The 2022 Thematic Review on Local Peacebuilding, commissioned by the UN Peacebuilding Support Office, in partnership with PeaceNexus Foundation and UN Volunteers programme, is informed by youth-led primary research in Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Kyrgyzstan and the Western Balkans, and explores how ‘local’ peacebuilding is conceptualized and approached, what factors enable or inhibit the effectiveness of local-level peacebuilding interventions, and how the Peacebuilding Fund and other donors can support local actors better.
Some of the recommendations include:
- Support financial independence and institutional strengthening of local peacebuilding partners for sustainability of project results by integrating income generation activities into projects, committing to longer-term and flexible funding mechanisms, or facilitating partnerships between local governments and local civil society.
- Strengthen country-wide stakeholder mapping with a focus on local conflict hotspots to ensure that selection of partners goes beyond the well-connected, capital city based national or local elite organizations, and extends to those who represent the spectrum of actors and social groups who are relevant to local conflict dynamics and populations.
- Connect with, mobilize, and recognize volunteers to help build sustainability, promote local ownership and leverage the networks and knowledge of local actors.
- Expand the use of participatory approaches to monitoring and evaluation, including ‘everyday peace indicators’, perception surveys and community-based monitoring and evaluation tools and processes to better measure local-level results and provide feedback for adaptation.
- Deliberately build local-national linkages into peacebuilding projects and sufficiently resource both levels of interventions, exploring ways in which local-level efforts can be catalysts for more structural or institutional change.
Access the publication here: Thematic Review on Local Peacebuilding.
To learn more, please visit www.un.org/peacebuilding/content/local-peacebuilding-2022.