Evaluating Interreligious Peacebuilding and Dialogue

Methods and Frameworks

Mohammed Abu-Nimer, Renáta Katalin Nelson, Mohammed Abu-Nimer, Renáta Katalin Nelson

• Verlag: De Gruyter
• Jahr: 2021
• ISBN:
  9783110625080
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Teologia e religione
• Thema: Religione

In the emerging fields of religious and interreligious peacebuilding, the question of monitoring and evaluation is a challenging, yet necessary process. The need to develop comprehensive yet fitting evaluation models for religious and interreligious peacebuilding is not only important for donor interests, but also critical as a means of documenting and learning for peacebuilders themselves. Theories and best practices in monitoring and evaluation have become prevalent in many fields, yet the amount of literature on evaluating intercultural and, especially, religious and interreligious projects remains scant in comparison. This volume offers a unique contribution that not only looks at several of the challenges and implications faced by religious and interreligious peacebuilders but also provides concrete examples of new models and tools for monitoring and evaluating religious and interreligious peacebuilding projects. In doing so, this volume serves as a tool and point of reference for individuals and organizations developing and implementing interreligious dialogue and peacebuilding projects.

Section 1 Evaluating Religious and Interreligious Peacebuilding and Dialogue: Challenges, and Implications

Challenges in Peacebuilding Evaluation

Voices from the Field

Mohammed Abu-Nimer

Note: This chapter also appeared in Abu-Nimer, Mohammed. (2020). “Challenges in Peacebuilding Evaluation: Voices from the Field.” In New Directions in Peacebuilding Evaluation, edited by Estree, Tamra. London: Rowman & Littlefield International.

1 Introduction

Due to the nature of the implementing organizations, the capacity of the programmers, and how peace work has been traditionally perceived (and many other factors), many peacebuilding programmes do not have a rigorous monitoring and evaluation mechanisms. It is only recently that the field began focusing on the need to be more systematic; such focus has been triggered by both donors and policy makers who began investing more resources in the peacebuilding programmes, especially in post conflict areas. However, efforts in systematizing and evaluating peacebuilding programmes have been subject to numerous challenges. This article examines some of the core obstacles for evaluators to be aware of in developing and conducting evaluations of peacebuilding programmes and projects. The challenges in this article were described in detail by 32 international evaluators that were interviewed for a wider study conducted by the Salam Institute (see www.salaminstitute.org) between 2008 and 2012 (Abu-Nimer, Nasser and Ouboulhcen 2016). The article begins by examining some of the fundamental obstacles faced by evaluators in developing an evaluation including those challenges that lie with the donors or peacebuilding programmers themselves, and then moves to more structural challenges faced in conducting evaluations. While the list of challenges discussed is far from comprehensive, the article aims to bring to light and emphasize the importance and need for further research on peacebuilding evaluation.

Many peacebuilders in general often see peace work as morally superior to other forms of interaction or intervention in a conflict. In fact, often most outsiders to the conflict (also some people from within the conflict) express a sense of admiration and recognition of the need to work for peace. However, working from a moral advantage cannot compensate for the fact that the majority of peacebuilding implementers stumble and fall short in their attempt to produce evidence to convince the average person, donors, or policy makers that any given intervention has the potential to change the conflict dynamics in a country. As Cheyanne Scharbatke-Church lamented in the early 1990s when meeting with policy makers in Northern Ireland to convince them to shift more of their resources to peace work: “where is the stuff that I can pound on the table and say, and here’s why we know this stuff works better than more guns on the street” (Church and Shouldice 2003). Instead, peace workers have often characterized their efforts as “planting seeds” for future peace, often noting that they do not necessarily expect to view or see the full results of these seeds in their lifetime.

The pressure to produce tangible results has been set by the rapidly advancing technologies, which have dramatically increased the ability of peacebuilding organizations and donors to collect and share data, in turn generating greater demand to demonstrate the impact and the effectiveness of their projects with quantifiable data. In addition, the greater awareness of civil society work and its potential capacity to advance social cohesion increases the demand for peacebuilding programmes to produce concrete results (Stern 2012). This is particularly visible in the emphasis placed on empirical evidence by both donors and policymakers; “donors are under a great deal of pressure by their policy makers to justify their foreign assistance budgets, and the trend towards big data has increased their desire for empirical evidence to support their requested levels of funding, prioritizing support for tangible results over peacebuilding needs. Yet, a very needs-oriented approach dominates the development field. “We know we all need peace and we easily want freedom, but that’s not a tangible” (Riak 2009).

The need to develop more systematic and widely used monitoring and evaluation of peacebuilding programmes is evident. However, the path towards creating strong evaluation systems faces a number of challenges ranging from difficulty in defining peacebuilding programmes, lack of evaluator experience on evaluating peacebuilding projects and programmes, and donor and programmer behaviour, to the very real obstacles faced by evaluators in conflict zones. Often these challenges are interlinked.

