Within the broad arena of humanitarian work, donors are increasingly demanding ‘results’ from the projects they fund, and the organisations who implement the projects are increasingly concerned with accountability and demonstrating their impact.
The article ‘Just wasting our time? Provocative Thoughts for Peacebuilders’ by Simon Fisher and Lada Zimina (March 2008), poses the challenge that peacebuilding and conflict transformation projects are not yet demonstrating the impact we hope and expect. The thoughts in this article mirror my own experience that proving the results from peacebuilding and conflict transformation activities is a very challenging aspect of the work, but one which I believe is made more difficult because of the way projects expect to measure the results by using techniques developed for development and humanitarian work, rather than for Conflict Transformation.
The approach based on the Logical Framework and encapsulated in Project Cycle Management (PCM) has become widely used by bilateral and multilateral donors and large Development NGOs, but little work has been done to adapt the methodology from Development and Humanitarian projects for use in Conflict Transformation.
Conflict Transformation typically takes place in a fluid and complex environment, where trust and relationships are a key element. When thinking about results we know that Peace is not something that can be ‘delivered’, a peace project can be deemed successful even if levels of violence increase, and proving a direct link between activities and any changes in the community or state is difficult. As noted in the United Nations definition[1], the Logical Framework expects a causal relationship to exist between activities and results, but when the project is dependent on so many external factors, and when local people have a central role, looking for indicators of direct impact may not give evidence that the activities have had the desired impact.
So, how about we collaborate to adapt methods and models to work more easily in projects that work to reduce violence and build peace, so that we can show the skeptics that civil society peacebuilding and violence prevention works…starting with the logical framework.
Can you share with us some of your experiences – how do you show the results of your peacebuilding and conflict transformation work?
[1] See http://www.un.org/Depts/oios/mecd/mecd_glossary/documents/glossary/set_l/logical_framework.htm (accessed May 25th 2009)
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