By George Wachira, NPI-Africa, based in Nairobi, Kenya
My reflections are from the perspective of a practitioner, having been involved in peacebuilding practice for the last eighteen years. NPI-Africa, the organization I work with, has had for a number of years now the privilege of accompanying organizations, individuals, and communities in peacebuilding in varying contexts in Africa.
It has been apparent to me and to some of my practitioner colleagues that traditional notions of evaluation of peacebuilding initiatives may not be fully appropriate to the peacebuilding endeavor as we understand it, thus raising the challenge for the peace researcher and practitioner communities to come up with methodologies and approaches that resonate well with what is being evaluated.
The needs of donors and those of the practitioner regarding evaluation are not necessarily the same. However, the needs of the donors have a greater potential for influencing the way the practitioner functions much more than the other way around. The donor needs to have a sense and evidence that the funds provided were put to the use for which they were provided (accountability), and that some results relevant to the situation were achieved (impact). This pursuit of accountability and ‘demonstrable’ impact then leads us in the direction of traditional project planning, monitoring and evaluation, captured in the
language of SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-specific) and the now ubiquitous and creativity-killing LogFrame.
This kind of evaluation, placed at the completion of tasks, seeks to assess how well this logical arrangement of things was adhered to and if it bore the fruits that had been promised – the success-failure framework. This evaluation is also best carried out by an “objective outsider.” This kind of evaluation can lead to major distortions in the way we as practitioners carry out and report on our work. First, the practitioner may often view evaluation purely from the point of view of donor credibility and survival of the organization. A second and more serious distortion begins when the practitioner shifts their priorities to follow the fads and the money.
For example, working with some of the pastoralist communities in Kenya between 1993 and 2000, it became quite clear that what initially pulled us there (endless armed violence around cattle rustling – what I call “involuntary exchange of livestock” in more politically correct terms) was underlain by fundamental security, subsistence, relational and developmental challenges that drive the conflicts and an accumulation of a deadly firearms arsenal. Yet, I have watched in dismay as the debate has shifted to a peculiar category called “small arms and light weapons,” seen as the challenge that needs to be overcome. More money is available for numerous research projects and conferences on small arms and light weapons; but little is available to organize longer-term processes that could address the wider question and fundamental roots of the problems of pastoralist societies in Kenya.
So, what drives us to focus on the small arms while ignoring what the actors in the conflicts themselves view as the fundamental concerns? Of course, one realizes the difficulty in assessing the far-into-the-future impact of structural change and we therefore seem to prefer short-term, measurable interventions. After all, it is easier to see the number of firearms recovered from communities than it is to see the evolution of the capacity of the same people involved to articulate the root causes of their conflicts and improve their political power of demanding attention.
Let us now turn to the evaluation needs of the practitioner. From one perspective, there is the tendency to view peacebuilding at the terminal end as the cessation of violence or conflict. From this perspective, peacebuilding initiatives have not succeeded if they have not resulted in measurable reduction or even end to violence or hostility. From my practitioner perspective, however, peacebuilding is another name for change; not just any change, but qualitative, liberating and humanizing change. It is fundamentally the process of building lines of trust and relationships among people upon which they can confront differences and build justice. It entails the creation of spaces and processes; introducing and sustaining positive change in situations of usually deep-seated mistrust, animosities and violence, redefining relationships and structures, imagining how people will live
together interdependently in the future, and so on. In this mix, peace workers initiate processes in already quickly changing situations. Bridge-building, process, time commitment, flexibility, hope, adaptation, discovery, unpredictability, alertness to the
unexpected (serendipity – which for me is not ‘lucky’ or ‘accidental’ discovery but rather finding the unknown hoped for), etc., are the words that the peace worker lives by. The predictability implied or assumed at the level of ‘SMART’ planning seems to evaporate as the day-to-day experience takes over and drives the process.
The practitioner needs the kind of evaluation that recognizes peacebuilding as a long-term change process, wrought with much unpredictability and demanding creative adaptations. Measuring achievement at this level is a major challenge but not impossible. Above all, it cannot be done within the short term, funding and project framework that often drives our interventions. Evaluation should be seen less as a validation or invalidation exercise pegged only to credibility, and more as a process where learning is extracted from practice and incorporated in new planning and thinking. This is the “evaluation as learning” paradigm.
What does all this suggest? First, we have to strive to balance donor needs (accountability, planning, predictability, impact) with the practitioner needs (context-responsiveness, freedom to be flexible, unpredictability, serendipity, adaptations, impact). We as practitioners could be more sensitive to the needs of the donors by more deliberately addressing the questions of impact and devising ways through which our work could be understood. It also requires a synergetic engagement with researchers who could help in the sharpening of methodologies for evaluation. This idea begins to challenge the notion of an “objective outsider” assessing our work, and suggests that of a “reflective insider.” Donors in their turn need to show sensitivity to the nature of peacebuilding and the change process. In particular, they could show a willingness to move away from the mere technical concern with results, impact and accountability for funds, to the discipline of learning, engagement and a more holistic appreciation of peacebuilding.
Secondly, I suggest separating evaluation concerns from funding and credibility concerns. Instead, practitioners should take up and own evaluation as part of the learning needed to drive their work.
Finally, I suggest the creation of a self-regulating and self-accountable practitioner community. This would require the practitioners to create peer forums where they critically examine their work. It may involve the development of a code of ethics for practitioners and a set of minimum accountability structures and procedures.
I believe that the major responsibility for the evolution of a culture of good practice lies with the practitioners with the support of researchers. If peacebuilding is about liberating and humanizing change, then we as practitioners have to be seen to exercise the highest degree of ethics and honesty. It is not enough to say that our work is not understood. We have to proactively seek to set the agenda if indeed we believe we understand better the nature of what we are engaged with.
This post was updated for the Humanitarianism in Africa Blog in November 2009 from an address to the International Conference on Towards Better Peacebuilding Practice, Soesterberg, The Netherlands October 2001. You may contact George Wachira at gwachira@npi-africa.org.