Content area
Full Text
Evaluation and peacebuilding experts have been working together to encourage more and better evaluation of conflict prevention and peacebuilding programmes. Draftguidance has been produced and used over a two-year test phase to evaluate donor support for peacebuilding in southern Sudan, Sri Lanka, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti and elsewhere. This article looks at what has been learned from these experiences in terms of both policy lessons and how evaluation can be managed and carried out in these challenging settings. This series of evaluations has shown that progress is needed on a number of fronts - institutional, political, managerial etc. - to make development co-operation more effective in conflict affected and fragile states.
Introduction
The OECD Network on Development Evaluation and the International Network on Conflict and Fragility have developed guidance on evaluating conflict prevention and peacebuilding activities. The guidance has been used for evaluations in southern Sudan, Sri Lanka, the Democratic Republic of Congo and elsewhere.2 This article looks at what we have learned from these experiences in terms of both policy lessons and how to undertake evaluations in these challenging environments.
The need for a better approach to evaluation in conflict settings
The astoundingly high human, societal and financial costs of recent violent conflicts led to a marked increase in international interventions intended to avert or end conflict and strengthen the foundations for sustainable development in fragile states in the early 2000s (OECD and Collaborative for Development Action (CDA), 2007). At the same time, concern has grown over the efficacy and value of such efforts. Concerns about the performance of pro-peace initiatives were exacerbated as many countries once thought to be emerging from conflict slipped back into war. There is also mounting alarm about the lack of development results - including slow to no progress on the Millennium Development Goals - in conflicted affected states and countries with weak or failing governments (International Dialogue on Peacebuilding and Statebuilding, 2010).
Coupled with these concerns are a number of practical and methodological challenges which make evaluating these types of programmes difficult and resulted in a dearth of rigorous evaluations. Data are scarce, objectives frequently ill-defined and the logic underpinning interventions often murky - to name just a few of the barriers to evaluation...