BUILDING LASTING PEACE

Building Lasting Peace

Building Lasting Peace

Introduction

Conducting evaluation is rarely a favorite activity for those engaged in conflict resolution and peace-building work (hereafter conflicts and peace processes). It takes time, consumes scarce resources, requires a relatively high degree of expertise, and can result in evaluation results that are already self-evident or that do not capture the nuances of conflict transformation work. Yet, there are good reasons to bring evaluation to the forefront of the field of conflicts and peace processes. First, evaluation is an essential instrument for monitoring and improving upon existing initiatives. Without solid evaluation, practitioners would lack the ability to understand 'what went wrong', and scholars would lack the ability to build a body of theory about the causes of and remedies to social conflicts. Second, as the number of nongovernmental and international organizations involved in peace building activities increases so, too, does the call for greater accountability on the part of these organizations. Finally, evaluation is an almost universal obligation when it comes to fulfilling the terms of conflict management grants given by public and private donors. In recent years scholars have answered the call for better evaluation in conflict resolution/ peace building work in a number of ways. Some have offered new approaches to conceptualizing the meaning of success in conflict resolution interventions, reconciliation initiatives, and other peace building efforts (Kriesberg 2002; Mitchell 1993; d'Estree et. al. 2001; Ross 2004; Rouhana 2000). Others have highlighted particular case studies in an effort to demonstrate the conditions and contexts that lead to more-or-less successful outcomes Draft, not for citation 2 (Douma and Klem 2004; Lieberfeld 2002). Still others have outlined specific questions or frameworks that could be usefully applied to peace building and conflict resolution activities (Anderson and Olson 2003; Church and Shouldice 2002 and 2003; NPI-Africa 2002; Paffenholz and Reychler 2005 and 2007). Yet despite this impressive body of work, many practitioners in the PB/CR fields remain skeptical about the overall merits and usability of traditional evaluation to their work. Some have argued that the complexity of conflict resolution and peace-building work makes outcome and impact evaluation nearly impossible to conduct, and that traditional program evaluation tools are incapable of measuring the kinds of intangible changes that occur during conflict resolution initiatives (Anderson and Olson 2003). The purpose of this chapter is to outline this debate, to examine the difficulties and possibilities of applying program and policy evaluation frameworks, methodologies and tools to conflict resolution/ peace building work, and to illustrate how traditional program and policy evaluation can be effectively used and/or modified and adapted to conflict resolution/ peace building assessment frameworks. The chapter proceeds in three sections: a general overview of the concept of evaluation as it is applied to the field of conflict resolution peacebuilding ; a review of the state of the art in evaluation frameworks and methodologies now being used in the field; and a discussion of various challenges currently confronting conflict resolution/ peace building ...