As the international peacebuilding and development communities are confronted with dualistic demands for understanding and effectively responding to local context, on the one hand, and fashioning a new development framework that responds to all of humanity, on the other, it behoves us to revisit and draw from core ideas that have driven our practice, while remaining open to evolution. Nurturing institutional memory by reflecting on the implementation of theories and practices in relation to new challenges facing the field has obvious advantages.
Building on Volume 8: 2 on ‘Evaluation in Violently Divided Societies’, this special issue of the Journal of Peacebuilding and Development (JPD) dives into an investigation of peace and conflict impact assessment (PCIA) as it is used today, in local and international policy contexts across transitional settings. Alongside the now famous ‘do no harm’ framework and wider practices that have come to be known as ‘conflict sensitivity’, this decade-and-a-half-long tradition of assessing impacts for better programme and policy design has proliferated across a broad array of sectoral areas of international as well as national development and peacebuilding practice. Consistent with JPD tradition, this issue's focus on PCIA allows an examination of methods and frameworks underpinning practice, reflection upon issues of knowledge production, and the development of grounded responses.
As critical reflections over top-down, Northern-led and template-driven international ‘liberal peacebuilding’ have gained momentum, peacebuilders have sought to engage more with endogenous, indigenous and local realities and efforts. The field of development has faced a similar set of critiques, fostering an inward reflective journey that has yet to produce a new, widely shared paradigm for practice. While PCIA is implemented varyingly, there is a common thread with respect to the need for deep attention to the factors (and capacities) that drive conflict and peace, and to build ownership around both analysis and priority-setting.
This idea lies at the heart of the International Dialogue on Peacebuilding and Statebuilding (IDPS) and its New Deal agreement, which JPD has, since V7N2, regularly featured in our Policy Dialogues section. This policy process, involving the g7+, a grouping of now 18 fragile and conflict-affected states, with international partners and civil society (globally and in g7+countries), aims to seat national actors at the helm of more effective peacebuilding and statebuilding practice. It involves fragility assessments and compacts to guide more effective and nationally led processes towards resilience and sustained peace. A briefing by the g7+secretariat Senior Policy Specialist Habib Ur Rehman Mayar discusses the status of this work in this issue. Two civil society statements in the same section comment on the tragic return to violent conflict in South Sudan, reflecting an emerging, powerful consensus in the IDPS process for even more profound attention to identifying and addressing the drivers of both conflict, violence and fragility, on the one hand, and resilience and peace, on the other. Robust analysis, which identifies how these drivers interact with both negative and positive forces, alongside proactive institutional mechanisms for response, is central to achieving this.
PCIA provides a methodological practice and process for this type of analysis and integrated priority-setting to unfold. PCIA and its sister frameworks and methods can also be of great value in supporting policy communities endeavouring to navigate a post-2015 development agenda that gives peacebuilding concerns the attention required to bring inclusive, sustained development to humanity. This integration challenge — identifying the fundamental factors of conflict, peace and resilience that lie at the heart of development, and that lie at the core of the other linked agendas vying for inclusion in the framework — notably security, governance and rule of law – can greatly benefit from the intellectual history, methodological wisdom and practical experience that PCIA offers.
We wish to thank our visiting editor and board member Eric Abitbol, and the rich group of author practitioners who are deeply engaged in meaningful efforts to build peace in far corners of our world. We thank them for taking time with JPD to reflect and share their work, and hope that this experience will bring great benefit to them, and to our readership.