Building Peace

Practical Innovations from USIP

 Building Peace no. 2 March 2012

Empowering Local Peacebuilders

Strategies for Effective Engagement of Local Actors 

in Peace Operations
Building Peace

Practical Innovations from USIP

 Building Peace no. 2 March 2012

Empowering Local Peacebuilders

Strategies for Effective Engagement of Local Actors in 

Peace Operations

Problem Identified

•	 Peacebuilding operations in conflict and post-conflict societies often undermine local 

capacity, ownership, and sustainability. The acknowledged remedy is to empower local

actors to take the lead in planning and implementing programs, but few empowerment 

strategies that work in practice have been documented and explained.

Action Taken

•	 Several organizations have reconfigured empowerment techniques traditionally used for 

peacetime development to work in societies emerging from conflict.

•	 Local actors have seized the chance presented by these new approaches to develop and 

implement their own creative solutions to conflict. Local ownership has in turn enabled the

integration of other sectors of society and government into peacebuilding activities.

Lessons Learned

•	 Focus on facilitating processes instead of trying to achieve specific outcomes. Successful

interventions help participants open channels to defend their own interests, with the

participants determining the final decisions and outcomes.

•	 Design programs to promote learning rather than to yield specific results. Effective

programs create opportunities for participants to seek out and absorb knowledge

critical to good decision making.

•	 Don’t be deflected by political pressures. Even well-known empowerment principles

(such as respecting local counterparts) can be sidelined if interveners do not prioritize

them above the kinds of political pressures typically encountered in conflict zones. 

The full text of this report is available at 

http://www.usip.org/publications/empowering-local-peacebuilders

United States Institute of Peace, 2301 Constitution Avenue, Washington, DC 20037
Contents

Introduction, A. Heather Coyne		 	 	 	 7

	 	 	 

Case Study 1 Getting the Right People into the Room:

The Burundi Leadership Training Program 15

Howard Wolpe and Steve McDonald

	 	 Advising Ministries: A Co-analysis Strategy 24

Nadia Gerspacher

Case Study 2 Research-Based Dialogue: Guatemalan

Dialogue on Security Sector Reform	 25

Bernardo Arévalo de Léon

	 	 Culturally Sensitive Engagement in 

 Bougainville 34

	 	 Iain Campbell Smith	 	 	 

Case Study 3 Mobilizing Community Decision Making:

The Iraq Community Action Program	 37

Sally Iadarola and Lindsey Jones

	 	 Peer Mentoring: Training for Entrepreneurs 

 in Southeast Europe 48

	 	 Peter Righi

Case Study 4 Building Collaborative Networks:

	 	 Independent Radio Network in

	 	 Sierra Leone	 	 	 	 	 49

	 	 Ambrose James

	 	 

 The Exchange of Skills: USIP Conflict

 Management Training in Pakisistan 57

	 	 Nina Sughrue
Main cover photo: Data collectors conduct a women’s focus group in the Niger Delta 

as part of a 2008 participatory stakeholder evaluation of community development 

agreements. Photograph by Paulinus Okoro. Used with permission by the Africa 

Centre for Corporate Responsibility.

Photo on page 5: Howard Wolpe, in Bakavu in eastern DRC, where he was attending 

a training for provincial and military faction leaders in Congo. Photograph by Michel 

Kassa. Used with permission by Michael Kassa.

The views expressed in this report are those of the authors alone. They do not necessarily 

reflect views of the United States Institute of Peace.

© 2012 by the Endowment of the United States Institute of Peace. All rights 

reserved.

The Building Peace series reports on innovative work by USIP that has practical 

applications for peacemakers and peacebuilders. The goal is to get useful knowledge 

into the hands of practitioners promptly. Some of the work reported in Building 

Peace is recent, some is ongoing. All of it has been tested, usually in the field, but 

this is work in progress and feedback is warmly welcomed. Please send all comments 

on this report to Nadia Gerspacher, a senior program officer in USIP’s Academy of 

International Conflict Management and Peacemaking, at ngerspacher@usip.org.

Case Study 5 Participatory Stakeholder Evaluation:

Evaluation of the Chevron, State Government,

and Community Compacts in the Niger Delta	 59

David Plumb

	 	 Adversarial Capacity Building 68

	 	 A. Heather Coyne

Conclusion: Keys to Engagement	 	 	 	 69

	 	 A. Heather Coyne

	 	 The Participatory Strategic Planning Index 82

Gary Bland

Acknowledgments	 	 	 	 	 	 83

About the Authors	 	 	 	 	 	 84

USIP Experts	 	 	 	 	 	 	 87

About USIP	 	 	 	 	 	 	 88
In memory of one of the leaders in the field of capacity building

for conflict management, Howard Wolpe.

The results of his innovative strategies and practices

can be seen in many places across the world.

Capacity building, local ownership, and sustainability—loosely captured in the almost

cliché term of “empowerment”—have long been core tenets for engaging local actors

in traditional development programming. These concepts have received prominence

in the discussion of interventions to prevent or resolve conflict and to rebuild societies

emerging from conflict. Across the spectrum of organizations involved in such peace

operations, from nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to civilian government

agencies to the military, it is virtually impossible to find anyone who does not claim

that these concepts are central to the design and implementation—and success—of

interventions. But for all the attention paid to the concepts of empowerment, the record

of successfully integrating them into interventions in conflict zones is distressingly

poor.

In many cases, that failure is due to the unique characteristics of conflict operations:

conflict environments are not conducive to traditional empowerment approaches;

agencies leading conflict operations often lack experience with empowerment

principles; and the intense scrutiny of highly politicized operations creates intense

pressure for immediate results that undermines empowerment strategies.

In large part, however, the failure to integrate empowerment into interventions is

due not to a lack of appreciation of the principles or to the constraints of working in

conflict zones, but simply to a lack of understanding of how to put them into practice.

How can interveners engage local actors in conflict zones in ways that promote

ownership, capacity building, and sustainability? What are the techniques for selecting

participants, establishing trust, encouraging awareness of common interests, building

collaborative networks, and facilitating participation in decision-making processes,

given the challenges and goals of peace operations? The lack of practical guidelines is

compounded by an incentive structure that rewards “disempowering” activities, so

even where good strategies are known, they often are not adopted.

This Building Peace report spotlights practical strategies for engaging local actors—

especially strategies that address the unique constraints of conflict operations. By

examining a series of case studies on creative engagement methodologies that seek to

empower local actors, this report draws out common themes and elements of effective

engagement. Although all practitioners know that interventions must be designed for

a specific context, basic elements—as well as respect for these elements in incentive

Introduction

A. Heather Coyne

• 7
8 • Empowering Local Peacebuilders

Building Peace No. 2

structures—can be incorporated into a variety of interventions. Such inclusion will

strengthen the ability of interventions to free the potential of local actors to drive,

manage, and sustain their own solutions to conflict.

The Challenge of Effective Engagement

The operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have highlighted the weaknesses in engagement

methodologies and practice. It is a matter of argument whether international interveners

have employed operations effectively even in traditional development contexts, but

results have been undeniably poor in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the vast majority of

activities in these counties, programming has not promoted local ownership, capacity,

or sustainability but rather the reverse. The consequent toll on resources, credibility, and

public support for operations has threatened the potential for success. Looking back at

other peace operations (a broad term that includes conflict management, peacemaking,

and stability and reconstruction efforts), one can see similar shortcomings.

The ineffectiveness of peace operations is partly explained by the dynamics of working

in conflict zones. A fundamental characteristic of empowerment is consultation. But

reliance on consultation is challenging in situations where interaction or association

with international interveners puts participants in danger. In addition, in situations

where power structures are violently contested, empowerment of local actors risks

strengthening one warring party to the detriment of another, feeding conflict, with the

intervention itself becoming another resource over which to fight.

Empowerment concepts have proven difficult for certain organizational cultures—

particularly the military—to adopt and implement. Peace operations in Iraq and

Afghanistan, and earlier interventions in the Balkans and elsewhere, have relied heavily

on military force, with military actors taking the lead even on economic and social

development activities. This dependence on military force has put empowerment at

risk because military organizational culture is often at odds with the requirements of

capacity building, local ownership, and sustainability. Military organizations value

swift action and results, values that conflict with the need to build processes and to

allow for individual and institutional learning over time. The U.S. military in particular

encourages “can do” and “take charge” attitudes. A can do attitude dictates finding

ways to achieve specified outcomes, often to the detriment of longer-term efforts to

build local support and decision-making processes, whereas a take charge attitude can

interrupt local leadership and undermine local ownership when military personnel

strive to get things done “their way.”

This mindset is not limited to the military; it is shared by civilian agencies eager for

immediate, reportable results in post-conflict reconstruction operations. Many agencies

involved in peacekeeping efforts have extensive relevant subject matter expertise but
Empowering Local Peacebuilders • 9

less familiarity with the imperatives of sustainable knowledge transfer. Cast in the

role of advisers and trainers, interveners often fall back on what they know best: active

involvement in shaping and directing policy outcomes at the expense of capacity

building.

Even those with extensive expertise in development and knowledge transfer—and

who should know better—feel the pressure in highly politicized operations to show

instant, easily visible progress. This pressure to show results is not a bad thing in

itself; the problem is pressure to show more results than can be achieved or results

that are ultimately counterproductive. For example, the U.S. Agency for International

Development (USAID) faced demands to change its traditional operating procedures

to accommodate the political exigencies of Iraq and Afghanistan and passed those

pressures on to its implementing partners. The scrutiny and pressure affected the

ability of organizations to conduct programming that supports local empowerment,

with amateurs and experts alike forced to short-circuit time-proven approaches and

principles. These pressures are not confined to Afghanistan and Iraq. Even outside

such highly politicized, high-pressure environments, conflict-related programming—

including conflict management, development, human rights, and democracy

initiatives—struggles to avoid the temptation of an excessive emphasis on delivering

speedy, superficially quantifiable results at the expense of sustainable empowerment.

Imposing solutions: U.S. soldiers in Baghdad explain a plan for relocating 

displaced persons. Photograph by A. Heather Coyne, 2003. Used with 

permission by A. Heather Coyne.
10 • Empowering Local Peacebuilders

Building Peace No. 2

Toward More Effective Engagement

Practitioners could debate endlessly whether the failures in effective engagement are

attributable to circumstances, organizational culture, or political will. But another, more

practical factor is at work that practitioners can more constructively address: how does

one actually engage effectively? How does one foster processes and dynamics that will

allow local actors to make and sustain their own decisions? Given the challenges of

conflict environments, the lack of familiarity of some organizations with empowerment

principles, and the constraints of the politicized operations, are there practical strategies

that practitioners can adopt to advance empowerment?

Plenty of information is available on how not to engage and what pitfalls to avoid;

for example, “Don’t assume that if you build it, they will come.” “Don’t sway local

prioritization by indicating which types of projects you want to fund.” “Don’t assume

that agreement with your proposal indicates commitment.” Much less exists in the way

of concrete guidance on how to engage local actors in ways that promote empowerment.

This Building Peace report attempts to move the debate beyond a recitation of the

importance of empowerment by exploring practical methodologies for capacity

building, local ownership, and sustainability. In includes case studies that describe

particular methods of engagement, documenting programmatic approaches for

selecting participants, establishing trust, encouraging awareness of common interests,

building relationships and collaborative networks, and facilitating participation in—

and ownership of—decision-making processes. The cases presented demonstrate

techniques to integrate local actors into every phase of a project, from initial conception

to planning, implementation, and evaluation.

This report does not provide an exhaustive list of approaches; the five cases featured

here are illustrative of the variety of engagement techniques that build capacity,

ownership, and sustainability. The cases were selected based on each implementer’s

conscious decision to prioritize active leadership of local actors above any other factors

such as speed, efficiency, or reach of the project. These implementers articulated a

methodology for deliberate empowerment and can trace outcomes and effects back

to the engagement techniques. Although all the cases use a combination of methods

to empower local actors, each case illustrates a key engagement methodology,

summarized below. The case studies are intended not to assess the overall impact

or success of the initiative but to describe approaches to engagement that build local

ownership.

The cases are mostly limited to a particular type of engagement: that of international

third parties bringing dedicated resources for social projects. It is hoped that this
Empowering Local Peacebuilders • 11

description of a few creative strategies will inspire further innovation for a wider range

of initiative types, including training, mentoring, and advising, technical assistance, and

grant making.

Case Study 1. Getting the Right People into the Room: The Burundi Leadership Training 

Program. Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars

Howard Wolpe and Steve McDonald examine the strategic selection and recruitment

of participants to develop buy-in to an initiative from the start as well as to ensure that

participants came to the program with the mindset necessary for it to succeed. The goal

of the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Burundi project was to build the collaborative capacity

of and trust between key leaders who had the ability to direct or influence Burundi’s

recovery and democratic transition, helping to create a network that could work

together across ethnic and political divides.

Case Study 2. Research-Based Dialogue: Guatemalan Dialogue on Security Sector Reform. 

Interpeace

Bernardo Arévalo de Léon presents a research-based dialogue approach to creating an

environment that allows for relationship building and for common interests to emerge.

Immediately after the civil war, the environment in Guatemala was antithetical to a

traditional dialogue between stakeholders. Interpeace organized a research project on

security sector reform that created a new, neutral space in society where constructive

engagement between the parties could take place.

Case Study 3. Mobilizing Community Decision Making: The Iraq Community Action Program. 

ACDI/VOCA

Sally Iadarola and Lindsey Jones describe a community mobilization process that

enables citizens to prioritize, select, and implement infrastructure projects to address

underlying drivers of conflict. Using local staff as mobilizers and involving local leaders

and government officials throughout the process, the Iraq Community Action Program

(ICAP) engages Iraqi communities in a decision-making process on what they can do

for themselves, building on their own strengths and contributing their own resources.

Outside support, although necessary, is structured in a way that does not dominate the

process.

“Creative strategies will inspire further innovation.”
12 • Empowering Local Peacebuilders

Building Peace No. 2

Case Study 4. Building Collaborative Networks: Independent Radio Network in Sierra Leone. 

Search for Common Ground

Ambrose James tells the story of the evolution of a successful, collaborative network of

local radio stations through the facilitation and gradual transfer of capacity. Search for

Common Ground supported the development of the network not through a directive

intervention but through continual encouragement, facilitation of communication

among members, and careful application of resources otherwise inaccessible to the

nascent group.

Unlike the other case studies, this example does not demonstrate a formalized,

articulated methodology as much as it validates a style of interaction—mostly handsoff, not directive, but continuous engagement with and encouragement of an organic

development process driven by local actors.

Case Study 5. Participatory Stakeholder Evaluation: Evaluation of the Chevron, State 

Government, and Community Compacts in the Niger Delta. Consensus Building Institute

David Plumb presents a participatory stakeholder evaluation designed to build the

capacity of stakeholders to shape and participate in decision making on community

development funds provided by Chevron Nigeria Ltd. The Consensus Building

Institute used a highly participatory approach in which stakeholders were directly

involved in and responsible for the design and implementation of the evaluation as well

as the analysis of results.

This Building Peace report also includes six feature boxes highlighting creative

techniques for engagement:

•	 A Co-analysis Approach. A co-analysis approach can enhance a training and

mentoring strategy in a fragile state.

•	 Culturally Sensitive Engagement. The Bougainville Peace Monitoring Group built

trust through music in the aftermath of civil war in Papua New Guinea.

•	 Peer Mentoring. The Center for Entrepreneurship and Executive Development

provides local mentors to train entrepreneurs in post-conflict areas of Southeast

Europe.

•	 The Exchange of Skills. The United States Institute of Peace’s (USIP) conflict

management training program in Pakistan fostered an environment in which

local actors could draw on expertise from external actors.
Empowering Local Peacebuilders • 13

•	 Adversarial Capacity Building. Coalition forces in Iraq used routine interactions

with local actors to strengthen local capacity to deal with authorities and create a

“safe space” for local actors to experiment with new roles and skills.

•	 The Participatory Strategic Planning Index. RTI International’s index is a tool for

evaluating the level of local participation in an initiative.

This collection of cases presents an opportunity to identify common themes and

elements that characterize effective engagement. This Building Peace report thus

summarizes themes for practitioners to incorporate into future intervention design.

All the programs presented here are characterized by an emphasis on process over

products: they enable the development of institutions and relationships—over

appropriate time frames—rather than trying to produce a predetermined result.

Local actors shape the outcome and often determine the nature of any final product

themselves. The studies also illustrate the importance of investment in learning by

participants, building respectful partnerships, and giving primacy to the local context.

Toward More Effective Institutions

Most of the cases presented here reflect an institutional commitment to the principles

of empowerment by the organizations behind the interventions. The methodologies

described were not ad hoc tactics but emerged out of long experience and gradual

recognition and incorporation of strategies that enhance those principles. Each

intervention was designed consciously and specifically to draw out local leadership

or an opportunity was capitalized on by individuals who were well trained in the

principles and applied them as a matter of course.

There is a reason for this. Sustainable approaches that build local ownership and

capacity are longer, harder, and less tangible in their results than short-term,

unsustainable approaches. Therefore, an organizational mindset and structure are

required that accept this fact; interveners must be willing to provide the sustained—and

restrained—support necessary to let the process reach its potential.

This does not mean that individuals cannot use empowerment strategies even if their

organizations do not fully grasp or adhere to empowerment principles. It does mean,

though, that without an institutional commitment behind them, practitioners are likely

to encounter resistance, impatience, or confusion about what they are achieving. They

risk being hijacked or pressured to speed up or take more “active” roles. Ultimately,

effective empowerment depends not only on the individuals incorporating or inventing

“All the programs presented here are characterized by an 

emphasis on process over products”
14 • Empowering Local Peacebuilders

Building Peace No. 2

engagement strategies, but also on their home organizations changing the way they

incentivize, measure, and judge success.

Taking this argument further, success in peace operations depends on changing the

mindset behind interventions. Although the debate on whether and how to undertake

major stabilization and reconstruction operations continues, most practitioners would

agree that intervention in conflict zones to promote governance, development, and

reconciliation is likely to be a standard feature of foreign policy in the foreseeable

future. Governments are therefore devoting more attention to building their own

capacity to conduct such operations. But these efforts tend to focus on the substance

of state building rather than on techniques for facilitating locally owned and managed

processes. Instead of training personnel to reform institutions and make new policy

for conflict countries, efforts should be focused on training interveners to be catalysts

for change. Interveners should be advisers who can facilitate processes in which local

actors take responsibility for changing their own systems in ways that they define

themselves; effectively build coalitions with other like-minded people; take advantage

of fair, inclusive forums to debate and pursue competing agendas; and draw on outside

expertise and best practices because they themselves see the value in using and refining

that knowledge for their own purposes. The role of interveners in peace operations

should not be to lead; it should be to empower the local population take the lead.
Case Study 1

Getting the Right People into the Room 

The Burundi Leadership Training Program

Howard Wolpe and Steve McDonald

• 15

Burundi offers a graphic illustration of a country whose leaders have, for decades,

seen themselves in the grip of a life-and-death struggle. A history of intercommunal

massacres, including genocide, combined with the postindependence domination of a

subset of the Tutsi minority over the majority Hutu population, have produced deepseated suspicions and mistrust among elites. Moreover, the country must contend

not only with an ethnically polarized urban leadership class, but also with a huge

gulf between the country’s “political class” and a deeply alienated, largely rural,

population.1

At the onset of the three-year political transition established by the Arusha Peace Accord

of August 2000, all four of the key political imperatives for a sustainable Burundian

peace and successful postwar reconstruction—a new interdependence-affirming

paradigm, trust among key players, cooperative political rhetoric, and consensus on

the rules of the game—were largely absent. Although there were plentiful examples of

grassroots reconciliation, at the leadership level there was little sense of common ground

among Tutsi, Hutu, and Twa. Trusting interethnic relationships were the exception

rather than the norm; notwithstanding their formal acceptance of power-sharing

arrangements negotiated in Arusha and afterward, the principal parties seemed to agree

that the rules governing the management of their interactions were exceedingly fragile.

