The Ownership Paradox: Continuity and Change

This article introduces the special section on The Ownership Paradox: Continuity and Change. In the text, we discuss how the principle and requirement of ownership is accommodated and how this may affect international development cooperation, drawing upon the various contributions in the section. The article is structured around the three crosscutting themes of who is to ‘own’, what is to be owned, and how are donor-recipient relations and approaches affected by the urge to demonstrate recipient ownership. Among the issues discussed are variations across aid modalities and groups of donors and recipients, an excessive focus on the organisation of aid at the expense of its contents, and the emergence a of a shared ownership related vocabulary.