Thinking about the Legacy of Peacebuilding Programs

Over the past three decades, we have seen the development of ever more complex peace support interventions by international organizations, bilateral donors and international non-governmental organizations (INGOs). From Cambodia and the former Yugoslavia in the early post-Cold War years to the latest interventions in South Sudan and Syria, we have seen enormous energies and significant material, political and symbolic resources expended in the name of peacebuilding— amounting to as much as $10 billion per year suggests the Global Peace Index Report in 2017.

Crucially, however, we have little idea if these resources are “well spent.” Unlike disciplines such as economics and health, macro-indicators of peace are not easily quantifiable. Community trust, social reconciliation, perceptions are intangibles, process-oriented objectives, not products. These are essentially elements of psychological change, rather than physical transformation. They involve public perceptions, and everyday adaptations to evolving circumstances. Measuring legacy poses several complex, and, as of yet, insurmountable methodological challenges. The delayed nature of causality requires more synthetic qualitative approaches for measurement.

Common monitoring and evaluation (M&E) mechanisms are only capable of assessing the short-term outputs of individual peacebuilding projects. They cannot, and generally do not even attempt, to provide any assessment of the long-term legacy of broader peacebuilding interventions made up—as they are—of many projects implemented over time by a diversity of peacebuilding organizations and institutions. While the long-term impact of peacebuilding interventions writ-large in a given post-conflict context, is as of yet, outside the scope of methodological possibilities, it is important to begin scoping the concept of legacy in greater depth, to enable scholars in the peacebuilding field to devise innovative methodologies for its study.

This essay outlines and explains the concept of peacebuilding legacy by situating it within the academic debates around peacebuilding effectiveness, and the role of evaluation in organizational learning and reflection. I argue that the study of peacebuilding legacy will benefit from the application of a three-pronged analytical axes. In particular, the issue of norm resonance and retention that is often overlooked in debates on peacebuilding effectiveness, the role of institutionalization in sustaining peace, and the application of institutional learning and reflection through a deliberate synthesis of related evaluative studies can help peacebuilding scholars and practitioners understand and apply the concept of peacebuilding legacy better.

Scholars who are critical of the liberal peace, have voiced their concern around the incompatibility between international norms espoused by INGOs (as agents of western donors) and local needs rather than the role of peacebuilding INGOs per se. Patrice McMahon has investigated the games played by INGOs and their local partners, highlighting their complicity in playing along the donors’ rules and visions, often at the detriment of local relevance and capacity building in order to secure aid monies for prolonging their own operations. The reason for growing criticism of peacebuilding NGOs also stems from a lack of firm results, and the short-termism that plagues the sector, one that fails to fully capture the nature of change sought. Changes tend to be more qualitative than quantitative, they may affect attitudes and relations in the short-term, but not have long-lasting influence.

Structural changes are even more difficult to orchestrate, and usually bear fruits only in the long-term. As a result, effectiveness can be differently measured, and can mean different things to different people. One simple approach according to Susanna Campbell, is to use the positive results of a single activity in terms of its support for personal change as an indicator of micro success. Of course, if the project can become more influential, and begins to shape wider relationships, then it can be considered as achieving a higher degree of success in peacebuilding.

Apart from effectiveness, the peacebuilding field faces significant challenges regarding how different actors think of, apply, and learn from peacebuilding monitoring and evaluation. This is because different actors have different needs when it comes to monitoring and evaluation. For donors, evaluation provides accountability, for practitioners’ evaluative data and findings that in turn provide food for reflective practice and learning. Monitoring provides only limited opportunity for institutional or organizational learning, which according to Manuela Leonhardt, involves “reflecting on the lessons learned from particular programmes.” While usefully capturing immediate changes, it cannot measure the degree or extent of change over time or allow for longer-term reflection.

Monitoring for long-term changes is also complicated by the short turnaround required of projects lasting anywhere between nine to twelve month per funding cycle. Evaluation on the other hand, is commonly thought to serve two purposes: learning and accountability. Peacebuilding evaluation as Blum defines it, involves “an evidence-based process designed to create accountability for, and learning from peacebuilding programmes.”

Evaluation can be both formative, conducted in the midst of an ongoing project to identify progress and opportunities for improvement, and summative, conducted at the end of the project to understand the changes achieved. The debate on effective peacebuilding evaluation, that can account for both short and long-term impact, also remains largely disconnected from the methodologies used across a range of disciplines such as education, health, and medicine.