Under the direction of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and with

the support of the World Bank’s Post-Conflict Fund and supplementary assistance

from USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives, the British Department for International

Development and the European Community, the Burundi Leadership Training Program

(BLTP) was designed and established to assist in Burundi’s fragile peace process. The

capacity-building program, originally funded for eighteen months, was a national

training program explicitly designed to build a cohesive, sustainable network of leaders

who could work together across all ethnic and political divides in order to advance

Burundi’s reconstruction. Rather than focusing on the acquisition of technical skills,

as other capacity-building programs tend to do, this program sought to build the

“collaborative capacity” of leaders. BLTP workshops featured training in interest-based

negotiations, communications, mediation, conflict analysis, strategic planning, and the

management of organizational change.
16 • Empowering Local Peacebuilders

Building Peace No. 2

The Strategic Challenge

The key to building collaborative capacity—and the primary challenge for the Wilson

Center and its local partner, the BLTP—is to get the right people into the room, that is,

key leaders within all social and institutional sectors who, by virtue of their formal roles

or their informal influence, could strategically impact, for better or worse, the course of

democratization and development.

Sometimes a single country or an international institution such as the United Nations or

the World Bank will have sufficient leverage to secure the participation of key leaders.

In other situations, a particularly credible neutral person or institution within the

society may kick-start the process. On occasion, however, it may be nearly impossible

to find a neutral third party, either within the country or within the international

community, with sufficient credibility and gravitas.

At the same time, the process used to identify and recruit key leaders must be seen not

as a process manipulated by external actors but as a process that is an accurate reflection

of the views of the protagonists to the conflict. In Burundi, the training program came to

be seen as “owned” by the indigenous parties and as a genuine partnership between the

parties and the international team mounting the leadership training program. Without

such local commitment, peacebuilding and conflict transformation efforts cannot be

sustainable.

The Wilson Center Burundi project created a “strategic selection process” to get the

right people into the room in a manner that built ownership over the training program

by the parties and ensured that the selected leaders participated in the workshops, not

to negotiate or posture, but to build their own capacities and relationships to move the

process forward.

Securing Burundian Buy-In

Two methods were used to obtain the broadest possible Burundian buy-in to the

project. First, the Wilson Center project managers held almost one hundred meetings

over two months with Burundians from all political perspectives—government and

civil society, as well as the military and rebel groups. The seriousness and credibility

of the proposed venture were enhanced in Burundian eyes by the project director’s

five-year involvement with the Burundian peace process as a special envoy, by the

World Bank’s financial sponsorship of the initiative, and by the neutrality and stature

of the implementing partner, the Washington-based Wilson Center. These consultative

meetings resulted in the endorsement of the BLTP by virtually all Burundian

stakeholders.
Empowering Local Peacebuilders • 17

Second, two Burundians were brought into the project management team at the

project’s inception—both highly respected and trusted individuals who enjoyed

the confidence of virtually all Burundian institutions and political factions and lent

immediate credibility to the initiative. Independent consultant Eugene Nindorera,

a former minister of human rights, brought to the project not only his considerable

personal stature and access to all factional leaders, but also exceptional political instincts

and an analytic grasp of Burundian political dynamics. BLTP office manager Fabien

Nsengimana, a former teacher and civil servant with extensive experience in the office

of the presidency, is, like Nindorera, one of the rare Burundians who has transcended

his society’s ethnic polarity and is accepted as an honest and trusted interlocutor by all.

Selecting Leaders Strategically

To achieve maximum possible impact in the shortest amount of time, the one hundred

leaders who were initially invited to participate in this initiative were strategically

selected. In the course of the project managers’ meetings with a broad range of

Burundian stakeholders, as described above, each institutional, faction, or constituency

leader, after hearing a full explanation of the project and the workshop methodology,

was requested to draw up his or her own list of leaders who he or she would most like

to see involved in the first workshop of the training program. Members of the initial

group were asked to nominate only persons who, by virtue of the positions they held

or the influence they wielded in their respective groups, had the capacity to shape

Burundi’s future. Because of the need to address simultaneously not only the ethnic

cleavage dividing Burundian elites but also the huge chasm between elites and the

country’s population, half the participants were drawn from the “political class”—the

government and the political parties, the army, and all the rebel organizations—while

the other half came from civil society (churches, women’s organizations, academia,

media, youth, labor unions, and the business community). The Wilson Center managers

asked the initial group to suggest names of political elites and civil society leaders from

across the political spectrum and to ensure an ethnic, geographic, and gender balance as

well. 

Members of the initial group were assured that their submissions would be treated

confidentially, shared only with the management team. The final responsibility for

participant selection would lie with the project managers, who would ensure that

the composition of every workshop group satisfied the need for ethnic, regional, and

gender balance as well as sectoral inclusivity. But the submissions would serve as an

important guide as to who Burundians believed were most capable of significantly

influencing their country’s future. The project managers received a large number of

responses to this request that which allowed them to draw up a database of almost four

“ The key to bulding collaborative capacity . . . 

is to get the right people into the room”
18 • Empowering Local Peacebuilders

Building Peace No. 2

hundred persons. A quick perusal showed individuals who were named repeatedly

as critical “players,” for better or worse. Included were some “spoilers,” individuals

seen by the international community as complicit in past negative actions or resistant

to change. When the project managers saw these names appear over and over again,

they decided to include them. These individuals were among those who were most

transformed by the training.

Framing the Invitations to Prospective Participants 

Invitations to participate in the project emphasized four themes:

• The invitee is one of a select group of around one hundred leaders identified by

other Burundians as individuals whose influence and stature are such that they

have the ability to shape the future of their country. Participants reported that

this framing underlined the importance of the effort and imbued the leaders with

a sense of responsibility to commit to the program.

• Leaders are invited to participate in their personal capacities, not as

representatives of organizations or institutions. This enabled participants to feel

freer and more open with each other within the workshops even though they

knew who the other participants were and what their affiliations were.

• The training workshops are not negotiating venues; rather, they are part of a

leadership capacity-building initiative designed to strengthen the individual

leadership skills of Burundian leaders. This formulation helped to depoliticize

the project, making it easier for people who had been demonized in the course

of their conflict to begin to re-engage with one another and providing an

excuse for those who resisted earlier opportunities for intergroup dialogue to

participate.

• The workshops will be private, with no publicity or press coverage. (Much later

in the process, participants decided to make the project public, but this

was after they had developed cooperative working relationships and wanted

to reassure the public that their leaders were working across political and

ethnic lines.)

Securing International and Regional Buy-In

Consultations were held with all donor governments and the regional governments that

were responsible for the transition established by the Arusha Peace Agreement. It was

important to ensure their full understanding of the objectives of the Burundi project and

to receive their analyses of evolving peace process dynamics. On the international front,

European powers in particular had been key players in the peace process and were,
Empowering Local Peacebuilders • 19

of course, potential donors down the line for expanding the work. The regional states

were still spearheading the application of the peace agreement—particularly Tanzania,

Uganda, and South Africa—or giving sanctuary to rebel groups—the Democratic

Republic of Congo, Kenya, and Tanzania—so it was important that all players

understood the complementary nature of the project and that the BLTP workshops

would never become an alternative negotiating venue. The project managers met with

the presidents of each of those countries, as well as other key diplomats and officials in

their facilitation teams, and found the South Africans particularly enthusiastic about

the training initiative, believing that this work with a diverse group of Burundian

leaders would complement and strengthen their efforts at facilitating further negotiated

agreements. The Tanzanians and Ugandans were similarly receptive.

Ensuring Program Sustainability

Burundians had extensive experience with well-intended training initiatives that lacked

any follow-through or sustainability. Project managers emphasized that the Burundi

process was designed not as a series of discrete training sessions but as a continuing

process directed to the development of a sustainable, cohesive network of Burundian

leaders. This issue was discussed openly with all the leaders and was often met with a

cynical response that leaders had seen donors “come and go” but never stay involved.

The project managers verbally assured the leaders otherwise, and the invitations to

participants underscored the fact that this was not to be a one-off event but rather

part of a process of leadership development and networking that would bring the

participants together every two or three months for exercises meant to broaden their

leadership skills and deepen their personal relationships. Over time, three groups of

participating leaders would undergo a series of workshops and then be merged into

a single leadership network with reinforcing social and professional interactions. The

participants probably were not sanguine that this transition would happen, but after

the second and third workshops, the project managers and training teams could see a

dramatic change in comfort of the participants and confidence that the Wilson Center

and BLTP were “in it for the long haul.”

To ensure that the transition to a leadership network was a realistic objective, the World

Bank’s Post-Conflict Fund provided start-up funding for a series of workshops that

would be organized over an eighteen-month period. In addition, project managers

received assurances from a number of donors who were involved in Burundi that,

as the leader-participants began to develop concrete projects of economic recovery

or other sector-specific capacity building (such as security sector reform or elections

preparations), additional funds would be made available for further training or to meet

other project resource requirements.

“Invitations . . . underscored the fact that this was not 

to be a one-off event but rather part of a process”
20 • Empowering Local Peacebuilders

Building Peace No. 2

Results of the Strategic Selection Process

The Burundi project succeeded in attracting an ethnically balanced and diverse group

of key leaders from virtually every social and institutional sector, government and

nongovernment, civilian and military. Because of the project’s intention to address

simultaneously both the ethnic divide within the political elite and the wide gulf between

the country’s political class and the rest of the population, BLTP participants were drawn

in almost equal measure from the political class and civil society. Participants from the

political class included a number of high-ranking military and political leaders, such as a

minister, the army chief of staff, a top general, the president of the Constitutional Court,

the first vice-president of the Senate, a former vice president of the country, a provincial

governor, and a number of parliamentarians. Six of the seven rebel groups were

represented, as were all the principal political parties. Even the National Liberation Front,

the one armed group still outside the peace process, said that it welcomed the BLTP

and hoped to join it once security conditions permitted. Civil society representatives

were drawn from academia, the media, the youth, business, labor unions, and several

grassroots relief, human rights and women’s organizations. Both the Catholic and the

Pentecostal churches were represented. Catholic participants included a bishop, a priest,

a nun, and the secretary-general of the Burundi Catholic Peace and Justice Commission.

Creating a Climate for Participation

Although the Burundi project succeeded in getting the right people in the room, it also

had the goal of fostering ownership of and interest in the training, and thus the first few

days were critical for cementing effective engagement of the participants in the process.

A principal training objective was to form a climate of mutual trust. Sustainable

agreements among competing parties require not only a sense of shared interests but

also a set of working human relationships. This means participants must consider

one another discrete individuals, not merely members of hostile groups; it also means

that each participant is able to put himself or herself “into the shoes of the other.”

In post-conflict societies, protagonists are familiar with each other—often they have

been schooled together, served in past governments, have familial connections, and

meet at the same club for drinks. But in reality, these people don’t really know each

other and assume characteristics or motivations about others that are born of distorted

perceptions, stereotypes, and known past affiliations.

During the first few days of the initial BLTP retreat workshop, virtually no reference

was made to real-world Burundi or to current political issues. This was intentional.

To begin with a discussion of Burundian problems and conflicts would be to invite

the participants to see each other in terms of their adversarial identities, a view that

would be counterproductive to the training objective of enabling the participants

to relate to one another as individuals, not simply as actors in an ethnically defined
Empowering Local Peacebuilders • 21

political conflict. The workshop would be a safe environment in which individuals felt

comfortable taking certain risks, opening up to each other, and exploring new ways of

relating to one another. After a few days of interactive communications and negotiation

exercises, including SIMSOC (simulated society exercise), there was a perceptible

lessening of ethnic sensitivities. As participants developed skills in active listening and

expanded their understanding of the conditioned nature of attitudes and perceptions,

they began to relate to each other as individuals and to identify common interests and

aspirations of which they were previously unaware. They were now able to turn to the

real world and to collaborate in analyzing common problems and identifying possible

solutions. Toward this end, a portion of every workshop was devoted to examining

analytic tools that could assist participants in developing effective decision-making

processes, diagnosing problems, and developing and implementing group projects.

There is no quick fix for the attitudinal and perceptual barriers that prevent leaders of

divided societies from working together effectively. Training for collaborative capacity

must be conceived of not as a single, one-off training event but, rather, as a long-term

process. No matter how much impact is felt in the initial training experience—and

often the transformational impact of a few days of training is dramatic—participants

inevitably return to the “real world,” in which others have not had such training

and have difficulty comprehending the altered mindsets of workshop participants.

Moreover, like all learning, the “learning” of collaborative decision making must

be constantly reinforced—by the practice of skills learned, by the strengthening of

relationships, and by actual collaborative initiatives. Otherwise, the new collaborative

capacity will erode with time.

A training for teachers on conflict resolution in schools in Ngozi, 

Burundi. Photograph by Elizabeth McClintock. Used with 

permission by Elizabeth McClintock. 
22 • Empowering Local Peacebuilders

Building Peace No. 2

Conclusion

According to both those who observed and those who took part, the Burundi project

has had remarkable success in breaking down ethnic and political barriers, building

social cohesion among training participants, strengthening collaborative capacities, and

boosting institutional transformation. Since the original World Bank grant, the Wilson

Center and BLTP have been asked to expand their work to encompass a wide variety

of security sector, parliamentary, and other government actors. Nearly 600 national

leaders from all these sections have now received the Wilson Center process training, as

have over 7,000 local formal and informal leaders. The members of the original network

of ninety-five continue to meet and work together, to socialize, and to collaborate on

a number of projects and activities. They have applied the lessons they learned—and

the potent example of their own collaboration—to the institutions with which they are

involved as well as to the broader society. In 2008, the Ministry of Education began

to develop a curriculum in conflict resolution for inclusion in the national secondary

schools’ civics curriculum. This project, funded by USAID, has engaged the pedagogy

bureau of the ministry, teachers, unions, and outside experts to develop and test

the curriculum, train teachers, evaluate impact, and prepare plans for a national

implementation. As of December 2010, the curriculum was fully tested in pilot schools.

More about the Wilson Center’s Burundi Project Methodology 

The Burundi project’s “strategic selection” methodology and subsequent steps 

to engage participants in the training was just the beginning of a comprehensive 

program designed to effectively engage local actors in capacity building. The training 

methodology for building collaborative capacity continued this emphasis on process 

rather than substance. The initial focus of the workshops was on strengthening 

participants’ understanding of the advantages of collaboration and the dangers of 

a “winner take all” mentality; building a degree of trust among participants; and 

strengthening participants’ communications and negotiations skills. The workshops 

used experiential learning methods—simulations, interactive exercises, mock 

negotiations, and role-playing—that were all designed to enable participants to 

acquire insight, through their own experience of reacting to a series of hypothetical 

situations, into the attitudes and perceptions that condition their behavior and that 

of others. In order to build collaborative capacity, participants, rather than being the 

passive recipients of knowledge, learned primarily by “doing,” by being immersed 

in hypothetical situations that confronted them with the same kinds of dilemmas 

and conflicts they would face in the real world. This methodology is a case study 

for engagement unto itself, and is presented in more depth in articles by Wolpe and 

McDonald in the Round Table and the Journal of Democracy.
Empowering Local Peacebuilders • 23

Building Peace No. 2

The importance of more holistic peacebuilding interventions that directly engage the

mind-sets and attitudes of key leaders is beginning to be recognized in several postconflict initiatives beyond Burundi—in such war-torn societies as the Democratic

Republic of the Congo and Liberia. In these places, the Wilson Center was invited by

diplomats and international institutions to employ its neutrality, leverage, and Burundibased experience in securing the participation of key national leaders from diverse

social and institutional sectors in training initiatives designed to build (or rebuild)

cohesion and collaborative capacity. These internationally facilitated efforts have been

directed not—as in Iraq—at imposing constitutional or political “fixes” conceived by

external interests, but rather at providing the key leaders of these divided societies

the tools with which they could themselves collaboratively build their own future.

In Burundi, the Wilson Center’s project and the creation of the BLTP, which is now

doing independent peacebuilding work, yielded quantifiable and rewarding results

that contributed to the democratization process. Although too little time has elapsed to

make definitive conclusions about this approach to post-conflict reconstruction in the

Democratic Republic of the Congo or Liberia, the initial indications are encouraging, so

much so that the leadership training model was extended to Timor-Leste at the request

of the World Bank and is now being considered for extension to other conflict zones.

Note

1.	 This case study is based on three publications: Howard Wolpe and Steve McDonald, “Burundi’s

Transition: Training Leaders for Peace,” Journal of Democracy 17, no. 1 (January 2006); Howard

Wolpe and Steve McDonald, “Democracy and Peace-Building: Re-Thinking the Conventional

Wisdom,” Round Table 97, no. 394 (February 2008): 137–45; and Howard Wolpe with Steve

McDonald, Eugene Nindorera, Elizabeth McClintock, Alain Lempereur, Fabien Nsengimana,

Nicole Rumeau, and Alli Blair, “Rebuilding Peace and State Capacity in War-Torn Burundi,”

Round Table 93, no. 375 (July 2004): 457–67.
Advising Ministries: A Co-analysis Strategy

Nadia Gerspacher

“If you don’t utilize the local capacity, it doesn’t matter how much you add from the outside.” 

This was how a senior Afghan ministry official summed up his experience with the international 

advisers sent to build his capacity to manage a ministry. The official had literally grown up in the 

ministry, working as an assistant to his father in the ministry when he was a child and holding 

several posts there over the years. But when the international advisers arrived, they never asked 

about his previous experience or his views on the challenges of building capacity; instead, they 

dictated an agenda that was in many respects inappropriate for the needs of the advisees, their 

ministries, and the country itself.

A former Iraqi minister registered similar complaints about the advising process, saying it lacked 

“understanding, compassion, and respect for what we went through and what we already 

know.” She felt that the technical support offered was too general and theoretical, as if advisers 

were assuming that Iraqis knew nothing about engineering. She believes that advisers should 

have talked with their Iraqi counterparts to learn what kind of engineering practice they used, 

identified weaknesses together, and created a team of advisers to address those specific issues.

Of course, ministerial advisers have their own side of the story, explaining that the ministries 

are often fundamentally flawed in ways that must be changed if they are to operate effectively 

and fairly, and that previous staff and leaders, with vested interests in the old approaches or 

who are unable to adapt to necessary changes, are obstacles to improving the system. Even if 

they are willing, local officials often may not have the skills and competencies to reach a desired 

outcome for their organization.

