Peacebuilding 2.0: Mapping the Boundaries of an Expanding Field

from NGOs that focus on working in conflict-affected
settings. 69 Additionally, “whole of community”
conversations on the field’s evaluation practices and
principles are occurring, translating into a real-world
system in which these practices and principles interact. 70
Despite this progress, however, further improvements
need to be made on structures currently in place
that support or hinder good evaluation practices and
learning at the organizational and aggregate field
levels. The latter will be particularly important as the
peacebuilding field expands its scope and presence
in the international development field. On a technical
level, measuring the success of interdisciplinary
ventures is more difficult than tracking change within
a narrower sectoral sphere. As peacebuilding moves
into other sectors and becomes a larger community
of practice, the evaluation methods and structures
currently in place will need to move and shift as well.
This may include using unfamiliar techniques, learning
from peer fields, and even changing the structure
of relationships among stakeholders in the field. As
daunting as this may sound, peacebuilding funders,
implementers, practitioners, and analysts have been
consistently willing, as seen during the Peacebuilding
Evaluation Project, to learn from each other, refine their
tools, and work toward better proof and practice.
69 Learning Portal for Design, Monitoring and Evaluation
(DM&E) in Peacebuilding, available at http://dmeforpeace.org
(accessed on August 16, 2012); OECD (2008); Church and
Rogers (2006); Lederach, Neufeldt, and Culbertson (2007);
Catholic Relief Services (2010); Allen Nan (2010); and Ross and
Rothman (1999).
70 In addition to the communities of practice that arise,
conversations among funders, practitioners, and analysts
include the Peacebuilding Evaluation Project. Started by USIP
and AfP in 2010, the initiative has resulted in joint consensus
and learning on the evaluation challenges of the field as
outlined in Blum (2011), Kawano-Chiu (2011), and the report
learnings from the first Peacebuilding Evaluation Evidence
Summit at USIP in December 2011 in Washington, DC
published in Blum and Kawano-Chiu (2012).
PEACEBUILDING HAS A DEEP AND
PASSIONATE FOLLOWING AMONG
STUDENTS AT THE HIGH SCHOOL AND
COLLEGE LEVELS.
Implications for the Education
of a New Generation
Peacebuilding has a deep and passionate following
among students at the high school and college levels.
Students can now major in peace studies at the
undergraduate and the certificate levels, and graduate
programs in peace studies are proliferating. 71 George
Mason University in Virginia now has one of the few
programs in the world elevated to a degree-granting
School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution (S-CAR),
a trend we predict will become more pronounced in
the broader field of peace and conflict studies. The
USIP report on the growth of graduate-level programs
in peace and conflict resolution explains that this
expansion in academic programs correlates with the
overlapping nature of peacebuilding practices across
sectors and a gradual recognition by agencies of the
importance of peacebuilding in their work (Carstarphen
et al. 2010).
However, even with this emerging awareness of
conflict-sensitive skill sets, very serious questions still
exist about the current disjuncture between the appetite
of students for nonviolent social transformation, the
71 Peace studies and conflict resolution, which once were
separate areas of study, have now become almost analogous
in many academic settings.
42 PEACEBUILDING 2.0 Mapping the Boundaries of an Expanding Field