Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning: Approaches for building resilience and sustaining peace

art by Victoria Nakada (Japan | USA)

Shanna McClain (NASA); Patrice Talla (Food and Agricultural Organization); Carl Bruch (Environmental Law Institute)

Improved integration of monitoring, evaluation, and learning approaches to peacebuilding could enhance the evidence base for resilience and inform future programming on building resilience and sustaining peace.

Context

In an effort to better understand security risks relating to economic, environmental, social, and political shocks and stressors, and the impacts from environmental peacebuilding initiatives to manage these risks, growing attention has been placed on integrating approaches for monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) into the peacebuilding processes. Persistent evaluation gaps and little to no evaluation activity in settings of violent conflict exist. Therefore, little credible information exists about the effectiveness and results of peacebuilding and conflict prevention efforts.[i]

When evaluations do occur, they are often focused on process and mapping of the context of conflict, leaving questions regarding causality inadequately addressed. This can weaken efforts focused on learning and accountability. Further, there is an urgent need to ensure that not only are humanitarian response and development interventions on track, but that they are not causing further harm by exacerbating inequalities and the fragmentation of communities, or by weakening unifying ties among conflict-affected areas.

What’s been done

Peacebuilding is a complex process focused on creating conditions for positive and sustainable peace by addressing systemic structures and causes of violence. The settings of conflict and fragility are intricate, combining multifaceted change processes with high levels of unpredictability, lack of information, and sometimes intentional misinformation. Though no two situations of conflict and fragility are the same, they can share some common characteristics and contextual risks (e.g., re-emergence of violence, disasters); therefore, finding effective ways to monitor, evaluate, and learn from effective peacebuilding approaches can improve resilience within impacted communities.

Monitoring and evaluation are often-conflated terms that refer to oversight functions providing information to understand performance, outputs, and accountability. However, there are important differences between monitoring and evaluation, particularly in the context of peacebuilding. Monitoring typically serves as a management function for measuring compliance, where evaluations are conducted independently to provide an objective assessment of the effectiveness of programs and specific interventions. Information gained from evaluating environmental peacebuilding approaches can provide evidence of what works or doesn’t and can validate specific actions to be scaled up or to determine which are most effective in particular contexts.[ii] Matching conflict interventions to outcomes can prove challenging; therefore, developing more consistent, extensive, and refined MEL tools can provide opportunities for accountability and learning.

Despite the opportunities for MEL in environmental peacebuilding, the process can be complicated by a number of challenges, including myriad actors and organizations that can add uncertainty and complexity to data collection and attribution, the often protracted nature of conflict and crisis settings—which can complicate the evaluation of effectiveness of particular interventions—the dynamic and insecure context, and the diverse and sometimes conflicting objectives and metrics used for peacebuilding interventions.[iii]

Looking ahead

There is much work to be done to advance the understanding of how to monitor, evaluate, and learn from peacebuilding initiatives effectively. Donor aid requires a focused shift from humanitarian response and short-term stability (i.e., cessation of hostilities) to a longer-term understanding of how interventions affect societal relations and prospects for developing a resilient, functioning, and legitimate state. Further elaboration of indicators and approaches to MEL approaches to peacebuilding are also needed, particularly where there is a bridge between environmental and peacebuilding indicators. It is also essential that evaluations prepare for risks, develop robust designs that integrate human and natural systems, and ensure sufficient flexibility to counter uncertainty and complexity experienced in conflict settings.

In addition to the development of more robust MEL approaches for environmental peacebuilding, institutionalization of these processes is also necessary. Because this process is often undertaken to satisfy donors and demonstrate effectiveness, there can be a reluctance to report honestly. However, if these processes become embedded programmatically, the cycle of improved learning, innovation, and scalability extend beyond a single programme to enable more systemic change. Recently, there has been a shift to focus more on theories of change rather than quantitative metrics, and to evaluate how a particular intervention contributed to a specific outcome instead of looking solely at attribution. Finally, to fully realize transformational peacebuilding, it is imperative that donors embrace risk.

Experience has shown that the international community tends to repeat mistakes despite sources of conflict varying significantly from place to place. Peacebuilding interventions may not always go as planned, but it is only through providing safe avenues to share failures that we can improve collective learning and adaptive responses.

[i] OECD (2012) ‘Evaluating peacebuilding activities in settings of conflict and fragility: Improving learning for results’, DAC Guidelines and References Series, OECD Publishing.

[ii] Nanthikesan, S., and Uitto, J. (2013) ‘Evaluating post-conflict assistance’, in ed. D., Jensen and S., Lonergan Assessing and Monitoring Natural Resources in Post-Conflict Peacebuilding, London: Earthscan.

[iii] Ide, T., Bruch, C., Carius, A., Conca, K., Dabelko, G., Matthew, R., and Weinthal E. (2021) ‘The past and future(s) of environmental peacebuilding’, International Affairs 97(1): 1-16.