Bringing Peace Closer to The People: The Role of Social Services in Peacebuilding

There is a growing recognition by policymakers and practitioners at the national and international levels that we must better understand the role that social services can play in fuelling instability and conflict and, conversely, the unique value they offer in fostering social cohesion and inclusive development and peaceful societies. By sharing a range of articles and policy and country briefs that provide compelling perspectives on cutting-edge themes in social services, this issue of the Journal of Peacebuilding & Development, in partnership with the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), seeks to contribute to policy discussions and programme strategies. UNICEF is pleased to support research and scholarly/practice debate in this important thematic area.

There is an increasing body of work that investigates the relationship between social services and conflict and/or offers foundational arguments that are shaping new policy and programming. In 2011 the World Development Report (WDR) examined the links between conflict, security and development and found that societies are vulnerable to conflict and insecurity when local institutions are unable to provide equitable access to justice and economic opportunities. Surveyed populations rated poverty and poor education amongst the top drivers of conflict (World Bank 2011, 9).1 Background research for the WDR argued that poor access to basic services is a defining characteristic of fragile and conflict-affected states: low-income countries disproportionately face high risks of relapse, and increasing access to basic services raises income levels (Baird 2002, 3).2 Despite this research, the headline messages from the WDR omitted the role of social services as a priority investment in addressing the causes of conflict.

The role of equity in social service delivery is also crucial in conflict-affected settings. Research has shown that lack of access or inequitable access to social services can be a key trigger or driver of conflict. Insufficient or inequitable access to education was a factor in the decision of adolescents and youth to join armed groups in Sierra Leone (Ashby 2002, 11). Inequitable social service access and delivery are particularly relevant where there is perceived discrimination towards a particular identity group or region, particularly in the immediate aftermath of conflict and even in later post-conflict settings.3

A 2012 United Nations study on the contributions of administrative and social services to peacebuilding sought to further deepen understanding on the issues (McCandless 2012). This followed the UN Secretary General's 2009 report on peacebuilding in the immediate aftermath of conflict, which listed the provision of administrative and social services amongst the five recurring priorities for peacebuilding in the years immediately following conflict. The 2012 report draws upon the experience of many UN agencies, illustrating the range of ways that social services intersect with conflict and peacebuilding. It states, for example, that infrastructure and delivery systems that support social services are often severely damaged during violent conflict — assuming they existed in the first place. Such services can be targeted in post-conflict settings, and delivery voids can be filled by criminal factions or by radical groups in ways that reflect unaddressed conflict drivers and undermine peace consolidation efforts. After conflict, death tolls can be higher than during conflict if access to safe drinking water or sanitation is not assured. Further, activities associated with conflict often continue — for instance, sexual violence against female students and teachers, and schools being used as sites for ongoing recruitment and politicisation of boys and girls.

The report argues that if services are not administered and delivered in a conflict-sensitive manner, whether by the international community or by governments, ‘they can do more harm than good by reinforcing horizontal inequalities that were a conflict driver in the first place’ (McCandless 2012, 10). Social services, it also suggests, can be offered as peace dividends that reduce social tensions and enhancing the citizen–state social compact through the provision of tangible, needed services, create incentives for nonviolent behaviour and support statebuilding efforts at critical junctures in the peace process.

This growing policy-level recognition of the links between social services, conflict and peace is catalysing policy and practice response. Advocates have long argued that peace settlements must prioritise services that reach war-weary populations outside the capitals to make tangible the peace agreement signed on paper often in remote capitals. Indeed, we note that social service related provisions are increasingly finding their way into peace agreements. In the respective periods of 1990–1998 and 1999–2006, provisions on education rose from 51 to 59 per cent, on health from 20 to 30 per cent and on social security/welfare from 20 to 36 per cent (United Nations Development Programme [UNDP] 2008, 45).

Conflict-affected and fragile states — self-organised through the international body now called the g7+— have also recognised the key role of social services in lifting them out of fragility and conflict and towards resilience. In collaboration with international partners including the UN, the World Bank, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the OECD Development Assistance Committee (OECD-DAC), its International Network on Conflict and Fragility (INCAF) and member donor country representatives, and civil society, the g7+ agreed that ‘the ability to raise, prioritise and manage resources to finance and develop capacity for accountable and fair service delivery’ is one of five goals that should provide a framework for country-led analysis and strategy development, and orient international assistance, for peacebuilding and statebuilding in fragile and conflict-affected states (International Dialogue on Peacebuilding and Statebuilding 2011). In the evolving implementation of the New Deal agreement around these five goals, fair social services thus, perhaps for the first time in global policy-level action, takes an equal position alongside security, governance, rule of law and wider economic recovery concerns in efforts to overcome fragility and conflict.