Initiatives like the Peacebuilding and Evaluation Consortium (PEC) launched in 2013 and funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York include several organizations such as the Alliance for Peacebuilding, the Center for Peacebuilding and Development (CPD), Mercy Corps, the United States Institute for Peace (USIP), and Search for Common Ground (SfCG). These organizations have made an open commitment to learning from evaluation. Despite these strides, academic research on institutional learning and reflection from peacebuilding projects is extremely limited. Barring a few studies on institutional memory of specific organizations such as the United Nations (UN) or specific NGOs, the field is relatively nascent in its development. To aid the process of conceptual development, this essay presents a new analytical framework that can aid peace building organizations to critically study the programme specific issues under examination. The three analytical axes include, norm transmission: resonance and retention; institutionalization and adaptation; and, learning and reflection. I discuss each in turn.

INGOs act as conduits for the delivery of humanitarian aid, and of the development policies of the donor community, acting as agents on their behalf. Their projects embody specific universalizing ideas that align with the values of liberalism and democracy including, but not limited to, strengthening democratic institutions; establishing security and rule of law; enhancing sustainable economic and human development; and implementing transitional justice. These multitude of international norms around democracy, human rights, the rule of law and free markets become ideas that peacebuilding INGOs transmit through their programs. Values consistent with liberal peacebuilding goals are transmitted through personal experiences, and through interaction with the various agents and actors of peacebuilding processes. The modes of transmission can include different channels such as schools, curriculum, family, beliefs or religion and through media, culture, art, literature and political economies.

Current research on norm transmission in postwar societies, has found varying degrees of resistance from local actors to the full adoption and implementation of liberal peacebuilding norms. These perspectives focus on the outcome of norm diffusion, with little attention paid to whether the norms underpinning peacebuilding projects resonate at various points in time, and to what extent these are retained by the program participants in the long-run. The OECD’s Development Assistance Committee Guidance published in 2012, explains that the relevance criterion should be used to assess the extent to which the objectives and activities of the interventions respond to the needs of beneficiaries, and the peacebuilding process, that is, whether the key driving factors of conflict revealed through a conflict analysis. Although the relevance of an intervention might change over time as circumstances change, it remains important to ask from time to time, whether the program is working on the right issues, at the right time, and with the right constituencies—in short, whether it resonates with the context and the prevalent concerns of the beneficiaries targeted.

Lack of resonance has implications for peacebuilding legacy in three ways. First, it can encourage target populations to engage in behaviors that speak to donor concerns, but which are not intrinsic to their everyday realities. Second, it can result in diverting resources and attention away from locally relevant issues, thereby resulting in a manufactured rather than an authentic peace. Finally, low resonance can be one of the many reasons for weak retention of values transmitted through peacebuilding projects. Unless programs speak to the intrinsic issues that separate groups in society, program participants can fall back to established patterns of behavior around tolerance and harmonious coexistence. Wider societal tendencies around segregation and in-group socialization quickly become the new normal. In short, understanding the extent to which the values and norms underpinning international peacebuilding projects resonate with the local context is important because missing resonance can become a major constraint to norm adoption at an individual and the group level.

The extent to which peacebuilding programs are adapted into or institutionalized as part of local governmental and non-governmental service provision can be a further determinant of weak or strong peacebuilding legacy from an organizational perspective. The analysis around institutionalization and adaptation is rooted in the sustaining peace and local ownership debates. The merits and potential pitfalls of transferring successful models of peacebuilding into national government departments must be considered carefully as part of the thinking around institutionalization.

Peacebuilding INGOs routinely face the challenge of closing projects and programs, or withdrawing operations from countries following organizational restructuring, strategic redirection, and funding cuts from donors. Exit strategies are embroiled in broader issues of job loss for local staff, developing the capacity of local NGOs to continue without support, and coping with reduced presence in specific geographies and its implications for the organization’s outreach and footprint. Given these potential sources and opportunities to be adaptive and to “survive” for multiple years, in reality, INGOs need to be more ruthless about exiting when their work is done, rather than seeking to prolong their presence.

As part of mentoring responsibilities, INGOs must focus on building up the capacity of national partners so that they can survive without external support in the long run, rather than turning them into instruments (implementation agencies) for manufacturing peace in the short-term. Some of these arguments are well-acknowledged in the literature on local ownership. Equally, efforts must be in place to transfer models of training and capacity building so that they can be adopted by, and absorbed into national structures to make these truly sustainable. The issue of institutionalization, involves designing and implementing projects with national government departments, and allowing for the projects to be adapted into the national setting, once INGOs exit.

In 2016, the UNSC and the UNGA adopted identical resolutions to reshape the UN’s peacebuilding architecture. The Challenge of Sustaining Peace report produced by a group of experts appointed by Ban Ki Moon, helped to define the sustaining peace concept as the forward looking and transformative alternative to peacebuilding. Encompassing the entire gamut of activities, the UN peacebuilding and sustaining peace agenda received an important boost following the adoption of resolution 2413 in 2018. The General Assembly’s high-level meeting on peacebuilding and sustaining peace, and a high-level briefing to the UNSC, followed by the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres’ report (A/72/707-S/2018/43) has urged UN bodies, organs including the UN Peacebuilding Commission (established in 2005) to support peace efforts in conflict-affected countries to advance, explore and consider their implementation. While certain types of programs, such as education reform projects, may prove more amenable to institutionalization than others, it is certainly an area that is critical to thinking about legacy.