Co-analysis is a strategy for starting an advising, training, or mentoring process in a way that 

draws on local knowledge and skills, putting the advisee in an active role in shaping the transfer 

of expertise. This approach builds rapport with advisees and increases their willingness to 

participate in the mentoring process and accept new approaches, increasing the likelihood 

that they will take responsibility for implementing reforms in the ministry. At the same time, 

it improves the quality and relevance of the reform agenda and more efficiently aligns outside 

expertise with critical needs.

Co-analysis involves three steps. First, the adviser identifies the existing capacity of the 

counterpart by asking questions to identify necessary skills and assessing existing capacity. This 

is the equivalent of a training needs assessment, conducted in interview style. The adviser is 

trying to find out who does what, with what means, what the counterpart understands about the 

necessary processes, and how sophisticated the current approach is. Second, the adviser and the 

counterpart identify together the function and associated tasks required for a system to function 

properly. This conversation requires the adviser and the counterpart to come to some agreement 

about what “proper functioning” entails. Third, the adviser and the counterpart identify the 

specific knowledge and skills necessary for the learner to perform his or her function to the 

desired effect.

After or as part of co-analysis, the adviser frames what he or she has to offer in terms of 

expertise and support, allowing the counterpart to draw on the resources he or she considers 

valuable.

Co-analysis has not been used systematically as an approach to advising local ministry officials, 

but many advisers have integrated some of its concepts into their interactions with ministries. 

Both advisers and their local counterparts see a significant improvement in relationships and 

results when this approach is used.

Nadia Gerspacher is a program officer in the Academy for International Conflict Management 

and Peacebuilding at the United States Institute of Peace. She developed the concept of coanalysis for the course “Strengthening Local Capacity: Training, Mentoring, Advising” taught by 

the Academy.
Case Study 2

Research-Based Dialogue

Guatemalan Dialogue on Security Sector Reform

Bernardo Arévalo de Léon

• 25

The Guatemalan Peace Accords, signed between the government and guerrilla forces in

December 1996, established an ambitious and wide-ranging program for reform aimed

at addressing the root causes of the thirty-six-year violent conflict. A specific agreement

within the accords—the Agreement on the Strengthening of Civil Society and the

function of the Military in Democratic Society—was devoted to the establishment

of a series of reforms necessary for the effective transformation of the authoritarian

and counterinsurgent state security apparatus. By 1999, though, it was evident that

implementation of this agreement was lacking. The policies necessary to transform

it into a reality were lacking, in particular those relating to military reform and

demilitarization of the security apparatus.1

A series of factors produced this stalemate:

• Weakness and inconsistency of the civilian political leadership—government

authorities and political parties—in the design, negotiation, and implementation

of the necessary policies

• Mistrust, disorientation, disinformation, and varying degrees of resistance to

reform within the military

• Difficulties in the development of a constructive dialogue between authorities

and society and between the military and civil society, due to a legacy of

mistrust, polarization, and fragmentation and the inability of political parties to

play a mediating role

• Limited understanding and command by civilians—in state and in society—of

the technical aspects of security issues, which had been monopolized by the

military in the previous four decades

To overcome the stalemate, advisers recognized the need for a process that would

address these factors, fostering productive interaction between state and society and

achieving concrete recommendations that would be technically sound and legitimate.
26 • Empowering Local Peacebuilders

Building Peace No. 2

A Research-Based Dialogue Strategy

Recognizing that social tensions prevented a traditional dialogue among stakeholders,

a partnership of Guatemalan and international actors decided to launch a researchbased dialogue initiative to address these challenges. This approach had been used

successfully in the aftermath of the Guatemalan Peace Accords, when the UN had

implemented a research-based dialogue as part of its War-Torn Societies Project, which

became institutionalized as an autonomous organization known as WSP International

and later changed its name to Interpeace. The research-based dialogue approach aims

to create a new, neutral space in society so that constructive engagement can take place

even in the context of prevailing, reciprocal mistrust.

The research-based dialogue approach integrates a research methodology called

participatory action research (PAR). Designed in the 1960s to make communities

active participants in social research instead of targets of research, PAR uses research

activities to empower communities to engage in political activity and transformation.

The research is collectively owned by the participants, not by the researcher, who

eventually becomes an executing agent of the collective will of the group. WSP

(Interpeace) refined this methodology to support reconciliation by focusing on

inclusiveness and consensus and to build it into a wider approach of participatory

research-based dialogue. Such dialogue achieves not only consensus-based concrete

recommendations for outstanding problems but also transformations in attitudes and

perceptions that become the foundation for further collaborative interaction among

participants.

A research-based dialogue approach to Guatemalan security sector reform required

three major elements. First, to enable discussion of highly contentious issues, the

effort would have to be depoliticized as much as possible. This could be accomplished

by stressing the effort’s academic nature and focusing on mid- to long-term issues.

Second, the approach would need to create and sustain a perception of impartiality

by emphasizing procedural aspects. Third, the approach would need to make policy

recommendations nonbinding, preventing political posturing.

To achieve these goals, the project had to function as an autonomous space, established

by credible and trusted local institutions, endowed with its own rules and regulations

and subject to the collective authority of participants. This reality reflects the guiding

principle of Interpeace in peacebuilding interventions: that a local project team rather

than an international NGO play a third-party role. The local project team, and, more

important the process it puts in place, then becomes the “trusted neutral” instead of

the outsider. (The dynamics of building the capacity of that local team is therefore an
Empowering Local Peacebuilders • 27

engagement strategy in itself, but this strategy is not explored in this study, which

focuses instead on the role that the local project team can play in facilitating stakeholder

dialogue.)

In Guatemala, two research institutions, the local chapter of the Latin America Faculty

for Social Sciences (FLACSO) and the Guatemalan Institute for Peace and Development

(IGEDEP), had participated in an earlier effort to foster consensus around an agenda

for post-conflict reconstruction and reconciliation based on the peace accords. They

were familiar with the research-based dialogue approach and invited WSP (Interpeace)

to adapt its participatory peacebuilding approach to the challenge of security reform.

Together with WSP (Interpeace), these institutions created a project team to manage

the process and interface with the participants. The two local organizations provided

staff and institutional support for the project team, while WSP (Interpeace) provided

methodological support: advising on process matters, raising possible alternatives, and

providing experience from other projects.

The nature of the institutions was critical in establishing the depoliticized, academic

nature of the process. Even if not considered “neutral” in the context of the polarized

political life of Guatemala, FLACSO was recognized as one of the most serious research

centers in the country, with an active and prolific academic program dealing with

security and defense issues and a reputation for academic objectivity and excellence.

IGEDEP was a recently established think tank with a board of directors of highly

reputed personalities from different ideological orientations—social scientists,

lawyers, diplomats—interested in combating polarization and overcoming ideological

entrenchment. WSP International had a reputation of impartiality and objectivity

from its role in the earlier research-based dialogue. These organizations requested the

support of the UN Development Programme in operationalizing the project, therefore

providing further guarantees of impartiality and responsibility.2

But even in the context of a partnership with foreign institutions such as WSP

International and the United Nations Development Programme,3 the project functioned

as a wholly Guatemalan effort. FLACSO and IGDEP were fully in control of the process,

and design and implementation of the initiative were entrusted to the Guatemalan

project team. Emphasis on local ownership was strategic and addressed two issues: on

the one hand, it related to questions of impact, capacity building, and sustainability

that are pertinent to any peacebuilding intervention. On the other hand, it addressed

concerns of different participants—particularly the military—about discussing

contentious national security issues in an environment controlled by outsiders, or even

including foreign participation.4 The locally controlled nature of the project was more

acceptable to those actors.

“Even in the context of a partnership with foreign institutions 

. . . the project functioned as a wholly Guatemalan effort”
28 • Empowering Local Peacebuilders

Building Peace No. 2

Mobilizing and Balancing Participation

To be viable, the project needed to respond to the key interests and concerns of all

participating sectors. The military was concerned that the process would be turned

into an institutional lynching of the army by revenge-thirsty ideological adversaries,

but was interested in legitimating its function in the new context. The government

was concerned that the process could upset the delicate balance it had achieved in

its relationship with the army and its factions, but was interested in advancing in the

implementation of the peace agenda and curtailing increasing criticism in this respect.

Civil society institutions and individuals had a range of differing concerns and interests,

depending on their particular activity and sociopolitical outlook, but in general were

interested in turning the page on conflict and concerned about the continuation of

authoritarian practices by security forces.

FLASCO and IGDEP held discussions with national authorities and civil society

actors that mobilized strong support for the initiative. The military was approached

in coordination with national authorities in order to mobilize their will to participate

beyond formal compliance with executive directives by civilian authorities, a goal

achieved after eight intense meetings in which the aims, the principles, and the method

of the project were examined.

An important element in establishing the project’s objectivity and impartiality was the

development of a perception among participants that representation was “balanced,”

that is, that the different legitimate sectors with a stake in this issue had a rightful

place in the discussion and no sector had been artificially inflated in order to achieve

prefabricated coalitions. Another imperative in this respect was to reach out to different

sectors, including hardliners and spoilers, in the proceedings. The project team

started by doing a careful actor-mapping process—initial desk research followed by

extensive individual and collective interviews—that identified the issues, positions,

and actors around the agenda of transformation established in the agreement. The

project intentionally avoided limiting participation to those already convinced of the

need to agree or to “politically correct” individuals who would ensure the “right”

recommendations. The project team enlisted participation from key actors in state

and society gradually, so that by the time hardliners and spoilers were interviewed

and invited, the project was a fact and important figures had already committed to

participate, making missing out on the exercise undesirable.5

Invitations were extended on an institutional basis to governmental agencies (security

sector dependencies in the executive branch, congressional committees, and the

presidential secretariat responsible for implementation of the peace accords) and

civil society organizations (academic institutions and NGOs, including the human

rights community and organizations established by the former guerrilla movements).
Empowering Local Peacebuilders • 29

Individual invitations were extended to a group of personalities representative of

social sectors that did not have any institutional engagement with security issues—the

indigenous movement and the private sector—and to retired military officers who

represented different positions within the institution that could not be expressed by its

official representation.6 This mechanism was a lesson learned from an earlier experience

with national dialogue in which some groups were unable to participate because there

was no alternative to official institutional representation.

Using Procedures to Build Legitimacy and Capacity

The project team approached the procedural aspects of the dialogue not as technical

issues but as “political” components that consciously aimed to enhance the legitimacy

of the project and build the technical and conceptual capacity of the participants. The

overall methodological approach was shared with all interviewees at the moment

of invitation. This approach included the reason for an academic emphasis and the

nonbinding nature of the resulting products; its inclusiveness and participatory nature;

the structuring of technical working groups and the plenary, including decision making

procedures; and the use throughout of PAR principles. The impact of each of these

elements is explored briefly below.

Civil society and government representatives from several Latin American countries 

gather for a seminar on comparative experiences on security sector reform processes. 

Photograph by Alejandro Morales. Used with permission by Interpeace.
30 • Empowering Local Peacebuilders

Building Peace No. 2

The research-based dialogue approach was used to prevent politicization of the process

and to foster a noncompetitive dynamic. The academic nature of the exercise and

the nonbinding nature of its recommendations allowed extensive exploration of the

conceptual foundations of the issues before consideration on what had happened in the

past could take place or recommendations for the future could be contemplated, both

areas in which positions were highly politicized. Decision making on alternative policy

recommendations by the working groups was delayed until a common language had

been established, sufficient agreement had been forged on basic principles and goals

and a new, collective identity had emerged that united participants behind a common

purpose.

The selection and use of researchers and moderators for the working groups was an

important aspect of building legitimacy and capacity, and another lesson learned

from problems with the earlier dialogues. The project team selected researchers from

different sectors so that all participants could see themselves “represented” somewhere

in the research team. A researcher close to the military was selected for one of the

groups, while a vocal human rights NGO was asked to undertake the research for

another.

The assignment of researchers to each working group helped address the challenge

of conceptual and technical asymmetries between the participants regarding the

workings of security institutions in a democratic context. Researchers were able to set

an appropriate pace for the learning and decision-making process so that a collective

identity could evolve, and ensured that there was a shared level of understanding

before decisions were made. The groups began by discussing the most basic notions

of each subject in an effort to establish a common language and framework. The

researchers also served to validate nontechnical input and knowledge from the

participants so that all participants felt they had something to contribute.

The project team organized conferences and seminars strategically to ensure that the

input arrived at a moment when it could be absorbed by the participants. For instance,

a seminar on intelligence reform took place when the working group on democratic

controls was considering different options for executive, judiciary, and parliamentary

oversight and could engage in substantive dialogue instead of just passively listening.

Many of these events were intended to bring firsthand experiences from other countries

that had already reformed. Care was taken to include different perspectives—political,

military, and academic— in each case, thus ensuring that the different participants

could empathize with the presenters.

The working groups were asked to select by consensus a member as a moderator to

facilitate discussions. The intention was to challenge the group to engage in collective
Empowering Local Peacebuilders • 31

decision making from the outset. Although most working groups were able to agree

on a single moderator, one group resolved a stalemate between two candidates with a

decision to turn them into a moderation team.7 The moderators became critical elements

in the functioning of the group in the context of the PAR approach, representing the

collective will of the working groups vis-à-vis the researchers and the project team.

Rules of procedure were important in creating and maintaining commitment from

the participants. By consensus, the plenary approved specific procedural rules during

its first sessions, after discussion of draft rules of procedure prepared by the project

team. These rules included how issues were tabled for discussion; how research was

developed in the working groups; how proposals moved between the technical and the

political level; how to proceed in case of lack of consensus; and how institutions and

individuals presented their comments and make suggestions. Any proposed changes

or additions to the rules had to be referred to the plenary for approval. In one example

of its flexible approach toward maintaining consensus, the plenary created an ad hoc

working group as a mechanism to continue researching an issue that lacked sufficient

consensus for the full plenary to move forward.

The adoption of consensual decision making was significant. The military feared that

majority-based voting would put it at a disadvantage because as an institution, it would

always be limited to a single vote vis-à-vis an indeterminate number of civil society

organizations. Therefore, the dialogue adopted a consensual decision-making process.

This process forced the proceedings to long, sometimes exhausting discussions, both at

the technical and the decision-making levels. It also limited the scope of the proposals to

aspects in which real consensus had been achieved among participants, which in some

cases meant an agreement on principles more than on operational detail.8 In addition,

the process enabled a sense of shared ownership over the results to emerge; this sense

became a common asset, a key element in terms of the sustainability of the process and

its recommendations.

Conclusions and Lessons Learned

By 2003, the project had achieved concrete results in terms of the policy

recommendations it was pursuing, as well as in the development of conditions for

sustained engagement beyond the lifespan of the project. Several recommendations

went directly into policy-formulation processes. Even more importantly, the

dialogue on security issues continued in a variety of forums: an official process for

the development of a white paper on defense, an office liaising between civil society

organizations and parliamentary commissions, a civil society security advisory council

to the president, a national security system law.

 “The moderators . . . [came to represent] the 

collective will of the working group”
32 • Empowering Local Peacebuilders

Building Peace No. 2

The team learned lessons from failure as well as success. Although invited to engage

in the process, political parties chose not to do so, thereby limiting the project’s ability

to influence their political agendas. Consultations with party activists revealed that

the main reason for the parties’ nonparticipation was incompatibility between the

pace and rhythm of the project and the demands of political debate and legislative

work: politicians needed technical input for legislative work provided in a more agile

manner. This problem was resolved by designing a new project that included an

official agreement between Congress and Interpeace; by the terms of this agreement,

participant civil society organizations provided technical support to parliamentary

commissions working on security-sector legislation between 2004 and 2010.

Several conclusions can be derived from this experience:

•	 The project’s academic nature, its low public profile, and its focus on mid- to

long-term policies created a framework in which participants were able to

overcome political and ideological positioning and engage in a rational analysis

of the issues.

•	 The project’s neutrality toward the different institutional interests in state

and society, the balance achieved among participants, and a methodology for

incremental consensus building made possible the discussion of politically

sensitive issues and the formulation of concrete recommendations.

•	 The PAR approach mitigated the asymmetry in knowledge among the group

members and encouraged hands-on capacity building.

•	 Direct involvement of government officials in the process, at the working group

and plenary level, facilitated the channeling of the recommendations into the

public policy formulation processes, and illustrated for government officers the

value of collaboration with academic and other civil society organizations.

•	 The development of shared interests and the hands-on experience of

collaborative action constituted a confidence-building process that allowed

incremental progress, the development of new alignments and alliances, and the

formulation of a new consensus.

•	 The unobtrusive role adopted by the international actors that supported the

project (by providing methodological, financial, and political support to a

locally driven initiative) allowed a real sense of ownership to emerge among

participants and facilitated the internalization of the process and its products.

Notes

1. For a complete analysis of the project, including perspectives from participants, see Bernardo Arévalo

de Léon, Jose Beltran and Doña, and Philip H. Fluri, eds., Hacia una Política de Seguridad para la 

Democracia en Guatemala. Investigación-Acción Participativa para la Reforma del Sector Seguridad (Geneva:

DCAF- Lit Verlag, 2005).
Empowering Local Peacebuilders • 33

2. Funding for the project was provided by the United Nations Development Programme, USAID, the

government of the Netherlands, and the government of Norway.

3. For an analysis of the interaction between the project and UN efforts to support implementation of the

peace accords, see Jose Giupponi, “Developing National Capacities to Manage Democratic Security:

Relevance of WSP International Projects for MINUGUA’s Verification Mandate and Their Impacts

on the Implementation of the Guatemala Peace Accords” (WSP International, March 2006), available

online at <http://www.interpeace.org/images/pdf/wsp_and_minugua_march_2006_english_final

_draft_with_executive_summary_op3.pdf>.

4. Hardliner elements in the military believed that international intervention in national politics had

prevented outright victory over the insurgency and dictated the terms of the peace accords.

5. Invitations were made in the context of interviews with identified candidates on the nature of the

problem, the challenges, and similar topics.

6. Representing the political sensitivity of the moment, the government requested that an organization

of military veterans that was outspokenly attacking the peace process and the accords not participate

in the process. The army stated for the record that the organization should be invited because it

represented veterans, but off the record, the army asked the project not to invite the organization for

fear of endangering the delicate internal balance between competing army factions. The project team

subsequently invited retired army officers who were members of the organization on an individual

basis to ensure that the views of this sector would be considered, and invited the organization to

participate in its open events.

7. The project team provided training and technical support to the moderators, who also participated in

project team planning and review meetings.

8. The scope of the recommendations was different in each case, ranging from matters of principles in the

case of military doctrine to organizational details in the case of intelligence reform. For the full text of

the recommendations in Spanish, see <http://www.interpeace.org/index.php/publications/cat

_view/8-publications/14-past-programmes/19-guatemala>.
Culturally Sensitive Engagement in Bougainville

Iain Campbell Smith

Peace talks between Bougainville rebels and the government of Papua New Guinea brought an 

eight-year war of independence to an end. The agreement invited Pacific countries to send in 

a monitoring force to oversee the cease-fire on the condition that the force come unarmed. 

With soldiers and civilians from Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, and Vanuata, the Peace Monitoring 

Group, established and deployed to Bougainville in December 1997, was the world’s first 

unarmed peacekeeping intervention.