The UN is working to develop and sharpen its strategies and programmes, including a systematic approach to results, monitoring and evaluation systems. Importantly, these efforts have increasingly focused on how to build upon explicit peacebuilding ‘theories of change’ and the contributions that social services can make to peacebuilding. UNICEF, in particular, has launched a ground-breaking programme to systematically explore and maximise the contributions of education and related sectors to peacebuilding in key conflict-affected countries.

This special issue, as a part of the growing attention to this important area, explores the potential of social services to contribute to peacebuilding and the challenges confronting policymakers and practitioners in adapting social services to deliver greater peacebuilding impact. The contributions share experiences and learning from ongoing initiatives and research in the field which are striving to make these connections.

The case studies span a diversity of settings — from Colombia and Guatemala to Rwanda and Iraq — yet strike common chords. The cases illustrate the unique ability of social services — from health to early childhood development — to play a significant role in shaping the daily lives and relationships of individuals, households and communities. The cases highlight how local and even non-formal action must be prioritised as a critical dimension of peacebuilding, especially when conflict sensitive, and in particular, in equity-promoting ways, complementing the customary focus on national political levels and on the state. At the same time, the roles of local government need greater attention to ensure services are delivered in ways that promote peacebuilding and development in conflict-sensitive ways. Lastly, the cases offer insights into the relationship between social services and other peacebuilding areas, such as the link with transitional justice, reparations, and anti-corruption imperatives.

A recurrent theme in this issue is the importance of investment in social services for peacebuilding at the individual and community levels. Matthew Klick shows how qualitative differences in state–society relations at the community level in Guatemala, including how local indigenous leaders relate to or compete with local authorities, have direct bearing on development and peace. He finds that semi-formal and indigenous institutions are most effective when coupled with resources that only the state, through formal local authorities, can provide. This brings together conventional statebuilding logic with the call for local ‘ownership’ of peacebuilding and development programming. It also links to evolving discussions of hybridity, buttressing arguments about the value, in varied contexts, of parallel systems that deliver what people need.4

As externally driven, often principle-based approaches engage with the on-the-ground realities of transitional and post-conflict settings there is new openness to understanding the political economy dynamics that may have to be engaged, accommodated and transformed over time. Yuliya Zabyelina examines one such issue — corruption in the public sector, where scholars have drawn attention to the potentially positive, albeit short-term benefits that corruption may bring for communities in terms of survival strategies. She reviews these debates though her examination of the unique aspects of post-conflict reconstruction in Chechnya and the role of corruption in the public sector. Weighing the debates, she concludes that the sweeping corruption in the public sector may have brought some immediate post-conflict stability, but threatens to undermine reconstruction.

Two pieces in this issue explore variants of the discussion and policy action surrounding the links between transitional justice and development — and, specifically, social services. In Colombia, the commitment to transitional justice programmes by government has accompanied a flourishing of different models and approaches. Amongst these are collective reparations schemes that include development programming for communities that have experienced violence. Pamina Firchow examines this phenomenon by asking why communities must ‘bleed first’ in order to receive basic social services. Building upon scholarly concerns about tendencies for policymakers to focus on short-term, predetermined and logistically feasible responses in transitional contexts, she argues that, without a comprehensive overhaul of development policies in general, isolated collective reparations projects are unlikely to address sources of conflict and could ultimately do more harm than good. She raises important questions about the appropriateness of outside, private actors being the sole coordinators of reparations and development projects in particular communities and advocates for a greater role of local government in the reparations process.

In their briefing, Sylvia Servaes and Natascha Zupan delve more specifically into the relationship of the health sector to transitional justice and peacebuilding. Recognising the way that the health sector can both fuel and mitigate conflict through, in particular, discriminatory delivery and/or access, or, instrumentalisation of health facilities for targeted violence. Transitional justice, they argue, is well suited to address these issues, and there is a need to bring a peacebuilding and conflict sensitivity perspective to issues surrounding health service provision and access — i.e., around ensuring regional distribution of health infrastructure, selection and training of staff, and symbolic measures to increase trust.

In her briefing on service delivery in post-withdrawal Iraq, Zara Järvinen speaks to many of the above concerns as she describes the local governance and service delivery programming that is increasingly supported by donors in transitional contexts. Supporting the UN's research findings highlighted above (McCandless 2012), she suggests that such programming paves the way for developing context-sensitive, locally driven processes that promote accountable and legitimate subnational governance and inclusive service delivery. If successful, she argues, such programming may inspire confidence in the benefits of stronger decentralisation and enhance state legitimacy. In addition, the improved and equitable service provision and citizen–government relations may contribute positively to social cohesion and address some of the root causes and drivers of conflict, especially in contexts where grievances are strongly linked to inequitable treatment or exclusion

Peacebuilding involves transforming relationships at all levels of society. Several authors probe efforts to develop individual resilience and support constructive social relationships at the most intimate levels that can form the bedrock of a peaceful society. Authors investigate the areas of early childhood development, intimate partner violence and psycho-social support and their potentially foundational contributions to peacebuilding more broadly.

