Is building peace through community development a promising approach? This paper from the Chr. Michelsen Institute draws on a recent CMI evaluation of a UNDP-led programme in Ituri district in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Community development can be an effective tool to build peace, even in the midst of violence. The Ituri experience suggests that aid agencies that adopt this strategy will stand a fair chance to succeed in significantly reducing poverty-related violence.
Mainstream peacebuilding approaches tend to assume that a conflict settlement must be in place before the process of social and economic development can begin. Humanitarian rather than development aid is therefore the norm for countries emerging from conflict, even after the violence has receded. Yet, if the conflict is closely related to poverty and marginalisation, community development is likely to make a difference in building peace.
The project in Ituri was relatively unique at the time, yet had it been scaled up and expanded geographically it would likely have reduced the levels of violence even further. The project was a success, in large part due to the local factor. Local communities welcomed the opportunity to build peace, and people from different sides of the conflict were involved in each project. Lessons learned from the project were that:
- reintegration and reconciliation of former combatants requires reconstruction and development;
- locally rooted and imaginative initiatives for peace are most likely to succeed;
- violence reduction came as a result of the practical orientation of each project, enabling participants both to work together and thereby to reconcile, and also to make a living;
- tight follow-up and guidance by the aid agency on the ground, and its ready availability in cases of problems and questions, has a positive impact on reducing the levels of violence; and
- projects as a whole can suffer – as this project did – from inadequate planning, an unsuitable organisational framework, the centralisation of key tasks to the capital, weak strategic management, and continued violence.
Organisations that are less bureaucratic than the UNDP, more flexible and more accustomed to working with local NGOs may achieve at least as much if adopting the peacebuilding through community development approach. The importance of anchoring the peacebuilding process among local actors and communities is likely to be universally applicable.
- Aid to reintegrate former combatants needs to target not only the combatants, but also the communities into which they are to be reintegrated.
- Local actors have proved to be key drivers of change – they are able to achieve a significant reduction of violence at the local level when higher-level peacemaking efforts are not.
- Aid agency’s trust in the local actors can inspire local ownership and boost the self-confidence of the community in their ability to build peace.
- Enabling the population to access locally produced information about the situation in their area is vital for peace to consolidate.
- Deficiencies were equally related to the UNDP and the fact that this is a relatively bureaucratic structure whose management standards are tailored to working with government agencies rather than with small NGOs.
- The evaluation is in line with the 2006 high-level panel report on UN reform, which highlights the need for better coordination between UNDP and other UN and non-UN agencies at the country level.
