Sustainable Change and Peacebuilding
Peacebuilding projects are often connected to development cooperation. True, many countries marked as developing countries are currently in a conflict region. And there is another point to it: many development issues can serve as a common interest between opposing groups and so play a role in dialogue, negotiations, settlements and cooperation.
The current German policy is a good example: the ZFD program (Civil Peace Service) funded by the German Federal Government comes out of the budget for development cooperation. The ZFD program started in 1998, and it has come a long way. Several German development organisations find themselves developing and implementing peacebuilding related projects.
Now, essentially these kind of projects are a good thing. But I can’t escape the feeling that the approach misses out at some points. What concerns me here is that many of these organisations coming from a development cooperation perspective, find themselves planning, implementing and monitoring peacebuilding projects using similar tools used for development cooperation projects. My view is that peacebuilding projects may have such a different character that concepts used in development cooperation could miss the point entirely. An example is the heavy use of the concept of sustainability.
Not generally applicable
A core concept in development cooperation is that change needs to be supported in such a way that it is sustainable: that the changes that are implemented can be carried into the future without any ongoing assistance from abroad. That means that in every project one has to check whether all measures fit local interests and needs and will empower local people involved in such a way that they are capable in sustaining the changes they are part of. An example would be a development project in which farmers are being trained using an irrigation system, that can be built and maintained with local equipment and skills and that fits local society’s culture and structure. It makes sure that the system can be used after the development organisation has left.
In general this is a very good concept. And I mean: very. Yet for peacebuilding it may not be enough. Peacebuilding is only part about structural change. It is also about changes in perspective, changing people’s opinions, an ‘aha-erlebnis’, reaching out and meeting the Others, learning how to cooperate across borders between opposing groups. More often than not, a project concerning these kinds of processes starts with a kind of empowerment. And this ignition for change and providing safe spaces for negotiation could actually be more central than overly focusing on sustainability.
Four Phases
I generally use a four step reflection loop for a quick look at peacebuilding projects. The idea comes from organisation development, and is centered around the question: what brings change and who carries this change? The metaphore as descibed by the picture below is a kind of combination of thoughts from Fritz Glasl and Diana Francis.
Imagine a peacebuilding project you know and go along the circle, and ask yourself questions like these:
- What phase would you put the project in?
- Who is carrying change?
- What is changed?
- What needs to be sustainable?
The picture starts with a situation in which there is no project at all: there is an escalated situation in which some individuals or local organisations are trying to address the situation. It’s the situation without any kind of intervention. In the picture above, I characterised this situation as Earth, a kind of painful normality. The will to change is carried by some people and organisations that find it hard to speak out. An example of this situation was the situation the small groups of democratic opposition found themselves in in Serbia in the 1990s.
In a second phase, conflicts go from hidden to open when somehow the weaker interest group’s find the power to speak out. When there is an outside intervention during this phase, it is generally characterised by solidarity. Outside persons intervene by helping out the weaker hand, by trying to give them a voice. Examples are supporting free media and supporting human rights organisations. Empowerment is the central concept, empowering people to take initiative, or coming back to the diagram: providing Fire.
In a third phase, when a conflict is out in the open, negotiations and mediation could take place. Again an outside agency is useful, but here the outside agency is characterised by neutrality or non-partisanship. An outside agency can take on the role of a mediator that provides safe space: no solidarity with the weaker party but rather offering safety and freedom to think for all, supporting the parties to look for solutions. The ones who carry change are the ones who negotiate, not the mediator. But the mediator provides the breathing space for Air. A good example is Athasaari’s work in Aceh after the tsunami in 2004.
The next phase is when negotiations went well enough and when settlements are reached. Here the changes that were agreed upon, need to be given a shape and need to be implemented. The direction of the changes may be clear, but it still needs to go out in larger society. Things need to flow like Water and eventually get rooted in the Earth. Not an easy part, full of develish details. An example may be again Aceh, where currently it still needs to be seen whether the results from the negotiations really get implemented.
Only in the last part, Water and back to Earth, sustainability is a central issue. It is important when things need to be implemented and changes need to be rooted in society by policy changes and new societal structures. These are also the phases in which the outside help should start focusing of rendering themselves obsolete.
Ofcourse a metaphore like this has its limits. The reason I presented here is that I think societal processes that are involved in peacebuilding have qualities that are not seen when looking at peacebuilding from a development cooperation angle alone. I consider the first the Fire and Air phases as absolutely necessary for any kind of peace process. Providing opponent free and safe space or providing weaker parties with such support that they are able to enter a non-violent confrontation. But they are not stages that you would characterise with sustainability. Maybe that should reflect support for peace projects and their funding as well.