Iain “Fred” Smith, working part time in the Australian Foreign Affairs Department while 

beginning a career as a singer-songwriter, was deployed to Bougainville in early 1999. Although 

he was sent to Bougainville to monitor, report, and translate, he discovered, quite by accident, 

that his musical talents could be of service to the peace process. One evening, he was picking 

his guitar on the porch of the Peace Monitoring Group’s outpost in southwest Bougainville 

underneath the only light bulb in the village. Soon two hundred people had gathered out of the 

darkness to listen. He made up a song in the local pidgin language to engage the group; and over 

the subsequent weeks, he wrote more, until he had a repertoire. 

In the early phases of the peace process, the group’s main objective was to be present and 

visible on the island and to project positive messages about the peace process. The captain of 

Smith’s patrol team thought that a concert would be a useful excuse for the presence of the 

team in the villages, so he developed a patrol structure around Smith, his guitar, some stories, 

and a quartet of soldiers singing backup vocals. (Smith notes that the soldiers initially were 

wretched singers but improved with time.) The staff at headquarters were persuaded that 

these songs might be used to promote positive messages about the peace process and so sent 

over a recording desk and microphones. Working with local sound engineers and musicians, 

Smith recorded his songs and songs written by local musicians reflecting on their experiences 

of the conflict and the peace. These recordings were mastered onto Songs of Peace, a cassette 

of which twenty thousand copies were distributed around the island. The music became very 

popular, and the concept of using music to promote peace was integrated into Bougainville’s new 

community radio station, which featured reconciliation programming. 

In the aftermath of the atrocious civil war, Bougainvilleans preferred to address reconciliation 

through traditional local processes rather than through the truth and reconciliation commissions 

commonly used in post-conflict situations. The international intervention force, partly because 

of its unarmed status, partly because of its leadership and mindset of the participating 

institutions, had assumed a facilitative and non-dominating role and was eager to encourage 

local reconciliation mechanisms. Recognition of the role that music played in the Bougainville 

culture allowed the Peace Monitoring Group to develop a channel that engaged local actors in a 

way that resonated with their own traditions. 

In 2005, a documentary film called Bougainville Sky was released celebrating the role of music in 

what became an unusually successful peace process. The film pointed out that the music served 
Empowering Local Peacebuilders • 35

Fred Smith sings to schoolchildren in Bougainville. Photo by Corporal Troy Rodgers, 

licenced to and courtesy of the Australian Department of Defence.

a number of functions: it reached disaffected youth otherwise immune to messages smacking 

of didacticism; it contributed to a mood of mirth and optimism around the peace process; and 

it bolstered the image of the peace monitors and therefore the credibility of the peace process 

by breaking the ice between and among peace monitors, former combatants, and otherwise 

wary villagers. A successful peace process is ultimately about changing hearts and minds; in 

Bougainville, music was a major component of the triumph of that process. 

Fred Smith’s songs about Bougainville are on a CD called Bagarap Empires, which is available 

through <http://www.fredsmith.com.au>. Bougainville Sky is distributed by Ronin Films.

Case Study 3

Mobilizing Community Decision Making 

The Iraq Community Action Program

Sally Iadarola and Lindsey Jones

• 37

Peace is never successfully imposed by outsiders. However, outsiders can help create a

culture of peace through local empowerment processes; this fact has been successfully

demonstrated by a contextualized community-driven development methodology

applied in eight provinces in central and northern Iraq.

In 2003, USAID awarded ACDI/VOCA the first phase of a community-driven

development project in northern Iraq, the Iraq Community Action Program (ICAP).1

Now in its third phase, the goal of ICAP is to enhance local government’s ability

to identify, articulate, and better meet the needs of its constituency. By promoting

democracy and good governance, the program’s ultimate objective is preventing

and mitigating conflict while enhancing local capacity. In 2008, the World Bank

awarded ACDI/VOCA the pilot Consultative Services Delivery Initiative, followed in

2010 by the Consultative Services Delivery Project I and in 2011 by the Consultative

Services Delivery Project II,2 which are generally consistent with the ICAP process

described below. The current phase focuses heavily on embedding the process within

government ministries such as the Ministry of Planning.

The ICAP Process

ICAP is based on a structured process of community mobilization in which

citizen advocate groups jointly work with local government representatives on coimplementing activities such as projects, trainings, and public meetings. This process

builds on lessons learned in war-torn parts of the world, contextualizing a relatively

standard community-driven development methodology within a large geographic

region characterized by highly diverse security, cultural, political, ethnic, religious, and

linguistic environments.

What makes the ICAP process different from other community-driven development

approaches is the creation of community volunteer committees, called community

action groups (CAGs). These nonregistered, volunteer, nonpolitical local action

groups were a new phenomenon in Iraq. CAG members are democratically elected

representatives of their communities and include ordinary citizens as well as local

government representatives. Members work together to (1) identify community
38 • Empowering Local Peacebuilders

Building Peace No. 2

resources and gaps in resources; (2) prioritize local projects to fill resource gaps; (3) plan

and monitor project implementation; and (4) formalize government support for project

operations and maintenance.

ICAP Results 2003–11

§ 153 community groups mobilized in eight provinces

§ More than 2,600 community projects completed

§ Community projects valued at more than $75.5 million

§ Community/local government contributions of over $29 million to total 

project costs

§ More than 13,400 long-term jobs created

In Iraq, community-led projects span diverse sectors, including education, health,

water and sewerage, irrigation, electricity, business, and services, as well as youth- and

women-focused services. Each community construction, rehabilitation or supply project

costs, on average, $60,000. To encourage buy-in for sustainability, ICAP now requires a

cost-share contribution toward the cost of projects. Combined contributions, per project,

from local government, the private sector, and individuals have ranged from 20 to 43

percent.

The ICAP process applies teaching and learning methods that stress participation,

joint problem solving, local management, transparency, accountability, and respect

for differences. Community members and local government officials are able to put

peacemaking into practice when they use these strategies to implement local projects

for common benefit. Iraqis see for themselves the positive results of joint governmentcitizen activities.

This methodology is effective because it is easy to comprehend, is based on

volunteerism, and relies on empowered local actors as the primary agents of change.

Throughout more than eight years of refinements and significant scale-up of the

program, the core principles of the standard methodology remain unchanged.

How Local Actors Are Engaged

The first step in community engagement is selecting target communities based on

criteria that correspond with the goals of the program. For example, “communities

prone to conflict” was one of the initial selection criteria for ICAP. As ICAP goals

changed to focus more on local government decision making, criteria were expanded to

include the presence of basic “local government capacity.”
Empowering Local Peacebuilders • 39

Building Peace No. 2

ICAP Initial Community Selection Criteria

Criteria Justification

High population of impoverished 

or vulnerable citizens

Reaches the most vulnerable 

people

Access to economic and natural 

resources (agriculture, oil, 

minerals)

Achieves meaningful results toward 

self-sufficiency

Area comprising heterogeneous 

social, cultural, or religious 

mix and with a history or 

potential for conflict

Targets areas with greatest 

potential peacebuilding impact and 

challenges; targets those whose 

opinions are likely or important to 

be positively influenced; targets 

those living within Transfer 

Disputed Territories (TDTs) 

Communities within close 

proximity to others or serving 

as a transportation hub

Facilitates potential clustering 

of projects and enables smooth 

implementation

Activities and programs of 

other donor organizations

Provides complementary and 

not overlapping benefits to the 

communities

Once community selection criteria are identified, ACDI/VOCA staff create an initial

profile, based on input of staff, government representatives, civil society organizations,

as well as from the donor, of potential target communities to determine which

communities best fit the selection criteria. Based on this, ACDI/VOCA staff select the

communities with which to partner.

ACDI/VOCA project staff then improve community profiles by conducting site

visits, assessments, and data collection using elements of a participatory rural (or

urban) assessment methodology. These expanded profiles include information on

access to basic public services and employment and, in security-permissive areas,

local governance characteristics, social capital/trust characteristics, and conflict

characteristics.

Community profiles are periodically updated in coordination with local government

offices, whose involvement is critical. Public-private involvement in this process plays

a key role in improving relations between community members and government

and linking community priorities with public funding, political support, government
40 • Empowering Local Peacebuilders

Building Peace No. 2

strategies, and local development plans. Although ACDI/VOCA staff in the past

solicited information from local government representatives for these profiles, under

ICAP phase three, staff now encourage CAG representatives to conduct community

assessments themselves in consultation with community members, government sources,

and other donors to update the profiles.

Direct engagement of the broader community begins by gaining the support and

assistance from the communities’ most influential natural and elected or appointed

leaders. In ICAP, this is often the mayor and district or subdistrict council chairperson/

other local councilor. Leaders are generally motivated by the possibility of donor

funding to support services and infrastructure improvements for their communities and

the prospect of enhanced citizen support for their leadership.

Once support for ICAP participation is assured, ACDI/VOCA staff and the initial

contacts agree on a time and place to hold a community-wide meeting, during which

community members elect a volunteer committee or CAG, composed of nine people.

Under the current phase of ICAP, CAGs include at least two women and two members

who are also part of the local council. Careful attention is devoted to ensuring that

community meetings represent the major demographic groups in the community, with

staff explaining the need for broad representation. The mayor and/or other leaders

invite community members to this meeting. In some cases, the mayor or other leader

asks each staff member to invite several people from different representative groups,

including tribal groups.

The presence of local tribal leaders at the initial meeting is important to gain the trust

of the broader community. The ACDI/VOCA staff introduces the program, CAG

concept, and the community project process, after which a participatory resourcemapping exercise is introduced. Resource mapping is an asset-based as opposed to

a needs-based tool. The exercise begins with drawing a map of the community. The

community members are then asked to identify which resources are available, rare, and

missing or nonexistent in their community. Resources may include electricity, water,

schools, hospitals or health clinics, irrigation system, community halls, playgrounds,

and veterinary services; they are normally identified by sector (e.g., education, health)

and are drawn on the map in the approximate location. To conclude this exercise,

community members are asked to prioritize these resources by need. They then elect a

nine-member CAG.

The resource-mapping exercise is used to gain and maintain momentum—to trigger

community pride in existing community assets as a basis for identifying gaps and to

convey the tangible positive benefits that the community action program participatory

process, with its associated community projects, can bring to the community. The

mapping exercise also provides a platform for identifying and planning projects later in

the process.
Empowering Local Peacebuilders • 41

During the activities of the initial community meeting, project staff play a key role in

building the motivation of community members-at-large to actively participate in the

process on a volunteer basis. ICAP is a program primarily implemented by Iraqis for

Iraqis. The ratio of expatriate staff to national staff at any given time is approximately

one expatriate for thirty-five national staff. Staff members known as “community

mobilizers” are selected, in part for their outgoing and energetic personalities but also for

their understanding of government processes and management experience. Mobilizers

must be perceived as sincere in order to connect with and secure the participation of

other community members. ACDI/VOCA selects mobilizers from within the community

in which they will be working, where possible. A factor for successfully mobilizing

communities is the message that there will be tangible benefits from the projects selected

through active participation of community members with local councils. ACDI/VOCA

offers examples of successful projects led by other CAGs. The resource-mapping

exercise, in which citizens voice their concerns, identify problems, and suggest solutions,

also encourages active participation and bolsters enthusiasm for sustained engagement.

How Local Actors Are Empowered

The ICAP approach to CAG capacity building includes community development

orientation and formal training complemented by a “learning-by-doing” approach

through participation in the community project planning, implementation, and

monitoring/evaluation cycle. Throughout the project cycle, CAG members participate

in a stepped program of training packages designed to equip them to (1) participate in

project proposal reviews; (2) effectively communicate project status to the community;

Ramla Al Obaidi (third from left), a member of the Kirkuk Community Action 

Group, discusses community priorities during training on advocacy and 

coalition building. Used with permission by ACDI/VOCA.
42 • Empowering Local Peacebuilders

Building Peace No. 2

(3) work with the community and local government to ensure that local contribution

commitments to total project costs are met and documented; (4) ensure that projects are

properly implemented, used, and maintained; and (5) understand government funding

processes and how local government-citizen coalitions can work strategically with

higher levels of government.

Specific skill sets in which CAG members are trained include project design, proposal

preparation, contracting, recordkeeping, leadership, basic conflict resolution, publicprivate partnerships, and monitoring and evaluation. All CAG members volunteer their

time. They receive training at no cost, but normally must take time off from their regular

work to attend the training and project-related activities, such as project site monitoring.

CAG member participation in the ICAP, as discussed in the following section, gives

participants the opportunity to practice the skills learned in formal training. This

“learning-by-doing” approach to capacity building emphasizes the process of project

development in addition to the quality and impact of the end product, that is, the

community project.

How the Project Is Implemented

CAGs develop project ideas into formal project proposals in concert with ACDI/VOCA

staff and relevant government technical staff and officials. For example, construction

projects require planning and oversight by a project engineer and often the approval

of an engineer from the corresponding government department. CAGs participate

in feasibility planning for the identified projects and then develop a proposal and

budget and gather the necessary documentation and government approvals and secure

community or local government contributions as in-kind cost-share. Once the proposals

are complete, they are submitted to the project review committee comprising ACDI/

VOCA staff from program, monitoring and evaluation, procurement, engineering, and

finance departments.

At a project review committee meeting, CAGs present their proposals, which are

reviewed, discussed, and approved or approved pending completion of documentation

(if certain information is missing or further proposal or budget development is

required). . Project evaluation criteria include community need for the project,

expected impact, feasibility, project cost, long-term sustainability (including project

holder’s technical ability and commitment to maintain the project), and community

support/ financial contribution. Once approved, community projects are implemented

through competitively selected local contractors under strict bidding, procurement,

and contracting guidelines spelled out in a project procurement manual.3 Because
Empowering Local Peacebuilders • 43

ICAP operates in a conflict environment with weak rule of law and high levels of

corruption, ACDI/VOCA maintains full control of all funds and procurement processes.

Communities have control over the use of funds only. CAGs remain involved in

the project during implementation through project monitoring and evaluation in

coordination with technical project officers and local government partners.

Once the project is completed and evaluated, and all contracts are finalized, ACDI/

VOCA transfers the project to the community. Hand-over of completed communitylevel projects is typically accompanied by official ceremonies to celebrate democratic

efforts on the part of CAGs, communities, and local governments working together

and to foster continued commitment to joint ownership of the project. This joint

participation and recognition of the project has been very important in strengthening

citizens’ confidence in the local government’s commitment to address their needs. It

also highlights to officials the community’s expectations for government accountability

and responsiveness in the maintenance of the project.

Lessons Learned

The success of the ICAP process validates the contextualized community-driven

development methodology. Lessons learned continue to be integrated into the ICAP

through a feedback loop and will serve as points of reference for future projects in other

conflict-affected environments. This section describes several keys to success based on

our experience.

Focus on Process

ICAP emphasizes a process of community mobilization and project development.

Delivering a quality project that meets gaps in essential resources in the community

occurs in tandem with building the capacity of CAG members and community

stakeholders, including the local government, to implement the process on their own

in the future. This multistep process with CAG members and the local government,

who are required to interact at various steps, demonstrates that results can be

obtained quickly within the framework of government bureaucracy when projects

are jointly identified, well-planned, clearly presented, and closely monitored. ICAP’s

process-driven approach results in the increased capacity of community members

and project stakeholders to adopt quality standards and jointly advocate for more

stringent government monitoring of community projects generally. We have begun to

see this process transferred to community investment projects wholly funded by the

government.

“Because ICAP operates in a conflict environment . . . 

ACDI/VOCA maintains full control of all funds”
44 • Empowering Local Peacebuilders

Building Peace No. 2

Conduct Resource-Mapping and Community Assessment Exercises

The resource-mapping exercise prompts community members to assess their resources,

infrastructure, and services and to prioritize the community’s resource gaps. At a

community-wide meeting in the presence of local government officials, the exercise is

one of the first opportunities for community members to express their needs to officials.

ACDI/VOCA trainers later prompt CAG members to expand upon the resourcemapping exercise during formal trainings. The graphic and comprehensive nature of

the exercise—which involved depicting spatial relationships and using colors to reflect

emotions attached to different institutions—provides a rich canvas easily understood

by everyone, even those with little formal education. The mapping exercise helps Iraqis

recognize that they have something of value they can build on and puts front and center

the notion that this is an Iraqi program that will succeed, or not, because of Iraqis—a

concept reinforced by the fact that the project staff is predominantly Iraqi. In addition,

the exercise provides an opportunity for community members to identify resourcebased conflict drivers within their community, even if not explicitly stating them as

such. This is a natural outcome of the activity because it compels community members

to analyze the effects of scarce or missing resources in their community and prioritize

their needs based on that analysis.

Secure the Contribution of Local Government

The interaction between CAG members and local government, during negotiations

for government project contribution and advocacy to state ministries to operate

and maintain the project after completion, is not simply a means to funding. These

interactions, as well as joint training, partnership conferences, and public meetings,

build local partnerships, leadership, and awareness of what is possible under

a democratic framework as well as forecast what citizens can expect from their

government when they systematically ask for government help to address resource

gaps. Over the life of the ICAP, we have learned that potential delays in receipt of

government contributions can be avoided by addressing the issue with government

officials early in the community project planning phase.

Consistently Apply Transparent Policies and Procedures

For effective management of a community project, clearly established programmatic

and administrative policies and procedures must be in place and enforced. ICAP

benefited from adhering to the following processes and procedures:
Empowering Local Peacebuilders • 45

§ Creating a systematic project cycle structure that can be learned easily and

followed smoothly; the cycle covers feasibility planning, proposal and budget

development and evaluation, documentation from local government and

stakeholders, measurement of project impact and reach, and communication

flow and protocols

§ Establishing transparent tendering processes, contracting, and coordination of

payments

§ Clearly defining cost-sharing between the community and local government and

guidelines for determining value and documentation

§ Conducting regular site visits to monitor project status and contractor

performance and providing regular internal updates/reports on project status

§ Ensuring clear security protocols, coordinated with transportation and logistics

procedures, and conducting ongoing security assessments

§ Introducing community project cycle management tools in the context of broader

funding opportunities

§ Continuously streamlining project procedures adapted to local political

dynamics and current government policies

Optimize Training Results through Training of Trainers, Joint Citizen-Government 

Training, and CAG Mentoring

Formal training for CAG members is a core component of the ICAP process and is

strengthened by the application of interactive participatory planning and management

tools with both CAG members and staff present, which contributes to joint learning and

practice. Training the trainers also enables established CAGs to transfer skills in project

management and citizen advocacy through mentoring of new CAGs. This is carried out

through joint training events where established CAGs showcase their results and talk

about their strategies both formally and informally. Joint trainings with government

representatives and CAGs, initiated in the third phase of ICAP programming, have

proven to be especially effective.

Encourage the Participation of Women and Youth

The ICAP process encourages the participation of women and youth in CAG

leadership where culturally acceptable. The increased emphasis on women in the third

phase of ICAP has resulted in 140 female CAG members out of a total of 773. When

participation is not culturally acceptable, ACDI/VOCA has developed alternative ways

“Clearly established programmatic and administrative policies 

and procedures must be in place and enforced”
46 • Empowering Local Peacebuilders

Building Peace No. 2

for the opinions of women and youth to be expressed. Two of the more successful

tools are breakout resource-mapping exercises and summer youth camps. In some

areas, after the first resource-mapping exercise was conducted, women and men were

divided to conduct resource-mapping exercises without the presence of the other sex.

