Spreading democracy? Subcontracting responsibility? A Critical Analysis of Local Governance and Development Projects within the Broader Context of State-Building in Northeast Afghanistan. By Raphaëlle Guillon and Bobby Anderson Abstract: This paper critically examines Afghanistan’s National Solidarity Programme (NSP) and the process of post- conflict reconstruction through the establishment of Community Development Councils- democratically-elected, transparent, village-level rural development and local governance bodies. NSP is part of the international community’s broader Afghan state-building agenda; however, the diverse expectations myriad internal and external actors place upon NSP have served to create contradictions in its dual-use nature. NSP tasks CDCs to act firstly as rural development implementers, and later, after they have ‘proven themselves’ through the execution of block grants, as local governance tools which will override pre-existing local governance structures—peripheral elites whose community stewardship is not generally characterized either by accountability or democratic principles. This paper illustrates how the current implementation of NSP concentrates upon the rural development aspect of the programme while ignoring much of the local government aspect, and this is not sufficient to ensure the desired transition. Moreover, such an approach allows for the possibility of elite capture by peripheral actors who are adept at altering their own discourses to match the expectations of the relevant NSP facilitating partner. Building on primary research conducted in Badakhshan and Kunduz, the authors demonstrate that, absent a legal confirmation of the governance role of the CDC which codifies both the equitability (and repetition) of the election process and the CDC relationship to district- and provincial-level government structures, the transition of CDCs from development to autonomous governance structures is dependent upon the will of pre-existing traditional power structures, who remain the primary decision-makers in nearly all NSP communities. Decades of conflict between the oft-fragmented Afghan centre, peripheral elites, and external actors have continually broken the fledgling connection between local governance and central authority. Part of the current Afghan political challenge is to re-establish that connection through legitimate and accountable local representative bodies. Here the National Solidarity Programme (NSP) fits into the government agenda. NSP—a World Bank-funded, government-led (through the Ministry for Rural Rehabilitation and Development, hereafter MRRD) programme—is the largest rural development project in Afghan history, and one of the larger development projects in the world. It has a dual objective: to rebuild (or reframe) both rural infrastructure and rural civil society through