'Une paix precaire' Promoting local ownership using adaptive approaches. The case study of of North Kivu in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Citation:
Alberti, Claudio, 'Une paix precaire' Promoting local ownership using adaptive approaches. The case study of of North Kivu in the Democratic Republic of the Congo., Trinity College Dublin, School of Religion, Irish School of Ecumenics, 2023Download Item:
Abstract:
In the early 2000s, almost ten years after its institutionalisation in 'Agenda for Peace' by Boutros Ghali (1992), peacebuilding entered into a crisis (Wiuff Moe and Stepputat 2018, 294) . The failure of ongoing and past peace operations raised questions about its relevance and effectiveness, leading to the development of new, adaptive and complexity-oriented peacebuilding approaches (de Coning 2018, 2020; Hunt 2020; Millar, van der Lijn, and Verkoren 2013; Paffenholz 2021; Randazzo and Torrent 2021). The adaptive approaches to peacebuilding lay their foundations in complexity theory and share a set of key characteristics. They acknowledge that peace is not a final status and peacebuilding is a process that cannot be implemented using a fit for all toolkit. The final aim of adaptive approaches is to strengthen societal resilience by facilitating and stimulating self-organisation so to allow conflict affected communities to better cope with future shocks. (de Coning 2018, 2020; Hunt 2020; Millar, van der Lijn, and Verkoren 2013; Paffenholz 2021; Randazzo and Torrent 2021).
This study aims to clarify where the adaptive approach is situated in the broader theoretical literature and to understand whether the approaches to peacebuilding implemented in the case study were able to promote local ownership at the community level and, if so, to what extent. It did so through the analysis of the case study of the International Security and Stabilisation Support Strategy (ISSSS) in North Kivu in the Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
In this thesis I analyse the Revised ISSSS based on the revision of six principles of adaptive peacebuilding (de Coning 2020) and explain why there are reasons to believe that it might exemplify the operationalisation of adaptive and complexity oriented approaches to peace. On paper, the implementation of the ISSSS was guided by an iterative process of experimentation and a selection of pilot interventions in priority areas. The decision to continue, discontinue, or scale up interventions was informed by the feedback from conflict-affected communities, implementers, donors, and local and national decision-makers in line with the adaptive approach conceived by de Coning (de Coning 2020, 851). However, this thesis shows that in practice adaptive peacebuilding principles are difficult to implement. The study engaged with a total of 148 community members from ISSSS target communities in North Kivu and 25 key informants from local elites, Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) representatives, and United Nations (UN) officials and consultants through key informant interviews and focus group discussions between November 2020 and March 2021.
The aim of the fieldwork was to understand how the strategy was implemented on the ground and to what extent the adaptive approach was operationalised and if its use was able to promote local ownership. Furthermore, the study aimed to understand what the implications of implementing peacebuilding interventions in the framework of a stabilisation strategy were.
The study proposes a framework to measure local ownership. The proposed methodology breaks down the concept into three main components: participation, the local decision-making agency, and sustainability. For each of those components, it defined expected results based on the expected outcomes as understood and formulated in the ISSSS.
Based on the data collected for this thesis, I argue that even though there is an increasing appetite for peacebuilding operations to be more adaptive, the analysed interventions were only partially adaptive and achieved limited results in terms of promoting local ownership at the community level.
This study identified the governance of the existing peacebuilding funding mechanisms and the need for a cultural shift in the way peacebuilding operations are conceived and implemented as some of the main barriers to the achievement of the expected results.
It emerged that while societies should be able to self-organise to cope with external shocks, in the context of the DRC, external support for the adaptation process was needed. These findings question the assumption underpinning the adaptive and complexity-oriented approaches to peacebuilding that societies will achieve sustainable peace by self-organising and building their resilience. I also found that the externally led adaptation process limits the promotion of local ownership at the community level as well. These findings contribute to the theorisation of adaptive approaches to peace and were functional to identify further areas for investigations in this realm. Among other, the need to further investigate the sensemaking process of conflict-affected communities and the role that external actors should play in adaptive peacebuilding operations.
Nonetheless, the ISSSS provided an example of how the UN is integrating peacebuilding interventions into stabilisation strategies. Despite this practice, the UN does not provide an institutional definition of stabilisation, causing it to take on different contexts, as shown by the ongoing operations in the DRC, the Central African Republic (CAR), and Mali. Currently, the prevailing approach to stabilisation in these settings is the holistic approach. To ensure consistency across operations and avoid the instrumentalisation of stabilisation, this thesis argues that there is a need for an institutional definition of stabilisation and to consult with conflict-affected communities when designing holistic stabilisation strategies
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Author: Alberti, Claudio
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Tannam, EtainPublisher:
Trinity College Dublin. School of Religion. Irish School of EcumenicsType of material:
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