Summer youth camps provide young Iraqis of both sexes with opportunities to learn

about democracy, governance, and tolerance skills in a participatory and enjoyable

environment. ACDI/VOCA has also developed youth apprenticeship programs,

coordinated by CAGs, which give young people opportunities to develop their technical

and professional skills while positively influencing the attitudes of youth and parents of

youth about employment options.

Adopt a Decentralized Operational Approach

ICAP’s decentralized approach to operations has been critical to its success.

Decentralized teams comprising engineers, program officers, and monitoring and

evaluation staff work out of one primary office and five satellite offices. With three

major ethnic groups and languages (Arab, Turkman, and Kurd), and different levels

of security present, operations had to be decentralized and human resource policies

contextualized. Certain areas were unsafe for staff from particular backgrounds, so we

proactively recruited a diverse staff to ensure that communities were supported by staff

who could work without risk of harm. Experience dictates that staff members need to

be reassigned to new communities from time to time to diffuse possible misperceptions

that they may be favoring one ethnic or tribal group over another.

Use National Staff as Community Mobilizers

ACDI/VOCA considers its national staff—as many as 250 at any one time—a key

resource in the community mobilization process. Many communities where ICAP is

implemented are in areas that are unsafe for international staff as well as nonlocal

national staff. Hiring national staff indigenous to a community builds trust within the

targeted community; trust is critical for community engagement. The value of national

staff to the community mobilization process should not be underestimated—national

staff should be invested in to the greatest extent possible. More women are being hired

as community mobilizers, which it is hoped will help raise the level of active female

participation on CAGs as well as representation in local government.
Empowering Local Peacebuilders • 47

Building Peace No. 2

Notes

1. The second and third ICAP phases were awarded in 2007 and 2008, respectively. ICAP’s geographical

area currently includes Diyala, Kirkuk, Ninawa, and Salah ad Din provinces of central and northern

Iraq. Previous phases included three provinces under the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG)—

Sulaymaniyah, Dohuk, and Erbil—and an additional non-KRG province—Al Anbar. Total project

funding through October 2011 was over $150 million.

2. The Consultative Services Delivery Initiative was carried out in the KRG province of Sulaymaniyah

only. Total project funding was $1,050,000; Consultative Services Delivery Projects I and II awards

were $5,000,000 each.

3. CAG members, members of community working groups, and project stakeholders are not allowed

to interfere in the competitive bidding process in any way. Any changes in project specifications

once a project is awarded are strongly discouraged; if changes are absolutely necessary, they must

be submitted in writing. Companies related in any way to CAG members are strictly forbidden to

participate in tenders.
Peer Mentoring: Training for Entrepreneurs 

in Southeast Europe

Peter Righi

The Center for Entrepreneurship and Executive Development (CEED) provides entrepreneurs 

and their executive teams in Bulgaria, Romania, Macedonia, Slovenia, Kosovo, Montenegro, 

Serbia, Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Armenia with the know-how and networks they need 

to accelerate the growth of their small and medium-size enterprises. With support from USAID, 

CEED was established by the Small Enterprise Assistance Funds (SEAF), a global investment firm 

focused on providing growth capital and operational support to businesses in emerging markets 

and those underserved by traditional sources of capital. 

CEED uses Top Class, a fee-based nine-month program that includes mentoring, coaching, 

entrepreneur-led training, and business-building networking sessions. In this situation, Top Class 

leveraged insights from more than 100 interviews with new and experienced entrepreneurs in 

the region, as well as from successful practices deployed at the USAID-sponsored U.S. Russian 

Center for Entrepreneurship. The program is led by successful local entrepreneurs who provide 

both the credibility and the connections that new entrepreneurs seek. Top Class participants 

put a high value on interacting with mentors/trainers with similar experiences who understand 

the environment. In the opinion of participants, entrepreneurs who have successfully mastered 

the challenges of the markets they face have more credibility and could offer more relevant 

strategies than entrepreneurs from outside the region. Moreover, Top Class participants are busy. 

If they dedicate time to the program, they want concrete returns in terms of enhanced ability 

to attract financing or secure new customers. The mentoring and associated networking sessions 

with other local entrepreneurs in Top Class provide this opportunity—an opportunity that a 

mentor from outside the region would be unlikely to provide. 

CEED charges between €1500 and €2500 for the Top Class program, depending on locale, a 

relatively high price in a region where free and highly subsidized programs predominate. Data 

and experience show that fees must be imposed for the program to be judged valuable. Fees 

also challenge CEED to deliver on its promise.

Stefan Furlan, CEO of Optilab, is a Slovenia Top Class participant. Optilab helps companies 

manage fraud using high-technology products and solutions. Furlan won the 2009 Ljubljana 

Elevator Pitch sponsored by CEED, in which ten entrepreneurs competed to succinctly (in less 

than five minutes) present their companies and/or business proposition to potential investors. 

Furlan’s CEED mentor was the sales director from Hermes Softlab, a well-known Slovene 

software firm. Through interactions over the course of a year, it became evident that Optilab’s 

antifraud software would have broad applications and could be valuable to Hermes Softlab. 

The two parties ultimately signed a joint venture agreement for the development of product 

by Optilab for Hermes Softlab. The mentoring relationship allowed them to get to know one 

another, develop trust in one another, and eventually work on a project together. Furlan felt 

that his experience was a testament to the value of Top Class, explaining that not only did it 

help him better position his company, but it also provided the opportunity to meet individuals 

with valued local experience who could help him find new business opportunities.

The legacy of conflict in the region has left many business leaders with a noncollaborative and 

distrustful mindset. Top Class challenges this mindset by creating a community of entrepreneurs 

that enables co-operation and translates into stronger, more successful businesses.

Peter Righi is global director of the Center for Entrepreneurship and Executive Development, 

http://www.ceed-global.org.
Case Study 4

Building Collaborative Networks 

Independent Radio Network in Sierra Leone

Ambrose James, Search for Common Ground

• 49

In 2002, Sierra Leone began the transition to a stable democracy with an election

that marked the finale of a peace process started in 1996. Sierra Leone’s history of

problematic elections motivated a number of different domestic and international

actors to collaborate in order to ensure that the 2002 elections would be free, fair,

inclusive, and transparent. With assistance from Search for Common Ground (SFCG),

this collaboration culminated in the Independent Radio Network (IRN), a group

of radio stations that jointly subscribe to a code of conduct, and produce and share

elections-related programming. SFCG played the role of a convener and supporter

of the gradual development of the network, helping stations to identify common

interests and providing resources as necessary to overcome obstacles and limitations.

As the members of the network realized the benefits of the coalition and took greater

responsibility for the activities of the network, SFCG steadily reduced its involvement,

but continued to encourage the network members to achieve the full potential of the

initiative.

Cooperation on Election Day Reporting and the Birth of IRN

In the build-up to the elections, elections watchers were concerned about transparency

on polling day and how the results of the voting would be shared with the public.

This was potentially a major problem for Sierra Leone, where the communication

infrastructure was poor or nonexistent, roads were decrepit, and large areas of

the country were out of touch with the capital city, where the National Electoral

Commission (NEC) was based.

SFCG convened a meeting with various players in the information sector to discuss

their respective roles on polling day. Those players included staff from the Ministry

of Information, the Sierra Leone Broadcasting Service (SLBS), independent FM station

managers, the UN Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL) Public Information Unit, and

Thompson Foundation/DFID (a bilateral agreement with the government had brought

Thompson Foundation to Sierra Leone to conduct extensive training of journalists).

It quickly became apparent that there were no coordinated efforts for disseminating

voting information. Although both SLBS and UNAMSIL had established elections

offices, they did not appear to be coordinating with each other or with the other players.
50 • Empowering Local Peacebuilders

Building Peace No. 2

SLBS was planning to rely solely on the NEC for its updates, whereas UNAMSIL

planned to collect information from its network of soldiers and offices around the

country. The Ministry of Information and the NEC disagreed about who was in the lead

in regards to disseminating information. SLBS, the national broadcaster, was perceived

by many to be progovernment and unable to provide unbiased coverage.

SFCG noticed that the independent FM stations were frustrated by the lack of

leadership and coordination, but were excited by the originality of reporting on election

day and saw a niche to provide objective coverage. SFCG offered to serve as a venue for

a meeting of just the station managers.

In this meeting, the independent FM station managers explored what was possible

for them to do regarding election day reporting, considering their limited personnel

and resources. The managers believed that elections were crucial to strengthening

stability and democracy and that nonpartisan coverage of the results was essential.

They agreed that reporting about election day should be consistent and independent

of the government, and they understood that collaborative reporting provided

protection, which would also maximize the minimal resources they had available.

Andrew Kromah, executive director of Media Foundation for Peace and Development

and owner of two FM stations, as well as a radio engineer with experience in setting

up community radios, proposed linking stations together to provide an independent

broadcast coverage of election day. SFCG provided the communication equipment

needed for this step, but its primary role was to bring people together and facilitate

conversations to encourage the exchange of ideas, helping to build consensus on the

way forward, and documenting and disseminating the conclusions. As the SFCG

director put it, “If no one was facilitating, all the ideas would be gone.”

Excitement about the project intensified as planning proceeded. The station managers

recognized the need for the initiative to have its own identity, to distinguish it clearly

from other initiatives like those of UNAMSIL and SLBS. After debating a number of

names, the group decided that the issue of independence should be brought to the fore

and decided to call the effort the Independent Radio Network (IRN). The group created

a coordinating team, with representatives from the stations and SFCG, charged with

ensuring that all logistics, training, and accreditation were in place.

Coordinated Planning

In subsequent meetings, discussions centered on coordinating the implementation of

a joint broadcast. Taking into account the different constituencies, range, and signal

strength of the different stations, the managers decided that the stations in Freetown

would all broadcast the same election day information, which would be aired through
Empowering Local Peacebuilders • 51

one particular station. That station had wide coverage and listenership in Freetown

and was centrally located, and its frequency could be captured by all the Freetown

stations. SFCG’s office in Freetown provided the facilities for a central news desk,

making available telephone lines, a generator, computers, conference lines for on-thespot broadcasts, and Internet connections to enable posting of results to a participating

web news outlet. The three Freetown stations would have a joint editorial team working

at this news desk for twenty hours per day. From the reporting, SFCG would prepare

in its own studios to provide national election summaries that would be played at

key points during the day. Another broadcast in the format of a magazine program,

produced in two fifteen-minute segments, would allow for coverage of breaking news.

The coordinating team delegated responsibilities to each station, meeting regularly as

election day approached. Radio Democracy, the Freetown coordinator, was responsible

for interacting with the NEC and the deployment of reporters in Freetown. KISS FM

104, the Bo team leader, was responsible for engineering. SFCG took responsibility for

logistics and national deployment as well as operations in Bo. Instead of trying to cover

all five thousand polling stations, the coordinating team decided to deploy reporters

to the twelve district headquarters and bigger cities that would collate the results from

each district. SFCG staff augmented the 112 station staff deployed across the country.

The team also assigned coordinators for the largest areas, with SFCG backstopping.

In planning discussions facilitated by SFCG, a consensus emerged that the group

should take steps to ensure that all reporters clearly understood their role and knew

how to focus their coverage. The coordinating team agreed to hold two training

The IRN Road Show visits Makeni, northern Sierra Leone, in 

March 2007. Outdoor broadcasting provides a platform for 

diverse public voices on elections issues. Photograph by Ransford 

Wright. Used with permission by IRN.
52 • Empowering Local Peacebuilders

Building Peace No. 2

workshops in which SFCG would provide technical training to prepare the reporters for

their work and an agreed-upon code of conduct. The workshops detailed the objectives

of reporting and finalized planning for the operation. SFCG and the coordinating team

developed a checklist and guidelines for reporting and personal conduct and provided

final details on the modalities of reporting, such as how reporters would cover their

different polling stations, when to call in, and what information to convey.

On election day, reports from the network of reporters in the provinces were fast and

furious, with the network staff racing to keep up with the flow of information. The IRN

aggregated results from individual polling stations and provided analysis on trends in

each region.

At the end of the day, the coordinating team hosted a reception to celebrate and to

recognize the efforts of all members of the network, highlighting the importance of the

initiative. With SFCG’s assistance, the team conducted a short evaluation with the key

players to ensure that lessons learned would be incorporated into future collaborative

work. The FM stations began planning how to build on this experience for independent

national reporting, along the lines of National Public Radio in the United States.

Expansion of IRN Programming 

The positive experience with reporting on local council elections inspired the station

managers to continue their relationship, in particular, to monitor the activities of the

new parliament. SFCG continued to facilitate conversations among the mangers to

encourage the sharing of new ideas. The managers thought that it was important to

follow up on the electoral campaign promises and development agendas of the elected

parliamentarians. The five members of the IRN decided to coproduce a program called

Parliament Bol At (a local term referring to the dome of the Parliament Building, with the

connotation that it has a view of everything that Parliament does). The program was

designed to enhance the link between parliament members and their constituencies,

and the editorial board ensured that the program addressed issues relevant to the

communities of each member. Two producers, supported by SFCG, produced two

thirty-minute programs that were to be played simultaneously on the five stations, with

the radio stations providing free airtime. An editorial board composed of three station

managers oversaw the process. The program was very popular; many parliamentarians

sought out the producers to share their thoughts on current issues. The production of

Parliament Bol At thus created new incentives for the stations to work together.

When local council elections were scheduled for 2004, the IRN started planning its

coverage, recognizing in discussions facilitated by SFCG that a legitimate electoral

result at the local level was vital to the authority of the decentralization process. When

the voter registration process got off to a very slow start, the five member stations
Empowering Local Peacebuilders • 53

discussed with SFCG how to enhance the process of participation. The network

determined that it needed to expand its geographical reach. Given the proliferation of

new radio stations and their expressed enthusiasm for joining the network, IRN invited

five stations to join, which gave it coverage equal to or surpassing that of the state radio

network. These ten stations were organized according to the 2002 elections model,

with stations linked together to create a national broadcast. The stations pooled their

resources (radio station equipment, staff, production expertise) with SFCG to enhance

the public information available on the decentralization process, voter education, and

the roles and responsibilities of local councils.

The success of the local council election reporting encouraged members to take steps to

expand the network’s activities. They agreed to produce an elections follow-up program

similar to Parliament Bol At, a five-part series on the first 100 days of district and town

councils. The program would cover both individual councils in the provinces and

overall trends and issues from a national perspective. It was produced by IRN members,

drawing on local coverage, and aired on all the member stations, further strengthening

the network by providing a national outlook on regional issues.

The advantages of the network in providing effective programming on the transition to

democracy were clear:

• The synergy of programming enabled members to cover events, trends, and

processes across the entire country, a huge task for which individual stations

lacked capacity. Stations generally have low-capacity transmitters that cover

limited areas. The network reached large populations in all regions.

• The contribution of inputs into the network programming extended the reach

of each station. In a sense, the voices moved from provincial to national as they

were heard in all corners of the country. The public respect and trust for the IRN

enhanced credibility, and the public profiles of many small stations were raised

in the process.

• As member stations continued interactions and spoke with a collective voice,

they found that a high level of unity had developed among them. Stations that

had operated as lone organizations began to share experiences and challenges,

leading to the exchange of resources at crucial times. The country-wide

deployment of staff for election coverage exposed many reporters to parts of the

country outside their traditional bases. This enabled them to know the country

better and to report in a more informed and professional way.

SFCG’s role in this process was not to drive the development of the network but to

identify opportunities for collaboration and to create a forum in which the stations

could engage each other and recognize common interests. As the stations became intent

on collaboration, SFCG provided capacity that the stations lacked in terms of facilities,
54 • Empowering Local Peacebuilders

Building Peace No. 2

resources, and expertise, and gradually backed away from a leading role as the stations

developed their own capacity.

Formalizing the Network

From 2004 to 2006, the IRN formalized the network. The members convened a general

assembly to document lessons learned for future operations and appointed a national

coordinator to administer the network. Much later, the general assembly appointed a

six-person board of local and international experts that would support IRN’s strategic

direction, fundraising, and vision and created a strategic management team made up of

local board members to support the coordinator. Recently, the general assembly agreed

to decentralize coordination and authority. The elected four regional coordinators (one

each from the north, east, south, and west) from its membership to assist the national

coordinator and to reinforce ownership and collaborative decision making.

IRN Code of Conduct and Ethics Committee

As the IRN expanded, members recognized a need to put in place clear standards for

reporting. With SFCG’s technical assistance, the network developed a code of conduct

that station boards and managers were required to sign and follow. The IRN formed

an ethics committee to ensure compliance with the code; this committee comprised

representatives from each region and two prominent and credible citizens from outside

the network. Any stations applying to join the network had to submit a formal letter

to the national coordinator, with the ethics committee vetting applications and making

assessment visits to applicants and a final review by the general assembly.

The ethics committee instituted monitoring mechanisms, traveling around the country

to monitor station compliance with the code of conduct. SFCG provided some support

for the travel expenses for these visits, but the committee members’ home stations

absorbed the cost of their time. The committee held meetings with both station staff

and the community to provide training on appropriate reporting behavior and to hear

complaints, reporting any problems or violations to the general assembly for action.

This internal monitoring mechanism was very effective—all the stations wanted

to avoid being named and shamed—or even suspended from the network—for

infringement of the code.

Solidarity and Political Cover

Perhaps most significantly, the network created a sense of solidarity and a mechanism

for protection against intimidation by local politicians by showing that even small,

potentially vulnerable stations are part of a larger network and can draw on its support.

For example, there were a number of conflicts between newly elected local councils

and some IRN members about reporting and editorial policies, especially reporting on
Empowering Local Peacebuilders • 55

accountability. The IRN, with the Sierra Leone Association of Journalists, was quick to

intervene in clarifying roles and responsibility and protecting member stations from

political capture. In addition, the network’s national programming structure took direct

responsibility for reporting out of individual stations’ control, thereby shielding stations

from reprisals.

Rotation of the General Assembly

As the membership expanded from ten to sixteen members, the IRN decided to rotate

general assembly meetings among the member stations. The rotations made each

member station feel an equal member of the network and provided an opportunity for

board, management, and staff to meet communities and explain the role of the IRN. An

IRN visit stimulated pride and excitement among individual communities that their

local stations were involved in a national, high-profile effort. Furthermore, the rotation

encouraged station representatives to travel outside their own area to other parts of the

country. The high visibility of the visits also reinforced the solidarity of the network to

politicians who might be tempted to pressure individual stations.

Efforts to institutionalize the network created the structures and processes needed for

the IRN’s continued expansion and professionalization. SFCG’s role throughout this

process was to highlight the opportunities and advantages of networking, pointing out

areas in which the group could enhance its professionalism and providing institutional

options and models for the group to adopt.

Capacity Building for New Programming

In November 2005, SFCG hired Developing Radio Partners (DRP) as consultants with

the goal of creating a plan for developing the community radio sector that included

professional development of the station and a structure to secure sustainability. DRP

worked with affiliated radio and television production personnel from the private and

public sector, community members, government and NGO officials, print journalists,

and media stakeholders to develop a strategy for strengthening a national network. The

IRN used the recommendations of the report as a road map for its development.