In thinking about learning from evaluation, it must be acknowledged that few direct tangible consequences exist for organizations or individuals for not learning. This is because of the structure of funding and accountability in the peacebuilding sector. Funding for projects are offered on 12, 18, and 24-month intervals, with a strong emphasis placed on meeting specific targets. Donors and implementing partners remain largely oblivious to learning from the process of implementation and adaptation. Few incentives are offered within peacebuilding organizations to encourage staff to prioritize learning from evaluation. Designing evaluation practices that can support organizational learning in turn require a “process use" approach, that interrogates, how peacebuilding is done and what lessons arise from it. A process driven organizational learning is less about sifting information, it is reflective and requires corrective action to rectify any misalignment between an organization’s aims and the outcome of its activities in relation to those aims. It could also be about linking individual projects for “cumulative effectiveness” according to the Reflecting for Peacebuilding Practice report of 2009.

For most peacebuilding INGOs, the practical issues, the logistical issues, and the resulting adaptations, that are seen, and recorded in various interim reports are often omitted from organizational learning loops. The reason for this learning lacunae is rooted in resource allocation practices. In any context of intervention, individual peacebuilding organizations do not find it cost-effective to undertake controlled comparisons between areas they operate in with areas that are not covered by programmes. This lack of resources for learning through comparison, is reinforced by the limited sharing of knowledge and know-how between peace building organizations due to the competitive nature of donor funding makes learning more ad hoc and unstructured. Tracking outcomes requires flexibility, and reflection on part of implementing staff, so that the intended outcome can be aligned to local needs. A revisionist theory of change approach enables ‘monitoring as learning’. Staff should be able to question their underlying assumptions and adapt activities accordingly. By focusing on the quality of content, and by monitoring resources, program managers can test the validity of assumptions underlying their theories of change, what some scholars call “double-loop” learning.

The final point is overcoming the fear of failure. A good M&E approach would require peacebuilding INGOs to pursue a more pragmatic evaluation strategy. It would require project managers to rigorously document failures, and revise their theories of change in response to the elements of programming that do and do not work. Cedric de Coning urges peacebuilding efforts to be more adaptive, and pragmatic, by acknowledging its inherently political nature.

Adaptive peacebuilding requires that both donors and implementing agencies value failure and become more proactive about learning from mistakes. This would enable donors to secure stronger accountability for how resources are being used, and organizations can become more open and accountable in their organizational learning approach. Efforts are also underway to remedy the barriers to inter-organizational learning. In 2017, three international peacebuilding organizations—Saferworld, Conciliation Resources, and International Alert launched the Peace Research partnership. Funded by UKAid, this three-year research program aims to generate knowledge, lessons and recommendations tailored to policymakers and practitioners working on peace and security. Thankfully, the focus is on the much-needed element of shared learning.

From a learning perspective that informs peacebuilding legacy, besides a lack of comparative analysis, few peacebuilding organizations undertake follow-up research with beneficiaries once they close their missions. Donors are equally unmotivated to look at the effects of programs years after projects have concluded, as the longer-term monitoring and evaluation of programs is not in the DNA of the peace building industry. Post-closure evaluations in which a study is commissioned by the funder for revisiting the project results a few years after the formal closure of the program, are few and far between. This type of evaluation differs from the final evaluation of a project, as the focus is on sustainability, and on the longer-term effects, that can only be studied several years after the programs were implemented. For example, following the transfer of its income and assets to national NGO partners, the INGO EveryChild commissioned a longitudinal evaluation of its responsible exit from six countries in 2015. This evaluation was undertaken by the International NGO Training and Research Center (INTRAC) and offers some valuable lessons for planning timely and responsible exits, that can offer models for sustainable peace building.

Linking organizational strategies around responsible exits, to the type of footprint, that a peacebuilding INGO would like to leave behind a considered approach to thinking about legacy. In this short essay, a first attempt has been made to open up the debate around the concept of peacebuilding legacy. By examining the resonance of peacebuilding activities, the potential for transferring peace building gains to national agencies; and by committing to learning from evaluation within and beyond the lifecycle of projects, peace building organizations can make a valuable contribution toward sustaining peace, one that merits further research and application.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sukanya Podder

Sukanya Podder is a senior lecturer of the Defence Studies Department in the School of Security Studies at King's College London, as well as in the Joint Services Command and Staff College at the Defence Academy of the UK. E-mail: [email protected]