Introduction

Just before the West Africa Ebola outbreak reached Sierra Leone, the United Nations Secretary General, Ban Ki-Moon, visited the country, praising what he called ‘enormous strides towards peace, stability and long-term development, [calling Sierra Leone] one of the world's most successful cases of post-conflict recovery, peacekeeping and peacebuilding’. The official UN version of the last decade in Sierra Leone stands in stark contrast not only to the obvious fragility of the country exposed by the Ebola outbreak and the devastating toll it has taken in terms of lives and opportunities lost but also with regard to the situation felt on the ground prior to the outbreak. In its operational plan for 2011–16, updated in 2012, the Department for International Development (DFID) spells out the context of a weak state in a fragile region – a country that remains one of the poorest in the world, near the bottom of the UN's Human Development Index, and unlikely to meet any of the Millennium Development Goals before 2015. It is therefore in the light of this understanding of the situation on the ground that we should also see that the ‘local peacebuilding’ initiatives have either been established by the international community or received support from such sources to protect and safeguard what is still a fragile peace.

Even, however, if most but not all funding for peacebuilding initiatives in Sierra Leone comes from international sources, this does not mean that efforts on the ground are completely controlled from above. The landscape of peacebuilding is complex and, therefore, difficult for foreign agencies to navigate or understand, let alone control, and a number of different outcomes are thus produced. Some are intended, some are unintended, and most materialise in a slightly different version from that originally planned. The implementation of some projects and programmes is supported by a baseline study which requires some planning or at least an idea about what is needed on the ground; others simply happen because they could happen. Regardless, however, of the planning process and the involvement of local actors and communities in it (or the lack of such), local actors still have a degree of agency that may affect outcomes.