment (see Annex to this paper). Hopefully, such a more systematic collection of experiences will also result in more realistic expectations of the contributions of peacebuilding and development programs to (re)establishing legitimate authority.