How can the Aid for Peace approach help to address the questions surrounding the debate on Peace and Conflict Impact Assessment (PCIA)? The Aid for Peace approach is a multi-purpose and multi-level process that facilitates the planning, assessment and evaluation of peace as well as aid interventions in conflict situations.
The widening development of the PCIA debate has ensured that it is difficult to define. For a basic understanding it is necessary to distinguish between PCIA approaches such as aid and peace interventions and project, programme and policy level approaches, among others. There are also a number of open questions about PCIA. For example, is a unified methodology/framework for PCIA needed or not? Is the purpose of PCIA technical or political? Is it a Northerner’s assessment tool or a Southerners’ peacebuilding tool? Is it only useful for aid or also for peace interventions? How can we define criteria and indicators for monitoring and assessing effects of interventions?
The Aid for Peace approach – a set of unified and inclusive methodologies that can be used by a broad range of different actors for all sorts of interventions – provides an answer to most of these questions. For example:
- A unified framework is useful since it represents a common starting point for all actors. Opting for a set of methodologies and a sequence of process steps, avoids an overly rigid format and allows for the different needs of different actors. Therefore, the approach can be used by Northerners and Southerners, peacebuilders and development actors.
- By breaking down the either/or decisions that dominated previous phases of the PCIA debate, the approach is useful to interventions with different purposes (namely development and peace) and on different levels (project, programme, policy).
- With respect to criteria and indicators to help better assess the effects of peace building and development institutions, there is a wealth of criteria to be found in the existing literature. These have been further developed and incorporated into the Aid for Peace approach.
The Aid for Peace Approach will require further dissemination and development. There also remain a number of challenges for the application of the PCIA debate to the evaluation of peacebuilding interventions.
- There should be more investment into planning as the current debate focuses too much on evaluation of peace efforts. There should be more discussion about better planning procedures for peace interventions that create the conditions for good monitoring and evaluation.
- It is difficult to assess the effects that project interventions have on a wider peace process. In order to bridge this ‘attribution gap’ it is advisable to formulate standardised result-chains for frequently implemented types of projects, and to disseminate these models together with participatory planning methods.
- Evaluation and impact assessment in peacebuilding needs to make more use of existing knowledge. The field of peacebuilding can benefit from the ideas, models and insights gathered in related fields such as policy analysis and development practice.
- It seems more promising to work towards a common standard in planning and evaluation of peacebuilding interventions. Governmental and non-governmental organisations should work together on such standardisation in an international network.