In early 2006, the IRN received donor funding through MFPD (a founding member

of the network) to provide a central hub for gathering news stories from around the

country and making the stories accessible for broadcast by local radio stations. The

IRN, which had until then used SFCG facilities, set up office space provided by MFPD,

recruited production staff, and moved program development from the SFCG site to the

new IRN studios under the supervision of the IRN national coordinator. The network

adopted a policy that member station staff would work in the central production hub

on a rotating basis as a way to build program production and digital editing capacity as

well as to ensure diverse voices on the national broadcast.
56 • Empowering Local Peacebuilders

Building Peace No. 2

A key recommendation of the DRP was to build the capacity of the IRN leadership

and its affiliate station staff. The network wanted to produce a national news program

based on community station reporting that would be broadcasted back to communities

through the network. In response to that interest, SFCG hired a consultant to coach

station staff on nationalizing community radio news reports, launching the IRN National 

News. Produced from the IRN studio, the sixteen IRN stations contributed stories to

each weekly program, helping to consolidate the community radio sector, improve

the watchdog role of the news media, and end the isolation felt by many Sierra Leone

residents who knew little about what was happening in other parts of their country. The

show used a magazine approach to maximize the reporting knowledge at community

stations without relying entirely on limited upcountry station capacity to produce audio

field reports. The stations submitting news items were always identified, preserving the

program’s grassroots character.

2007 Elections and Future Directions

As the 2007 presidential and general elections approached, more stations applied to join

the IRN and membership expanded to twenty-one members. The IRN began developing

its election day strategy six months prior to the elections from its new base and studio,

collaborating with both SFCG and the NEC. The IRN national coordinator and the

strategic management team directly supervised the rollout of the strategy. The network

continued its general assembly meetings and created a platform for the membership

to set priorities for issues around the electoral process at both the national and the

regional level. Afterwards, local and international observers described the elections as

transparent, free, and fair. The IRN was a significant factor in this success.

With the success of the 2007 election coverage, the IRN shifted its focus to providing

objective and diverse reporting for the 2008 local council elections and an initiative

to promote women’s participation in local elections; it eventually adopted a focus on

postelection violence and the development plans of the various councils. In terms of

institutional development, the IRN continues to expand its membership to achieve

the benefits of diversity, and supports emerging stations to obtain licenses. In April

2009, the IRN set up a website (<http://www.irnsierraleone.org>) to boost its profile,

membership, and work. It is equipping station staffers with the advocacy skills required

to engage regulatory and policy institutions and expanding the operating space for the

IRN and the media as an institution. As the 2012 elections approach, the membership

has expanded, with four new stations bringing the total number of members to

twenty-five. The IRN has also developed a comprehensive media strategy for this

crucial election that has been shared with various stakeholders. The IRN is building

relationships with other media stakeholders such as the Sierra Leone Association of

Journalists, the Community Radio Network, and the Independent Media Commission,

and is looking at ways to share its networking model in other countries.
Exchanging Skills: USIP Conflict Management 

Training in Pakistan

Nina Sughrue

Seeking to emulate USIP’s success in building networks of facilitators in Iraq and Afghanistan, 

USIP’s Academy for International Conflict Management and Peacebuilding began in 2009 to 

develop a network of conflict managers in Pakistan. The goal for the Pakistan program is to 

develop a self-expanding network of Pakistani civil society leaders, journalists, law enforcement 

personnel, local government officials, private-sector leaders, religious scholars, academics, and 

lawyers who will conduct conflict management training workshops, organize local dialogues, and 

mediate disputes throughout the country.

Working with a local partner, the Sustainable Peace and Development Organization (SPADO), 

the Academy has (as of early 2012) conducted four workshops for approximately ninety-three 

Pakistanis from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), Sindh 

Province, and Karachi. 

The training sessions were treated as an exchange of skills, with USIP trainers learning from 

their Pakistani counterparts as well as sharing their own techniques. The Academy worked with 

participants to strengthen their training and mediation techniques and to facilitate a process in 

which participants advise each other, opening the doors for increased collaboration among the 

diverse set of actors. In between USIP-funded workshops, SPADO keeps track of the group and 

interviews network members on their conflict management and training work; details of their 

activities are then published in a newsletter that is distributed to network members as well as 

to like-minded organizations in Pakistan. The newsletters have been an essential tool in keeping 

the members engaged and connected. To date, five newsletters have been published.

During the first workshop, Academy trainers presented modules that covered such subjects as 

conflict analysis, negotiation, mediation, problem solving, facilitation techniques, and how 

to train others in these skills. The workshop was highly interactive and included role-playing 

exercises and group work. 

Because conflict is so culturally specific in Pakistan, Academy trainers wanted to ensure that 

the participants would relate to the subjects they had just been taught, take ownership of the 

materials they had been given, and build relationships among themselves. Therefore, at the end 

of the first workshop, participants were broken up into seven groups and—as a form of homework 

to be completed before the second workshop—each group was asked to put together a training 

module on one of the topics taught in the workshop. An agenda group was also created and given 

the responsibility of coordinating with the other groups. SPADO met regularly with the groups to 

ensure that they stayed on track during the intervening months. 

At the second workshop, which was run by the agenda group, the groups effectively trained one 

another, each group presenting its module to all the other participants.

The third workshop was an advanced mediation workshop. The workshop covered advanced 

conflict analysis, conflict ripeness, mediator readiness, and problem-solving skills. After every 

training module, each participant used a worksheet to apply what he or she had just been 

taught to a conflict in his or her community. Participants were then divided into groups, in which 

they discussed their individual work and selected one of their conflicts to present to the entire 

workshop. The groups were based on location, the goal being to enable participants to build 
relationships with participants from neighboring areas and then to use those relationships to 

address conflicts in their communities. Participants left the workshop with their own plans 

for analyzing local conflict, assessing conflict ripeness, determining mediator readiness, 

and taking action. Action plans focused on small, tangible steps the participants could take 

immediately to help prevent and/or resolve conflicts in their communities.

The fourth workshop expanded the network into Sindh province, focusing on Sindh’s capital, 

Karachi. Karachi, the financial hub of Pakistan, is riddled with a diverse set of problems, 

including political, ethnic, and socioeconomic conflicts. A major goal of the workshop was 

to build trust among participants, as well as to develop their capacity to resolve conflicts 

nonviolently.

Academy trainers ran the workshop with the help of three KP and FATA participants from 

earlier workshops. This approach served both to develop the capacity of original network 

members and to connect KP and FATA network member with the Sindh participants. With 

ethnic problems being a major source of conflict in Karachi, connecting network members 

from different ethnic groups and geographical locations is critical for the success of the 

network.

Academy trainers also invited SPADO to lead some of the modules in the fourth workshop, 

thereby increasing SPADO’s training capacity, which is essential if the program is to be 

sustainable.

The Pakistan network of conflict managers has registered a number of practical successes 

in the Pashtu tribal areas of FATA, the Swat valley of KP, and in Sindh Province. In FATA 

and KP, the facilitators have peacefully resolved two land conflicts and managed another 

land conflict nonviolently. The KP and FATA facilitators have also helped achieve peaceful 

settlements in three other conflicts: one that divided several NGOs along ethnic lines, a 

second that concerned humanitarian assistance to flood victims, and a third that focused 

on jurisdictional disputes between two journalist unions. In Sindh Province, the network 

members are conducting conflict resolution training at the University of Karachi, at local 

NGOs, and in their communities. Network members also mediated a peaceful end to a 

dispute between two families from the same village who were armed and ready to take 

violent revenge against each other.

Nina Sughrue is a senior program officer in the United States Institute of Peace’s Academy 

for International Conflict Management and Peacebuilding. 
Case Study 5

Participatory Stakeholder Evaluation

Evaluation of the Chevron, State 

Government, and Community 

Relationships in the Niger Delta

David Plumb

• 59

Oil production in Nigeria’s Niger Delta region has been marked by decades of strained

relationships between host communities, oil companies, and the Nigerian government.

Vast quantities of oil, valued at billions of dollars, are pumped each year from the

swampy lowlands. Yet, despite the revenue generated by oil exports, much of the

population remains mired in extreme poverty.

Many communities claim they have seen little or no benefit from the tapping of natural

resources by the federal government and its multinational oil company partners.

Relationships have been further strained by the emergence of violent groups in the

swamps that have sabotaged oil installations and kidnapped company workers.

Since 2008, the Consensus Building Institute (CBI) has been working with Chevron

Nigeria Limited and its Niger Delta stakeholders to improve and strengthen their

relationships. The work has brought together community leaders, the company,

government representatives, and local nonprofits to produce credible information

about development impacts. CBI assisted stakeholders impacted by Chevron’s oil

extraction in the Niger Delta to conduct an intensive evaluation of a core component

of Chevron Nigeria Limited’s community engagement strategy, commonly known as

the global memoranda of understanding (GMOUs). GMOUs are intended to promote

development and have governed many aspects of the company’s relationship with

Niger Delta communities.

The evaluation used a highly participatory approach in which stakeholders were

directly involved in and responsible for the design and implementation of the

evaluation as well as the analysis of results. This design aimed to maximize credible,

public information for future decision making around the GMOUs. The evaluation

team focused on the perceived strengths and weaknesses of the GMOUs as well as

stakeholders’ suggestions for improvement.
60 • Empowering Local Peacebuilders

Building Peace No. 2

Austin Onuoha (in orange) leads a data collection team visiting a Niger Delta community in June-July 

2008 as part of a participatory stakeholder evaluation of development agreements. Photograph by Paulinus 

Okoro. Used with permission by the Africa Centre for Corporate Responsibility.

Evaluating Chevron’s GMOUs 

In 2005, Chevron changed its approach to engaging communities impacted by its

onshore oil operations. Chevron signed a series of GMOUs with eight clusters of

communities and their corresponding state governments. Under these GMOUs,

each cluster created a regional development council that took primary responsibility

for identifying and implementing community development projects using funds

contributed by Chevron. The new approach was intended to promote community-led

development and improve relationships. The three-year agreements were a significant

change from the company’s previous approach, and stakeholders had a variety of

opinions about the shift.
Empowering Local Peacebuilders • 61

Building Peace No. 2

Before the initial agreements were to expire, Chevron asked CBI to lead an

innovative, participatory evaluation of the GMOUs. From June through August 2008,

a diverse group of stakeholders directly involved in the GMOU process—including

representatives from communities, Nigeria’s government, local NGOs, and Chevron—

jointly designed and implemented the evaluation.

The evaluation was the first comprehensive analysis of the GMOUs’ functioning. The

findings reflected the divergent perspectives that emerged from stakeholders on specific

issues. The analysis did not seek to reconcile these different viewpoints, but rather

to review and understand them. Moreover, the evaluation sought to identify general

themes about the GMOU process expressed in the interviews and to gain an overall

understanding of how the process could be strengthened, rather than evaluate the

specific performance or projects of individual regional development councils.

Fundamentally, the evaluation aimed to provide credible, public information for

future decision making around the GMOUs, which were slated for renegotiation

within the following twelve months. To achieve credibility, the process had to involve

stakeholders.

Participatory Stakeholder Evaluation Methodology

Stakeholders involved in the GMOU process carried out the planning and analysis

of this evaluation. Representatives from the regional development councils; state,

local, and national government; Chevron; and local NGOs designed the evaluation

jointly, assisted in the collection of data, and analyzed the results as a group. Although

Chevron convened participants and funded the effort, an independent facilitation team

helped the group manage discussions and decision making.

The facilitation team was drawn from three organizations. CBI led the evaluation

effort; SFCG provided facilitation support and expertise in conflict issues; and Research

Triangle Institute provided expertise in governance and development issues as well as

assisted with workshop facilitation.1 CBI was responsible for writing the final report and

ensuring that it accurately reflected findings.

The facilitation team sought to guide a process that was perceived as legitimate by all

stakeholder groups. This perceived legitimacy did not exist at the beginning of the

evaluation effort, given the history of strained relationships and the fact that Chevron

had convened the exercise and paid for the facilitators. The facilitators built legitimacy

over time with two main strategies:

• Developing a roadmap that maximized ownership and control by participants

• Prioritizing “fairness” as a guiding principle for every step, even at the expense

of efficiency, speed, and depth of analysis
62 • Empowering Local Peacebuilders

Building Peace No. 2

The team used a variety of techniques to implement these strategies, which are

discussed below.

To encourage collaboration among stakeholders in the process, the facilitation

team explicitly sought to separate the evaluation exercise from upcoming GMOU

renegotiations. This meant avoiding the temptation to seek definitive, unanimous

conclusions from the analysis or to treat the evaluation as an “audit” or “judgment” of

the GMOUs. Rather, the primary goal was to survey the full range of views expressed

and to clarify salient themes. During the analysis phase, participants in the evaluation

were encouraged to make recommendations about the kinds of issues that needed

greater focus and discussion in the negotiation, but not determine exactly what should

done about those issues. This approach allowed the evaluation to be a group learning

exercise rather than a bargaining session.

Planning Phase

In the first phase of the process, Chevron convened stakeholder representatives to plan

the evaluation process. The representatives developed the goals of the evaluation, a

data-collection strategy, and interview protocols in planning workshops.

As convener of the evaluation, Chevron selected the participants. This was a potential

weakness of the process because participant selection was a significant decision over

which stakeholders did not have a say. The team addressed this challenge through an

exercise in which participants identified voices that were not in the room. Participants

then designed strategies to reach out to those voices during the data-collection phase.

In feedback forms, participants cited this discussion as one of the most important of the

first planning workshop.

The first planning workshop started with a visioning exercise to help participants focus

on the possibility of positive change and improvement. Facilitators then prompted the

group to articulate why an evaluation might be a worthwhile step toward construction

of this vision. The workshop goals emerged from this discussion:

• Provide credible information about the strengths, weaknesses, and areas for

improvement of the GMOU process.

• Create a shared understanding of what occurred under the GMOUs.

• Develop a shared set of recommendations about how to improve the process.

Several participants had experience with previous evaluations. A discussion about this

experience led to agreement on the principles that should guide this evaluation. The
Empowering Local Peacebuilders • 63

group determined that the evaluation would be carried out in a participatory, inclusive,

and transparent way to ensure that it achieved these goals and that stakeholder

representatives would participate in all stages of the evaluation.

One of the challenges of the evaluation was to identify the elements of the GMOUs that

were working and should be strengthened. This approach of building on strengths,

often referred to as “appreciative inquiry,” ran the risk of being laughable in the Niger

Delta context, or worse, perceived as a ploy by Chevron to cover up real problems.

Yet the approach became a key tool for the facilitators to generate a mental shift that

permitted participants to identify opportunities for action and improvement.

The first planning workshop developed a list of several dozen potential questions that

the evaluation would answer, as well as the stakeholders who would be contacted to

answer the questions. A second workshop refined the list into a questionnaire with

eleven questions. The second workshop, which began with the same type of discussions

as the first to generate participant buy-in, also resulted in a detailed plan for reaching

out to stakeholders during data collection.

Data-Collection Phase

The data-collection phase of the evaluation occurred over five weeks during June and

July 2008. One of the facilitators, a Nigerian who lives and works in the Niger Delta,

selected a team of twenty-eight trained data collectors drawn from local NGOs. Using

the interview protocol developed in the planning workshops, the data-collection team

members conducted eighty-seven interviews and focus groups in all eight Regional

Development Council (RDC) areas, involving more than one thousand individuals.

Using contacts and guidance from the workshop participants, the team covered all five

states where the GMOUs are present and visited more than twenty rural Niger Delta

communities, mostly by boat.

Other participatory stakeholder evaluations have used workshop participants

themselves to conduct interviews and focus groups. In this evaluation, the facilitation

team chose to use professionals from local NGOs due to the complexity of the terrain

and the short time frame in which to complete data collection.

Before starting the interviews, data collectors participated in a two-day orientation

session about the participatory stakeholder evaluation process and their role as data

collectors. The training focused on interviewing and note-taking techniques, as well as

familiarizing data collectors with the interview protocol.

“The approach of building on strengths . . . became a 

key tool for the facilitators to generate mental shift”
64 • Empowering Local Peacebuilders

Building Peace No. 2

Community focus groups formed the core of the data-collection effort. In many

communities, data collectors held separate focus groups with youth, women, and men.

Other communities preferred to hold open town forums. Typically, one data collector

guided the focus group conversation while two or more data collectors took notes.

The team also conducted individual and focus group interviews with government

representatives, RDC leadership, and NGOs involved in the GMOU process. Chevron

participants in the planning workshops interviewed Chevron managers and staff in

an effort to promote frank discussion. Workshop participants suggested this approach

after considering how to make different stakeholders feel as comfortable as possible in

the interviews. Members of the workshop facilitation team interviewed representatives

from international donors by phone.

To promote a candid sharing of perspectives, data collectors told interviewees and

focus group participants that their comments would not be attributed by name, though

participants were encouraged to allow their names to be listed in an annex to the report.

Analysis Phase

In the third phase of the evaluation, participants from the planning workshops returned

in late July and early August to form an evaluation team to analyze the interview and

focus group data.

Data collectors prepare to conduct a women’s focus group in the Niger Delta. 

Photograph by Paulinus Okoro. Used with permission by the Africa Centre for 

Corporate Responsibility.
Empowering Local Peacebuilders • 65

Building Peace No. 2

To promote constructive dialogue, the evaluation team focused its analysis on the

perceived strengths and weaknesses of the GMOUs as well as stakeholders’ suggestions

for improvement. The evaluation brought to light diverse views among Niger Delta

stakeholders, ranging from positive comments about GMOU impacts and processes to

deep frustration and anger over participation and the equitable distribution of benefits.

The key strategy used to build legitimacy during the analysis phase was to focus

attention on raw data. Workshops became a learning exercise in which stakeholders,

sitting side by side, poured over interview notes in search of critical issues and common

themes. Participants were so intrigued by interviews with Chevron staff that they took

stacks of notes back to the hotel at night to continue reading. They were stunned when

notes from a community women’s group revealing perspectives that many people in the

room previously hadn’t heard were read aloud.

Interviews and focus groups were separated into stakeholder categories (women, men/

elders, youth, traditional leaders, government, Chevron, NGOs); participants, working

in small groups, generated a “gallery” of key findings written on flipcharts pasted

around the room. The small groups explained their findings to the full group, and

then participants reviewed interviews and double-checked each other’s findings. The

facilitation team compiled the findings each evening into a consolidated chart presented

to the full group the next day. After three and a half days, the first workshop had a

fourteen-page summary chart of findings.

Specific Findings of the Evaluation

Among its key findings, the evaluation team noted that many stakeholders believed 

GMOUs were more effective at promoting sustainable development, more transparent, 

and more able to give communities ownership of the development process than 

previous strategies. A large number of stakeholders said Chevron Nigeria’s relationship 

with communities had improved under the GMOUs. 

Nearly all stakeholders said that GMOU funding was inadequate for the extensive 

needs of Niger Delta communities. Coordination with government and other 

development actors needed significant improvement, as did communication about the 

initiative between community representatives and community stakeholders. Initial 

projects were slow to implement, causing some stakeholders to lose faith in the 

process.

Many community members said they did not feel the process was transparent enough 

or representative of their interests. Nearly all stakeholders noted that women were 

largely excluded from the process. Youth and traditional leaders expressed a range of 

views about the GMOUs, including significant anger and frustration. A few communities 

said they wanted to pull out of the agreements. Most community members agreed that 

conflict resolution mechanisms intended to address disputes were not functioning or 

functioning poorly. 
66 • Empowering Local Peacebuilders

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A second workshop refined and enhanced the summary based on further detailed

review of the interview and focus group transcripts. Participants also discussed how

they would use the findings of the evaluation in their organizations as a basis for

strengthening the GMOU process. RDC chairmen, government representatives, CNL

staff, and NGO representatives split into separate groups to come up with next steps.

