Abstract (eng)
This thesis aims at deconstructing the ownership discourse as part of the current development discourse on the basis of a policy document analysis. Ownership is an approach in develop-ment politics which intends to transfer responsibility and control over development actions and goals to the receiving country. The aim of deconstructing the ownership discourse emerges from the criticism of official development assistance. Additionally, ownership implies a debate on a shift in the balance of power between donors and receivers of development assistance.
The research question of the configuration of ownership in international development policy and of the power politics of the discourse are elaborated in the following steps: First, I will determine the different meanings and problems of the concept of ownership. For this, current research and analysis on ownership and on related approaches – first and foremost partnership and participation – are used. The threads of the discursive field and the different readings of ownership as a tool, principle, process or a goal of development cooperation form the basis for the deconstruction of the discourse. They provide information about the theoretical as-sumptions on which the ownership discourse is based on and illustrate the complexity due to the different perspectives on the concept of development policy.
The epistemology of the thesis is based on a post-structuralist critique of the eurocentric, uni-versalistic approach of western social sciences. The discourse theory of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe is the methodological basis for addressing my research question. Postcolonial perspectives on development and development cooperation are the main theoretical back-ground of the thesis. On the basis of standard works such as Dispesh Chakrabarty’s "Provin-cializing Europe," Edward W. Said's "Orientalism" and James Ferguson's "The Anti-Politics Machine" and other postcolonial texts, I will develop categories for the deconstruction of the ownership discourse. Perspectives of the political economy on development cooperation help balance the historical focus of the postcolonial approach.
To examine the history of the emergence of ownership and its concrete design in the devel-opment discourse, I will analyse key policy documents of the World Bank and the OECD Development Assistance Committee. The analysis starts in the first United Nations Develop-ment Decade in the 1960s and ends with the last document of the Aid Effectiveness Agenda from 2011. Finally, the findings of the document analysis are discussed based on categories such as the understanding of development, of state and governance and of the development actors and their discursive roles. A striking conclusion of my thesis is that the problems and solutions for development are still coined by the dominant donor agencies. Recipient countries are limited in their political agency due to precise requirements for official management and the quality of national development strategies and systems. In the hegemonic development paradigm, ownership is primarily an instrument of donor agencies to make their reforms within the framework of development cooperation more efficient. Nevertheless, there are op-portunities for recipient countries to expand their control over development actions and objec-tives in the context of the ownership principle.