Wendy Lambourne and Lydia Wanja Gitau's article focusing on Rwanda starts from the premise that peacebuilding and development have been too focused on the dominant state-centric model of peacebuilding at the expense of a more people-centred, service-oriented process that promotes the transformation in relationships and life conditions necessary to support a sustainable peace. They start from the premise that states and societies do not exist apart from individuals and their relationships, and show how psychosocial services can form an integral part of building community cohesion and resilience.

Early childhood development is rarely considered a peacebuilding priority, yet there is growing evidence of the societal and inter-generational impact of early childhood development investments. Diane Sunar and colleagues5 share outcomes of an expert consultation on the potential of early childhood development to support community cohesion and peaceful societies. Results of the expert consultation suggest a robust connection between early childhood development and peacebuilding. For instance, a close, satisfying relationship with one or both parents in the early years can increase the likelihood that the child will behave in a more peaceful, cooperative manner in later childhood with peers and even rivals and outgroups. Early childhood development interventions focusing on fathers can offer peacebuilding outcomes particularly in contexts of adversity — a finding that should resonate with evolving policy and scholar discussions around resilience.

The connections between service-seeking behaviour following intimate partner violence (IPV), rights-based programming and civic knowledge in two settlements in Liberia and peacebuilding are laid out by Erin Bernstein and colleagues. The article reveals how informal mechanisms can resolve disputes more fairly than formal ones, and how women suffering from IPV had high distrust of governmental institutions to help them. Women also learned more about civic issues from the media and informal channels than men did.

Giving us practical insight into policy efforts to integrate peacebuilding into a particular sector — education — Kerstin Tebbe, Mary Kang'ethe and Vick Ikobwa share lessons from inter-governmental efforts in Africa. Based on findings of a global ministerial meeting at the end of 2012, they note that, despite progress, gaps in information and evidence about what works persist, and analytical tools for education and peacebuilding, including monitoring and evaluation, are limited or unused. There is also a dearth of information on non-formal and community-based peace education. Lastly they note that networking and collaborative working can be challenging for governmental bureaucracies, and political leadership at the highest levels still remains vital.

While not a direct contribution to this special issue on social services, policy dialogue contribution for this issue, focusing on the post-2015 development framework discussions, has strong relevance. Henk-Jan Brinkman reviews the debates and policy developments surrounding efforts to infuse peace, justice and governance in the post-2015 development framework. While the current Millennium Development Goals based framework has strong social services dimensions, the peacebuilding community has long been concerned that this agenda does not reflect the challenges of peace, security and governance issues that interact with and undermine development. Integrating these fully within the new, post-2015 framework, if done well, will support thinking and practice aimed at ensuring the provision of social services and that the wider array of development concerns have a more intentional, and likely results-based, impact on building and sustaining peace across all country contexts.

In closing, the Journal of Peacebuilding & Development and UNICEF are pleased to share this special issue on social services and peacebuilding with our readers. We hope that the contributions it contains will support ongoing efforts to understand and advance the conceptual, practical and policy linkages between social services and peacebuilding. To be sure, more research is needed to build a body of evidence around what works and what does not, and how programming and policy impact of social services can be measured in ways that support social cohesion and sustainable peace. We believe this issue offers new insights and suggests innovative paths upon which these enquiries can unfold.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Erin McCandless

ERIN McCANDLESS, Chief Editor of the Journal of Peacebuilding & Development, is a peacebuilding scholar and practitioner, and has conducted work on social services and peacebuilding for the UN.

James Rogan

JAMES ROGAN is the Chief of the Peacebuilding and Recovery Section, Office of Emergency Programmes, at UNICEF.

Notes

¹ It cites an opinion poll suggesting that, as drivers of conflict, ‘poverty/poor education’ and ‘injustice/inequality/corruption’ were the two categories with the highest ratings.

² Sierra Leone's Fragility Assessment (2012), too, underlines how social services represented the most pressing gap in the country's post-conflict transition.

³ See, for example, Nafziger and Väyrynen (2000); ‘horizontal inequalities’ are inequalities among groups of people who share a common identity. Such inequalities have economic, social, political and cultural status dimensions (Stewart 2010).

⁴Journal of Peacebuilding & Development 7: 2 (2012), a special issue on ‘Hybridity in Peacebuilding and Development’, explores these issues.

⁵ The other authors are: Cigdem Kagitcibasi, James Leckman, Pia Britto, Catherine Panter-Brick, Kyle Pruett, Maria Reyes, William Hodges, Anna Zonderman, Yankı Yazgan, Ayla Göksel, Yasemin Sirali, Muzaffer Şişli.