The practical steps they developed (e.g., “Include women in councils and give them

responsible positions”) showed a willingness to act on the evaluation findings even

before formal negotiation to renew the GMOUs began. The steps also demonstrated

enhanced capacity among all stakeholders to be reflective about the challenges they

faced and to develop practical action steps based on joint learning.

Conclusion

Participants in the evaluation expressed enthusiasm for the participatory approach

used to conduct the process. They also expressed a strong willingness to continue using

dialogue and joint problem solving to strengthen the engagement between CNL and its

Niger Delta stakeholders through the GMOU process.

The experience appears to have shifted attitudes among many stakeholders about

how to engage each other around difficult issues and provided some skills for more

collaborative approaches. This shift was evident in the renegotiation of the eight

GMOUs, which began in late 2008. Community representatives and Chevron jointly

invited CBI to serve as a neutral facilitator of the negotiations. CBI, along with a

Nigerian partner organization, kicked off the process with joint training in mutual gains

negotiation. CBI led the parties through a structured negotiation process that would

have been all but unthinkable a year earlier. The evaluation findings served as the

guiding document to inform these negotiations.

The evaluation experience and subsequent negotiations provided an opportunity

for communities and Chevron to turn a potentially confrontational and explosive

interaction into an exercise that enhanced relationships and understanding. It is a

hopeful sign pointing to the potential for constructive action in a region suffering from

years of violent confrontation.

Note

1. The facilitation team included Merrick Hoben, David Kovick, and Jide Olagunju from CBI (<http://

www.cbuilding.org>); David Plumb and Austin Onuoha from SFGC (<http://www.sfcg.org>); and

Barbara Rodey, Dan Goetz, and Dan Gerber from the Research Triangle Institute (<http://sww.rti.org>).

Austin Onuoha also led the data-collection team.
Adversarial Capacity Building

A. Heather Coyne 

Just as the Niger Delta case study included stakeholders in the process of evaluating a project, 

exposing the project to criticism and making opposition an integral, constructive part of the 

project, other interventions could benefit from integrating an “adversarial” relationship into 

programming. 

The Coalition military forces in Iraq had a number of opportunities to build capacity through 

their own routine interaction with local actors rather than through dedicated capacity-building 

initiatives. For example, in the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib scandal, several Iraqi human rights 

organizations and ex-prisoner associations volunteered to serve as monitors for the Coalitionrun prisons, to oversee the conditions there, and to report back to the Iraqi people. At the 

same time, the new Iraqi local councils that worked closely with Coalition forces were eager 

to provide information to the families of detainees on their status, providing a service to their 

constituents. 

In both cases, these interactions could have served a capacity-building purpose, helping NGOs 

and local councils learn how to interact effectively with military forces, strengthening advocacy, 

public diplomacy, and watchdog skills through the interaction, and building their legitimacy with 

their own communities. Such interactions provided a unique opportunity to provide “learning 

through doing” in a relatively safe environment, through an adversarial approach—but with a 

relatively congenial adversary. Local actors could have developed skills sets by questioning and 

pressing the Coalition military—which sincerely wanted the local organizations to succeed—

before they attempted the same activities with Iraqi military forces and other authorities less 

familiar with, or less tolerant of, the role of watchdogs. 

Although these opportunities were largely missed, the military did create such an adversarial 

capacity-building opportunity in its interactions with local councils on the status of neighborhood 

security arrangements. Because Coalition forces were heavily involved in the development of the 

local councils and responsible for local security in the early days of the operation, it was natural 

for military units to brief the councils in their areas of operation on the security situation. 

The councils developed an expectation of hearing from the military regularly on security, as 

well as a certain comfort level with the questioning process and making recommendations on 

security issues. As the military gradually transitioned responsibility for security arrangements to 

Iraqi police, the councils transferred these expectations and expertise to the Iraqi authorities. 

This was not a consistent success, but in some areas the process became institutionalized; 

police commanders still regularly meet with local representatives to provide information on 

neighborhood security and to get input and assistance from them. 

The Coalition forces often did not consciously think of themselves as training the councils to 

demand oversight of security issues, nor did they actively shape the capacity of the councils 

to ask good questions to develop effective mechanisms for interviewing security forces. But 

because the military assumed the councils should be involved and did its best to inform the 

councils of its own actions, the councils responded to the opportunity and gradually improved 

their capacity in oversight. During the transition of authority to Iraqi forces, the military 

pressured Iraqi police and other authorities to be as responsive to the councils as it had 

been, smoothing the way for councils to transition their new skills to their own authorities. If 

intervening forces could treat all their “adversarial” engagements with host nation citizens as 

capacity-building opportunities, viewing them in the context of building essential democratic 

skill sets as opposed to a challenge to their authority, this mind-set could dramatically enhance 

the sustainability of democratic processes, as well as improve relations with local actors.

A. Heather Coyne served for fifteen months in Iraq as a U.S. Army Reserve civil affairs officer, 

assigned to the Coalition Provisional Authority to support Iraqi civil society. She was the chief 

of party for the United States Institute of Peace’s activities in Iraq in 2003–5.

Conclusion

Keys to Engagement

A. Heather Coyne

• 69

The case studies cover a wide range of third-party interventions in conflict zones that

focused on social and economic development to reduce the drivers of conflict. Although

in all cases the interveners used a combination of methods to empower local actors, each

case illustrates a key engagement methodology.

In spite of the vastly different contexts, approaches, and priorities of each case,

common themes are evident. This section examines these themes. Interveners should

consider incorporating components discussed here into the design of future conflict

interventions.

Focus on Process, Not Outcomes

The most significant theme that characterizes each case study is a focus on process

rather than outcomes. These cases all emphasize the development of processes in which

effective decision making, relationship building, or learning can take place when the

emphasis is not simply on the result of an intervention. In each case, the intervention

was designed to make interaction among participants as productive as possible, with

the participants determining final decisions and outcomes.

Interveners can facilitate process development by ensuring that participants are

representative of all stakeholders, that they come to the process with a sense

of enthusiasm or receptiveness, that the environment for discussion is safe for

participation, that relevant technical expertise is available for participants to draw

on, that incentives exist for advancing the agenda, and that resources are available to

put plans into action. Within that framework, the case studies address some specific

considerations.

Trust Building

Most of these interventions started with some form of trust building, rather than

jumping immediately to collaboration or to addressing issues. Interveners should not

expect actors in a conflict to work together before they have established a basis and

a motivation for doing so. These interventions often aspired to early successes that

would build momentum and enthusiasm for the process, starting with relatively easy
70 • Empowering Local Peacebuilders

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wins before tackling more involved aspects. Interactions were also framed in terms of

“learning” and “research” rather than negotiations and bargaining.

Local Priorities

In most of these cases, interveners provided a general framework of support but the

participants themselves decided what substantive issues to tackle. Some interventions

provided more guidance, such as ICAP’s resource-mapping exercise followed by project

development and BLTP’s simulations and exercises. Others, such as the Guatemalan

dialogue, provided a topic and let participants develop their own discussion of it. In

Sierra Leone, SFCG identified an area of common concern and convened forums in

which the local actors could pursue discussions. In the Niger Delta, participants took a

role in developing the process themselves, but CBI provided extensive guidance on the

overall structure of the review.

The interventions all involved a willingness to trust local actors to define what they

want to do and a recognition that outsiders cannot know or determine the right

outcome for them. At the same time, interveners cannot be naïve about the fact that local

actors have many different agendas, including ones advanced by hostile, regressive, or

criminal elements. Successful interventions will happen where broad local priorities

intersect with the broad objectives of the interveners and where local actors have space

to explore and define the specifics of those broad priorities.

Rules of Procedure

Methodology and rules of procedure are not technical issues but can be used to shape

the tone of the interaction. In Guatemala, the interveners used procedural rules to

enhance the legitimacy of the project by showing that no one interest group would be

singled out.

Inclusiveness

One aspect of process facilitation where interveners may add value is in ensuring

diverse and representative participation. Interveners should avoid taking the path

of least resistance in selection of participants, where selection is made on the basis

of recommendations by trusted partners. The Burundi case demonstrates clearly

why extended investment in the selection process, both to get the right actors and

to ensure inclusiveness, is worth the effort. In the case studies, interveners avoided

the use of quotas and took the time to recruit a diversity of participants or to explain

the advantages of inclusiveness to local actors who were managing the selection. In

Burundi, the organizers chose from among the large number of stakeholder suggestions

to ensure a balance. In the Niger Delta, inclusiveness was a weakness of the original

invitation process, so the facilitators addressed it directly by having the participants
Empowering Local Peacebuilders • 71

identify “missing voices” and develop ways to reach out to them during the datacollection effort. In Guatemala, the project team gradually expanded the invitation

to key actors in the state and society so that by the time hardliners and spoilers were

invited, the project was a fact and enough important figures had already committed,

making missing out on it undesirable.

During implementation, some projects tried to ensure that each leadership position

was assigned to a “consensus” candidate, while others, such as the Guatemala project,

distributed leading roles across groupings so that each group had a chance to be in the

lead on a different issue. One mechanism to include controversial actors is to invite

them in their personal capacity rather than as representatives of an institution.

Coalition Building

One goal of a relationship-building process might be to establish sustained networks

with power to act in unison for advocacy purposes—bringing pressure to bear on

governments, combatants, or communities as a coalition rather than as individuals.

Interveners can assist, as SFGC and CEED did, by creating forums where like-minded

groups can share agendas and find common interests, and, in later stages, by offering

training in advocacy skills (rather than defining the agenda) so that coalitions can be

more effective in lobbying for their cause.

Continuing Activity

It is important for local actors to see how their activities might continue beyond the

initial involvement. Most of the case studies involved open-ended processes, in which

participants could develop further and in new directions. Even for processes that had

a more defined ending, such as the completion of a project under ICAP, mechanisms

were provided for continued interaction so that the momentum created did not have a

chance to fade. Some ICAP CAGs have continued to implement projects following the

ICAP methodology but with nondonor funds.

Ground Rule Development as a Model for Process

Many organizations begin interactions between local actors with agreement on ground 

rules for an interaction as a way of building participant ownership of the process. 

Some provide a list of commonly used rules and ask participants to make refinements. 

Others ask participants to create rules from scratch, using questions such as “What 

behaviors will help us have a constructive conversation?” to solicit suggestions. 

This approach may take a while but has the advantage of direct participation and 

ownership of the rules. Organizers should consider the time, purpose of the session, 

degree of conflict within the group, and how skilled the participants are at group 

interaction to determine the best balance. 
72 • Empowering Local Peacebuilders

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One practitioner advises, “Most ground rules are really subsets of a very few main 

rules such as ‘treat each other with respect’ and ‘be open to new perspectives.’ Even 

when participants come up with tons of rules, such as with respect to cell phone 

usage, speaking one at a time, listening to others, being on time, etc., I find they fit 

into these main categories. I like to keep it simple, yet still let them craft the rules. 

So I do something like ask permission of them to reframe their rule only slightly, and 

from there, ask if it is ok if I fit something else into that category.” 

In some contexts, the term “ground rules” might not be appropriate, so organizers 

might refer to “process agreements” or “group guidelines” instead. It is also helpful to 

have the participants select someone to enforce the rules (within reason).

Whenever interveners ask for input—for ground rules or other interactions—it is 

important that they be comfortable with long periods of silence. It may take time for 

participants to gather their thoughts or their courage to speak. If interveners move 

too quickly to fill the silence with their own suggestions, they will miss the chance for 

participants to drive the discussion. In fact, an extended silence can help encourage 

participants to comment if the intervener makes no move to continue without their 

input.

Allow Sufficient Time

Closely linked to the emphasis on process is the need to allow sufficient time for

changes in behavior to take hold. Relationships take time to build; a decision-making

process must run through its full cycle several times before people can fully grasp

all the implications; people must have a chance to learn for themselves and to see

consequences play out. Leaders elected to local councils, as in the Niger Delta, may not

understand the importance of delivering on community development projects until

they see the consequences in the next election cycle. Some activities, such as institution

building, may require years of evolution. The Independent Radio Network developed

over many years.

This is not to say that interveners should plan only for long-term projects. Quick results

may be possible in some cases, but interveners should consider the long-term impact of

these projects. Although some cases, such as ICAP, were intended to be quick impact

projects, they also encouraged the adoption of a decision-making process and norms

for community participation in the longer term—the infrastructure improvements were

almost a side benefit to that more significant achievement. Lessons learned from ICAP

may provide an option for those struggling to balance long-term requirements with the

equally valid pressure to show improvements quickly in order to build support for the

longer-term effort: invest in long-term processes that can provide short-term results.
Empowering Local Peacebuilders • 73

Choosing Implementing Partners

One implication of the imperative to use long time horizons is that interveners will

need a mechanism for sustained contact and on-the-ground support. The development

of a process or relationship requires nurturing that is inconsistent with a “parachute in

and out” approach. However, many interveners do not have the capacity to maintain

local offices to provide such support. Partnering arrangements with local organizations

or local project managers such as those used by the Institute and BLTP are useful, but

in such cases, the intervener should consider both its relationship with those partners

and the partners’ relationship with participants in the context of empowerment.

Interveners should choose partners carefully and invest in partnering organizations to

ensure they follow empowerment principles in their dealings with their fellow citizens.

CBI dedicated extensive time to fostering empowerment techniques at multiple levels

(with the facilitation team, the evaluation process team, the data collectors, and the

interviewees themselves). ICAP selected mobilizers based on their ability to relate to the

communities. The Institute selected an Afghan partner whose own style was compatible

with developing the leadership of local organizations.

Utilize Empowerment-Focused Learning Approaches

In some cases, interveners ask local actors to make decisions on issues on which they

have little familiarity or expertise. It is part of empowerment to share knowledge that

can help local actors make better decisions, but knowledge transfer activities can too

easily take on a patronizing tone. Interveners can avoid that tone by providing expertise

and exposing locals to new approaches with empowerment in mind.

Learn by Doing

Several case studies focused on the concept of learning by doing rather than through

didactic approaches. Not only is this a better way for adults to absorb material, it also

brings participants into contact with the stakeholders and issues they must work with

in the real world. As Howard Wolpe describes his work with the BLTP, “This requires

more than ‘book learning’ and a cognitive understanding of concepts. A paradigm

or mind-shift cannot be taught; it must be experienced. The same is true of trusting

relationships that develop only over time and involve personal emotional investment.

Likewise, an appreciation of the importance of process will emerge only through direct

experience with others.”1 The process of engaging adversaries in the Niger Delta and

Guatemala, and of engaging government agencies in Iraq, modeled—in a relatively

controlled, low-impact way—the same relationships and problems the participants

would face in the real world.

“People must have a chance to learn for themselves 

and to see consequences play out”
74 • Empowering Local Peacebuilders

Building Peace No. 2

In many cases, interveners may have a prescribed way of doing something that they

want participants to follow. Learning by doing challenges interveners to refrain from

providing guidance outright and instead to encourage participants to develop best

practices for themselves. For example, CBI knew that an evaluation should follow

principles of participatory, transparency, and inclusiveness. But by making space for the

participants to draw those conclusions themselves through dialogue and exploration

of goals, CBI enabled participants to feel greater ownership of the specific concepts and

greater control of the process.

Work with the Agendas of Local Actors

Local actors must be involved from the outset in shaping programming as well

as in their own capacity building. This involvement not only ensures their active

participation in the project, but results in more effective, relevant project design because

the design has incorporated local knowledge. The co-analysis technique is intended

to result in a jointly designed strategy for capacity building that builds on existing

skills. It involves periods of learning what the other wants to do through a focus on

questioning and listening. Beyond simply understanding the interests and objectives of

local partners, the co-analysis method is intended to foster an environment where local

actors can draw out the expertise and support they want from interveners, rather than

interveners imposing good ideas on the local actors.

Short of a formal co-analysis technique, simple sensitivity and awareness of

local interests can help interveners recognize and take advantage of engagement

opportunities. In Bougainville, the unarmed intervention force had a mindset of

looking for opportunities to engage rather than directing engagement. The interveners

embraced the unconventional approach of relating through music when they saw

how music resonated with the population. If interveners focus on what local actors are

interested in as opposed to what their own interests are, the intervention will be more

compelling and more sustainable.

One way to test whether an intervention is tapping into local interests is to establish

matching requirements, where local actors are required to contribute a certain

percentage of the funds, time, labor, or other assets for a project. CEED used a feebased service to ensure the strength of the commitment of both the participants and

interveners, whereas ICAP used a community cost-share approach.

One approach that merges locally driven agendas with learning by doing is to conduct

a participatory assessment. In the same way that CBI used a participatory evaluation

of an existing initiative, interveners can involve stakeholders in the assessment phase
Empowering Local Peacebuilders • 75

before the launch of a project. In both Iraq and Guatemala, the projects used a variation

of the PAR approach; the Burundi case and the co-analysis feature box showcase the

importance of defining the agenda with stakeholders from the start. An expanded

version of a participatory assessment can involve stakeholders as a way to raise

their awareness of the issues and other actors and to lay a foundation for continued

development of relationships.

Build on Local Strengths

Interventions do not start from a blank slate, and practitioners must convey that fact

clearly to their local partners. It is advisable to avoid needs-based assessments that

encourage local actors to focus on what they do not have and that raise expectations

of having all those (limitless) desires met. Strengths-based assessment—also known

as “appreciative inquiry”—focuses local actors on what they bring to the table. Not

only does this create a sense of pride and self-reliance, but the fact that projects are

tied to existing infrastructures and skills is more sustainable than creating entirely

new systems from scratch. The ICAP resource mapping and CBI’s interview design

both integrated a focus on local strengths and “what is going right.” As CBI noted, this

approach carries the risk of being rejected if serious problems exist in the region and

the perception that the intervener is trying to cover them up. But facilitators can explain

that the approach is part of the overall goal of discovering opportunities for action and

improvement, rather than avoiding identification of problems.

Employ Sequencing

In Guatemala, the project organized events strategically to ensure that participants

were exposed to outside expertise at the moment when they could best absorb it, which

allowed them to engage in more substantive dialogue instead of just listening passively.

Take Advantage of Peer Learning. When local actors learn from each other rather than from

outsiders, the dynamic is significantly different. Peers from the same conflict may be

more willing to criticize the practicalities of ideas for their context, or may provide more

specific feedback than outsiders, but only if the intervention environment is conducive

to such exchanges. Presentations by locals to each other can offer a subtle way to

provide indirect feedback, as groups judge each other’s performance and strive to

excel or address weaknesses they see in the presentations even if they do not explicitly

critique each other. The Institute’s method in Afghanistan depended heavily on peerdirected teaching, and ICAP frequently brings together more advanced CAGs with

newly mobilized CAGs for peer learning.

