‘The idea of progressing from CBMs (confidence-building measures) to OBMs (ownership-building measures) is to revert the problem-solving ambit back into the hands of the primary stakeholders, viz. the 20 million or so people living across the breadth of the divided State.’ Thus wrote Tanveer Ahmed on 19 April this year in The Rising Kashmir.
The literature on OBMs, ownership-building measures, is as yet in its infancy. In order to consider further the question of ownership, the author had to consult some of the literature on measuring performance in capacity building interventions. Ownership, Gene Ogiogio writes, ‘can be described as the extent to which a country, an organization or a group of stakeholders has unrestricted influence or control over a resource, an activity, process or an output. Unless a capacity-building process is owned by its stakeholders, it is not likely to be sustainable. Ownership and sustainability are therefore two sides of the same coin.’ Ownership in capacity building interventions centres around three main issues: 1) Ownership of the financial resources with which capacity is built. 2) Ownership of the capacity (human skills and institutions) that generate policies and programs for development. 3) Ownership of the policies and programs that result from the skills and institutions used (capacity). In measuring the level of local ownership in capacity building, it is desirable to take all components of the ownership factor into consideration. ‘In summary’, Ogogio writes, ‘ownership in capacity building measures ownership of the financial resources through which interventions are made, ownership of the skills and institutions resulting from the interventions, and ownership of the policies and programs that result from the capacity building interventions. If skills, institutions, policies and programs are not owned locally after interventions in capacity building, then such intervention is still far from successful.’
The first and fundamental innovation in moving from a CBM-based to an OBM-based future for Kashmir is to develop a mechanism whereby the genesis, planning and implementation of future measures for peace rests with the people of the divided Kashmir. Not only do they need to understand and own the confidence-building measures for their future sustainability; they need to plan and own that which is likely to be of greatest benefit to themselves. Others can, and do, imagine these things for them. This contribution imagines these things on behalf of those who at present have no voice. But the important thing for the future is to imagine in what way the people themselves might have a voice and a say in which ownership-building measures will bring about the greatest benefit to themselves in the shortest possible timeframe.
At the outset, such a future seems to have little likelihood of being achievable because of the close attention of the two proximate states with the greatest interest in the security and sovereignty aspects of Kashmir’s future. Here, however, it is possible to argue that India and Pakistan have every reason to concentrate on the issues of security and sovereignty and favour a detailed solution to the Kashmir problem that delegates as much of the non-security related responsibilities as possible to the local level – at the very least, this serves to divert the focus away from the intractable international politics of peace-making with the high stakes on failure or success.
The former Prime Minister of Azad Kashmir has suggested among his twelve CBMs the setting up of a Joint Pakistan-India-Kashmir Development Fund. This is indeed desirable, but requires a prior measure in order to secure the effectiveness of this development fund or any aid received from abroad. Development funding should be conditional on the nature of the NGOs or other local stakeholders planning the CBMs or carrying out the identified tasks within Kashmir. The highest priority, it is suggested here, is to identify the local NGOs or stakeholders who alone can propose ownership-building measures which will bring about the greatest benefit to all Kashmiris in the shortest possible timeframe. Caution is needed and attention needs to be paid to the Bosnian example. There, as Roberto Belloni argues, ‘instead of providing incentives for inter-ethnic cooperation, foreign monies and market-oriented reforms gave further opportunities to ethnic elites to enrich themselves...’ Even the strategy of direct funding of NGOs had little success. Bosnian NGOs ended up depending too much on foreign funding and therefore tended to reflect the priorities of their funders rather than articulating and addressing the views of local communities. Sectarian organizations, Belloni writes, ‘perpetuate the divisions within society and can contribute to political polarization and continuing confrontation between groups. Although these divisions complicate the tasks of international agencies, they do not make it impossible, but it requires a judicious assessment of the local reality and careful support to those groups which strive to promote civic politics instead of ethnic politics, and social and political spaces of dialogue instead of ethnic or national segregation.’
The US Ambassador to India placed the ‘strengthen[ing of] civil society by making it easier for NGOs to operate’ last in his list of 20 CBMs in 2009. With the amendment to ‘the strengthening of civil society by making it easier for NGOs to operate across the LoC’ it is suggested that this should be the first and most important CBM – because it is the only one which will lead predictably to an OBM-based future for Kashmir, whereby the genesis, planning and implementation of future measures for peace rests with the people of the divided Kashmir. The priority is to strengthen civil society in the two parts of divided Kashmir by empowering NGOs which are genuinely pluralistic bodies in all senses of the term – in their political origins, and in their ethnic, religious and linguistic composition. They may not exist at present, or only in embryonic form. The task of international stakeholders is to bring them about.
At a conference in April this year, the OSCE affirmed:
Non-military confidence-building measures (CBMs), employed alone or alongside other rehabilitation and reconciliation instruments, can be effective tools to reduce tensions, guard against a relapse to further conflict/crisis and build trust between the sides to the conflict/crisis, including as part of stabilization and peace-building efforts. However, their success and sustainability depend on the genuine will of the sides to employ them. Local ownership is essential. Nevertheless, the international community has an important supporting role: to convince the sides of the utility of CBMs, to assist in the development and implementation of balanced and effective CBMs; and, to act as a third party if/when/where appropriate.
It is proposed that non-military CBMs/OBMs should be evaluated for their feasibility and the processes whereby they might be implemented. A good model for such work is the briefing on trade across the LoC published by Conciliation Resources in partnership with the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies (New Delhi) and the Pakistan Institute of Legislative Reform and Transparency (Islamabad): the briefing, entitled Intra Kashmir Trade, was published in January 2011.
