Reflective peacebuilding: a planning, monitoring and learning toolkit
Open, violent conflict slows, if not destroys, community development projects, and is often a primary reason that extensive emergency aid and relief programmes are needed. This toolkit aims to improve peacebuilders’ ability to be reflective practitioners. This involves enhancing peacebuilders’ capacity to design and impact transformative change, and track and improve upon those changes over time, in unpredictable conflict contexts. The tools presented in this document can stand alone or be added to established design, monitoring, evaluation and learning systems and practices. They focus on dimensions specific to peacebuilding work and provide practitioners with resources for enhancing their creativity in developing context specific learning, monitoring and evaluation systems.
The overarching theme of the toolkit is learning before, during and after implementation of peacebuilding programmes. The authors explore the connections between learning and effective peacebuilding practice, and suggest practices for reflection and learning as individuals and communities. Ethical considerations for monitoring, evaluation and learning are considered and the types of change that peacebuilding practice promotes examined. The tools are presented to enable readers to further understand change, as well as to develop indicators to trace those changes over time. The authors consider the importance of planning for long-term change and scaling up activities in addition to monitoring and evaluation practices. Additional areas addressed in this document include:
- theories of change in peacebuilding projects
- ethical dilemmas in evaluation
- ideas to help groups develop theories of change
- incorporating scaling up strategies into planning, monitoring and learning
- characteristics of a learning document