When evaluating peacebuilding programmes, one must examine a wider scale of influences on the success and impact of peacebuilding programmes. Evaluators of peacebuilding programmes have to explore linkages with other sectors, rather than just focus on their small and confined efforts of reducing direct forms of violence and advancing peacebuilding. The lack of clear definitions of both peace and peacebuilding on the one hand can make it difficult for peacebuilding programmers to create clear indicators of success and on the other for evaluators to structure evaluations.¹ Pressure from donors to show quick tangible results clashes considerably with the aforementioned attribution of peace work as towards a moral higher cause and can heighten peacebuilders’ resistance to evaluations.

A further dilemma is that peacebuilding work is often subject to two-year programme cycles that are dependent on donor funding. These issues are not made any easier by the fact the majority of the peacebuilding programmes are implemented by local partners but designed by international organizations (United Nations, European Union, African Union, OSCE, etc.) or donors (World Bank, USAID, DFID, etc.) a feature that adds to the complexity of carrying out an evaluation that is relevant to the local partners (Brown et al. 2015). This might also be true of most international development programmes as well, thus it might not just be a challenge specific to peacebuilding but international programming writ large. Nevertheless, the evaluator must take into consideration the meaning and impact of such factors in design and implementation on the hope for peace and commitment of local communities to peace when presented by such outside organizations.

Even when evaluators are able to navigate these obstacles and develop an evaluation methodology and tools for a particular peacebuilding programme or project, the challenges do not stop there. Often evaluators themselves lack expertise in peacebuilding which not only can pose an issue in evaluation development but also in conducting the evaluation in the field.

Furthermore, conflict zone realities produce certain conditions on the ground which affect people’s behaviour and responses to everything around them. The proximity of the conflict and its consequences for communities and individuals produce an environment that affects any evaluation design and creates challenges and obstacles for evaluation teams. Identifying and devising strategies on how to handle these possible obstacles is crucial to the success of an evaluation.

2 Challenges in developing peacebuilding evaluations

2.1 Lack of Consistent Definitions

When evaluating peacebuilding programmes, one must examine a wider scale of influence than the immediate effect on individuals, institutions, or communities. Evaluators of peacebuilding programmes have to explore linkages with other sectors. The need for broader perspective stems from the fact that peacebuilding occurs in volatile areas with complex situations with numerous factors that can affect the level of impact that any given peacebuilding programme can have. For example, without taking into consideration an external factor that leads to a further outbreak in violence, an evaluation could falsely interpret the effectiveness of the programme design or the reasons for delays in implementation. This has prompted some evaluators to work to expand the definitions of the field of peacebuilding and of peacebuilders. Michael Lund, for example, argues that it is a mistake to assume that operating in any level of Lederach’s pyramid of intervention – bottom up, top down, or middle out– makes someone a peacebuilder and thus requires that this person has special criteria to be able to execute their specific part of the operation; conversely, being far from a narrow field, peacebuilding often requires the work of individuals in the process who are not peacebuilders (Lederach 1997). Projects targeting civil society groups, security organizations and military services for providing secure environments in a conflict also have peacebuilding impact and ought to be included in a definition of peacebuilding interventions. The lack of an agreed upon definition of what it means to work for peace or peacebuilding is a primary challenge in both designing and implementing as well as evaluating peacebuilding intervention.

The attempts at opening a wider definition presents further difficulties as to whether or not the project in question is solely a peacebuilding programme or if peacebuilding programming is integrated across all of the organization’s projects. For example, according to World Vision or Catholic Relief Services, peacebuilding input and design is expected to be a component of all their development projects, in addition to their direct peacebuilding programming. An additional challenge is defining sub-groups of peacebuilding, such as interreligious or religious peacebuilding which draws its inspiration and motivation from the beliefs, values, practices, and rituals derived from the scriptures of one or more faith traditions; uses the institutional platforms, networks, and resources; or leverages the moral voice and authority of religious actors (including the clergy and lay persons and organizations working in the name of the faith) to facilitate the creation of the conditions for peace and the prevention of violent conflicts in divided societies. Evaluating these different types of programmes requires different strategies. Furthermore, when peacebuilding is integrated into development projects, it tends to be carried out by programmers who are not necessarily trained in in peacebuilding frameworks and therefore have limited awareness of definition, meaning, and strategies of peace.

In addition to the difficulty in defining what constitutes a peacebuilding programme, the lack of a clear definition of “peace” in most peacebuilding programmes is a major challenge for evaluators. Of the evaluators interviewed for the study, 30 % mentioned that, conceptually, there is an inconsistent definition of “what builds peace” or conceptualization of what a good peacebuilding programme would look like in the field. Without a precise definition of how a particular intervention relates to accomplishing peace on a macro level, it is difficult for evaluators to link the programme’s outcomes with the way that people, donors, and organizers in the conflict context understand peace. Thus, evaluators can be torn between various conceptual approaches of “what constitutes peace?” As Mary Anderson states:

We don’t really know what constitutes a good peace programme, we don’t know what makes peace happen in any definitive way. Most assume, if one does peace, then you bring peace. We don’t have clear set of benchm...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction Evaluating Religious and Interreligious Peacebuilding: Meeting the Challenge
• Section 1 Evaluating Religious and Interreligious Peacebuilding and Dialogue: Challenges, and Implications
• Section 2 New Models and Tools in Evaluating Religious and Interreligious Peacebuilding
• Author Biographies
• Index