“Strengths-based assessment . . . focuses local actors 

on what they bring to the table”
76 • Empowering Local Peacebuilders

Building Peace No. 2

Let Mentors Share Their Experience

As the CEED example illustrates, people in conflict zones are intensely aware of

the challenges they face and may treat as suspect or irrelevant methodologies—or

trainers—imported from nonconflict contexts. When possible, interveners should use

presenters and staff from the same conflict or with a background in another conflict to

provide credibility and foster a sense of shared experience. In addition, the insights and

networking opportunities that such people present are likely to be more relevant to the

local actors.

Build Capacity through Adversarial Interactions. Local actors can learn from interacting

with adversaries as well as from peers. Where this methodology has been used,

it seems to have been used unconsciously. Interveners do not always recognize

that their own interactions with local organizations can be a capacity-building

opportunity in itself, and therefore they do not take advantage of it. Interveners

that actively examine each interaction with local actors may be able to refine their

interactions ways that build capacity. For example, press conferences with local

journalists can become an opportunity for interveners to explain the intervention

and a training ground for local journalists to practice investigative skills. Monitoring

and complaint systems for the behavior of foreign forces can raise awareness of

standards for government behavior and transparency and for citizen involvement

and activism.

Address the Constraints of the Local Context

Utilize Local Systems

Where appropriate, interveners should consider how to integrate the intervention with

existing local institutions and structures rather than creating new systems. However,

in some cases, structures do not exist or the existing structures are part of the problem

because they are corrupt or exclusionary of key groups. In such cases, interveners may

choose to offer new systems to engage relevant stakeholders. In Iraq, while working

closely with government structures and local leaders, ICAP created a new forum for

interaction and facilitated the inclusion of traditionally marginalized groups and the

emergence of new community leaders.

How should interveners balance these imperatives? An intervention will often be most

successful when it involves making incremental adjustments within existing systems,

such as improving the access of marginalized groups to existing resources and decisionmaking processes. Where possible, an intervention should avoid trying to combat or

act parallel to existing processes. Ideally, the new systems will link to existing systems
Empowering Local Peacebuilders • 77

and bring pressure to bear for their reform rather than setting up something entirely

new. In Guatemala, the new forum channeled recommendations into the existing

political process. ICAP envisions the gradual transition of community development

to government budgets, though with substantial community input—this transition,

however, is an ongoing challenge for the program to achieve and depends on progress

outside the control of ICAP. Similarly, the Niger Delta project placed emphasis on

influencing the decisions of local government but had little ability to pressure local

government to be more effective.

In terms of aligning an intervention’s own organizational arrangements with those of

local systems, interveners should take care to make these compatible with the local

division of authority and boundaries. Otherwise jurisdictions and authority may be

divided between multiple actors.

Provide Political Cover for Participation

In many cases, participation in conflict management and reconciliation

programming—or even just interacting with members from other communities—is

a dangerous endeavor for local actors. Moreover, activities associated with such

programming (e.g., decisions on participation, resource allocation) may place

local actors “out in front” of their communities in terms of acceptable levels of

intercommunal collaboration. To mitigate these risks, interveners can provide

cover for participants, either to reduce their own reservations about participating,

as in Guatemala, or to enable participants to “sell” their activities to their own

constituencies, as in the Niger Delta (by creating a findings document that

represented multiple views rather than just points of consensus) and in Iraq (by

demonstrating tangible benefits to communities).

A variety of institutional arrangements can facilitate the participation of reluctant

actors. Burundi and Guatemala used organizations or individuals perceived as

neutral or widely respected for a particular expertise, and reinforced that perception

with the involvement of outside actors such as the United Nations and neighboring

countries. In some contexts, the involvement of outsiders may be reassuring; in others,

participants may need purely local management to feel comfortable exploring issues.

In the extreme case, anonymity can provide cover for participation or viewpoints,

such as with some of the Niger Delta interviews. The nature of the activity can also

provide cover; with the Burundi project and in Guatemala, the formulation as a

leadership capacity-building initiative or research effort depoliticized the projects.

“An intervention will often be most successful when it involves 

making incremental adjustments within existing systems”
78 • Empowering Local Peacebuilders

Building Peace No. 2

Choose Appropriate Representatives

In choosing interlocutors for particular audiences, there is a constant tension between

equality and inclusiveness while engaging people who have reliable access to and

credibility with that group. Although the strategies presented here do not fully resolve

that tension, they suggest that the stage of the process and the role of the interlocutor

may affect this trade-off. The intervening organizations ensured that initial interactions

were handled by the people who would make participants feel most comfortable (as

in the Niger Delta interviews and the Guatemala effort to recruit participation) or

whose legitimacy was crucial (ICAP invitations sent by Iraqi mayors). As participants

established relationships and processes for interaction, more flexibility in the choice

of interlocutors was possible, as in Burundi, where the local managers took more

active roles after trust had been developed. The ICAP was able to use unconventional

interlocutors as mobilizers (women, young people) because these people were

perceived as representatives of the organization for a specific purpose rather than as

leaders of the process.

Manage Expectations

Practitioners are familiar with the risk of expectations that are not in line with reality,

and often talk about managing expectations so that local actors do not become

disappointed with or disillusioned by the progress of peace operations. The case studies

suggest that interveners should not manage expectations but rather should involve local

actors so they can see for themselves what is realistic to expect from a program and then

set their own expectations accordingly. For example, participants were part of every

step of the ICAP process, understanding the trade-offs and prioritization involved.

In the development of the IRN, members made decisions on what they were willing

to contribute to achieve corresponding benefits. In the Niger Delta and Guatemala,

participants from various interest groups were responsible for identifying shortages and

constraints together.

Use Meaningful Impact and Evaluation Methods 

Impact Multipliers

Most practitioners are familiar with the advantage of a train–the-trainer approach that

creates capacity for local actors to replicate a training project on their own, expanding

the reach of the initial interaction. The USIP case study puts an additional twist on this

approach by encouraging initial participants to refine the material presented in the

training for their own context—making it more likely that important substance will be

passed on rather than launching a game of “telephone” in which content is lost in each
Empowering Local Peacebuilders • 79

iteration. There are other ways to expand the reach of a project beyond the immediate

participants—such as the radio show that incorporated reconciliation programming and

the recording produced in Bougainville. Whatever the mechanism used, interveners

should try to incorporate some kind of impact multiplier into interventions to achieve

the maximum impact for the investment.

Monitoring

Monitoring should not be discarded as overly paternalistic, but instead should be

handled in ways that strengthen the accountability of the local actors to their own

communities or constituents rather than to the intervener. For example, a local NGO

might be required to brief its community on its progress rather than submitting a report

to a foreign donor. In the ICAP, volunteer CAG members (including ordinary citizens,

business leaders, and government leaders) were trained to monitor community progress

in collaboration with ACDI/VOCA trained staff (the results, however, were submitted

to USAID through ACDI/VOCA rather than directly to communities which missed an

opportunity for local control). In Sierra Leone, violations of the code of conduct were

brought to network members for action, not to donors.

Measures of Effectiveness

How institutions judge progress and effectiveness will require systemic change if

metrics are to support effective engagement strategies. New measures of effectiveness

are needed to evaluate programs that take place over long time frames that focus on

process, relationships, and capacity development rather than on tangible outputs.

Interveners need to measure the quality of the systems and skills they have fostered, as

well as the quality of their own interaction with local actors.

Show Respect and Humility 

It would seem unnecessary to make this point, but even the best intentioned

practitioners may not be aware of how their actions are perceived in terms of setting a

tone of respect for local partners.

Jargon

The terminology used in the project can reinforce or undermine a sense of mutual

respect. In the cases studies, interveners preferred phrases such as “knowledge transfer

or exchange.” They avoided phrases commonly used in interventions that convey a lack

of respect for local knowledge and expertise, such as “taking off the training wheels”

“The terminology used in a project can reinforce 

or undermine a sense of mutual respect”
80 • Empowering Local Peacebuilders

Building Peace No. 2

and “it is better for them to do it poorly than for us to do it perfectly.” These kinds of

phrases present a false (and rather patronizing) choice between local and intervener

capacity. References to parent-child or teacher-student relationships, although not

intended malevolently, may invoke resentment among locals who want to be treated as

equals.

Interveners should design project terminology (including names and acronyms) around

the local language and context rather than using labels that resonate in their own.

Mutual Learning

Interventions should emphasize that the interveners are there to learn from local

actors. Instead of framing the relationship as a superior training an inferior, interveners

should cast it as an exchange of knowledge based on the strengths of each. The Institute

emphasized that the techniques it was teaching might not be appropriate in the Afghan

context and urged participants to highlight any shortcomings found and explain the

changes made so that Institute staff could learn more about what would work there.

Use Local Staff in Leadership Positions

As the case studies demonstrate, the use of local staff and facilitators reinforces the

impression that the intervener believes in the capacity of local actors to manage the

project. If training requires outsiders, interveners should use people who have had

similar experiences in another context. This creates a sense that the interveners are

there to create an environment in which learning can take place, facilitating exposure to

outside ideas that might be useful, rather than taking the role of teachers or owners of

the knowledge.

Let Locals Take Credit

Most interveners are well aware that accomplishments should bring recognition for

the local actor, not the outsider; in the cases presented, local stakeholders were in the

forefront of any victory celebrations. But ensuring that locals take the credit can be

more subtle (and a greater sacrifice) than giving up a banner or center stage at a ribboncutting ceremony. For example, interveners may offer “fringe benefits” of participation

in international conferences or special events to their preferred local partners, creating

some level of obligation in return. Interveners could instead arrange for those benefits

to be granted through local associations or local leaders so that the credit (and

obligation) accrues to local actors instead of to the foreigner. For example, instead of

choosing a local partner to attend an international conference on human rights, the

intervener could delegate the selection to the coordinators of the process itself, with
Empowering Local Peacebuilders • 81

Building Peace No. 2

the understanding that the attendee would then report back to that group. That way,

individuals see the value, as well as the responsibility, of being an active part of the

relationship, rather than seeking favors directly from the intervener.

Interveners should also avoid “taking the voice” from their local partners in explaining

an achievement to the community or to the world and instead assist them in conducting

their own publicity.

Don’t Make Yourself Part of the Solution

Perhaps the hardest concept for interveners to internalize, and the most important

factor in designing an intervention is this: never make yourself part of the solution. As long

as the new process or relationship requires a direct, continuing role for the intervener,

the process is not a viable, sustainable local solution.

Note

1. Howard Wolpe with Steve McDonald, Eugene Nindorera, Elizabeth McClintock, Alain Lempereur,

Fabien Nsengimana, Nicole Rumeau, and Alli Blair, “Rebuilding Peace and State Capacity in War-Torn

Burundi,” The Round Table 93, no. 375 (July 2004).
The Participatory Strategic Planning Index®

Gary Bland

In its capacity-building work with local governments, RTI International promoted “participatory 

budgeting”—processes for municipalities to directly involve their constituents in decision making 

on public planning and investment. In an effort to determine how successful a local government 

participatory planning process is, RTI created a system to measure the results of its support 

for participatory practice in post-conflict El Salvador in 2000, called the Participatory Strategic 

Planning (PSP) index. RTI now uses the PSP index to assess and evaluate progress for local 

governments in the developing world. 

The PSP index considers six criteria for the capacity of a participatory planning and budgeting 

process and weighs progress in each: (1) institutionalization of the participatory process; (2) 

social and gender equity; (3) citizen co-responsibility; (4) transparency in management and 

execution; (5) complementarity, or support from local, national, and international actors; 

and (6) accountability and sustainability. A series of indicators serves as measures of progress, 

and progress along each indicator determines the assignment of points up to pre-established 

maximum for that indicator. The sum total of points for all indicators across all components—the 

maximum score is 100—provides a single measure of the strength of the participatory process. 

Some components, such as degree of institutionalization, carry greater numerical weight than 

others.

For example, the citizen co-responsibility component of the PSP index measures the involvement 

of nongovernmental actors and is based on the concept that citizens should be engaged with 

municipal authorities at all stages of the participatory process—planning, financing, execution, 

and maintenance of specific projects. Citizens are viewed not only as participants but as agents 

for public monitoring and oversight. Two indicators are used to measure citizens’ roles: (1) the 

amount of support (labor, funding, equipment, etc.) voluntarily provided by the community 

as a percentage of the total amount of project investments; and (2) the percentage share of 

municipal investment executed with the participation of a local management committee that 

includes community representatives. 

Although the index was originally developed to measure the level of participation in a local 

government’s planning process, the measures and indicators may help outside implementers 

evaluate their own engagement strategies as well.

Gary Bland is a fellow in democratic governance at RTI International. He specializes in 

decentralization and local governance, primarily in Latin America and Africa.
Acknowledgments

• 83

All the authors deserve considerable thanks, not only for their insightful and eloquent

contributions but also for their patience during the review process for the manuscript

and when A. Heather Coyne was deployed to Afghanistan.

Thanks also go to Rick Hill, who mulled over years of experience with capacity-building

projects to point us toward some projects that would be a good fit; to Maria JessopMandel for her insights on using ground rules as a capacity-building tool; and to Dan

Serwer for demonstrating the value of silence. David Smock provided continuous and

invaluable support throughout the manuscript’s development; and as the manuscript

neared completion, Nigel Quinney helped to sharpen its presentation.
About the Authors

84 • 

A. Heather Coyne was formerly a senior program officer in the Center for

Mediation and Conflict Resolution at the United States Institute of Peace, working

to craft integrated strategies to address active violent conflicts and developing best

practices and conflict management tools for practitioners. She was the chief of party for

the Institute’s activities in Iraq in 2003–5. She previously had served for fifteen months

in Iraq as a U.S. Army Reserve civil affairs officer, assigned to the Coalition Provisional

Authority to support Iraqi civil society. She is currently serving with the NATO

Training Mission, Afghanistan as the NGO and International Organizations Liaison.

* * *

Bernardo Arévalo de León is the deputy director general for research and development

at Interpeace. His involvement with Interpeace and peacebuilding started in 1996,

since when he has helped design and implement peacebuilding strategies that combine

research and dialogue methods. He has managed consensus-building projects in his

native Guatemala, led Interpeace’s Regional Office for Latin America, and served

as director of the Joint Program Unit for UN/Interpeace initiatives. Before joining

Interpeace, he served in Guatemala’s Foreign Service for more than twelve years,

including as deputy minister of foreign affairs and as ambassador to Spain. He has

published several books and articles on civil-military relations, security sector reform,

and democratization.
• 85

Sally Iadarola is a community development specialist with more than twenty years

of experience. She was managing director of the Community Stabilization and

Development Group at ACDI/VOCA, where she provided oversight for donor-funded

projects in fragile states in the Middle East; Central, South, and East Asia; and South

America until joining the President’s Office, while continuing to supervise ACDI/

VOCA’s Iraq projects. She has supervised projects in transitional states in the Caucasus,

Central and Eastern Europe, and Russia, and served as deputy country representative/

private sector officer for the Central Asia Republic Mission, USAID before joining

ACDI/VOCA. She holds a master’s degree in urban and regional planning from George

Washington University.

Ambrose James has more than ten years of experience developing project management

strategies in conflict-sensitive and conflict transformation programming with

international nonprofit organizations in Sierra Leone. He has worked for Search for

Common Ground in Sierra Leone since 2000 and has spearheaded the program’s

country operations. From 2000 until 2006, he was the head of programming, leading

SFCG initiatives in community radio development, production of new radio

programming, and community-level outreach. In 2006, he became director of the Sierra

Leone program and managed SFCG’s elections strategies. A graduate of the University

of Sierra Leone, he previously worked for Action Aid and Conciliation Resources.

Lindsey Jones is a gender specialist and head of ACDI/VOCA’s Gender Integration

and Women’s Empowerment unit. She leads ACDI/VOCA in mainstreaming gender

throughout programs and operations and advising staff on gender strategies. She is

also experienced in research methodologies and data quality standards, particularly in

leading data quality assessments, designing survey questionnaires, and analyzing data.

She directed the database and reporting department for ACDI/VOCA in Iraq on the

Community Action Program. She earned her MA in Arab studies with a concentration

in women and gender studies from Georgetown University.

Steve McDonald is the director of the Africa Program and the Project on Leadership

and Building State Capacity at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars

in Washington, D.C., where he has worked since 2002. McDonald helped to design and

now manages the Center’s leadership capacity building and post-conflict resolution

programs in Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Liberia. He served

for ten years as Foreign Service officer in Africa, and thereafter headed a variety of

Africa-related programs for organizations such as the Aspen Institute and the National

Endowment for Democracy. He has a master’s degree in African politics from the

University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies. He articles and chapters

have appeared in many magazines, newspapers, and books.

Empowering Local Peacebuilders • 85
David Plumb is a senior associate at the Consensus Building Institute. He designs and

facilitates stakeholder-engagement strategies in complex natural resource disputes.

He has worked in a wide range of environments where community, government, and

corporate interests have collided, including Nigeria’s Niger Delta, Angola, Mexico,

Guatemala, and Argentina. He also designs and delivers trainings in stakeholder

engagement, consensus building, negotiation, and conflict resolution. Before joining

CBI, he was director of the Sustainable Business Practice at Search for Common Ground.

He is a former financial journalist and correspondent. A Fulbright Scholar, he holds a

BA in politics and Latin American studies from Princeton University.

Howard Wolpe served seven terms as a member of Congress and was presidential

special envoy to Africa’s Great Lakes Region in 1996–2000 and again in 2009. In 2000–8,

he directed both the Africa Program and the Project on Leadership and Building State

Capacity at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. A specialist in

African politics, he chaired the Subcommittee on Africa of the House Foreign Affairs

Committee. He taught at Western Michigan University and the University of Michigan,

and was a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, a public policy scholar at the

Woodrow Wilson Center, and a consultant to the World Bank and the Foreign Service

Institute of the U.S. State Department. He received his BA from Reed College and

his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He retired from the State

Department in 2010. Wolpe is widely published and was working on a book on the

Burundi peace process when he passed away on October 26, 2011.

86 •

86 • Empowering Local Peacebuilders
USIP Experts

• 87

USIP experts on working with local actors in the context of post-conflict peacebuilding

include the following, all of whom are senior program officers in USIP’s Academy for

International Conflict Management and Peacebuilding.

• Linda Bishai focuses on peacebuilding education and conflict management

programing in Sudan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Bishai was also responsible

for a series of programs on electoral violence prevention in Sudan before the general

elections and the South Sudan. Contacts: lbishai@usip.org; (202) 429-4712.

• Nadia Gerspacher has developed courses on police reform and the establishment of a

safe and secure environment as well as on capacity building for mentors and advisers.

She also works with the Ministry of Defense Advisor program to prepare senior civilian

advisers to strengthen interior and defense ministries. Contacts: ngerspacher@usip.org; 

(202) 429-4745.

• Maria Jessop conducts education, training, and dialogue programs in Iraq, Colombia,

Haiti and sub-Saharan Africa for civil society, government, and UN peacekeeping

officers. She also teaches a course on facilitated intergroup dialogue. Contacts: mjessop@

usip.org; (202) 429-3844.

• Nina Sughrue teaches conflict management skills to government officials, military

and police personnel, and representatives of NGOs and international organizations.

She has conducted training in Afghanistan, Colombia, Egypt, Jordan, India, Iraq,

Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Poland, Sudan, and Turkey and with Israelis and Palestinians.

Contacts: nsughrue@usip.org; (202) 429-4712.

• Peter Weinberger focuses on how best to deal with ethnic, religious and tribal

groups when rebuilding countries after war and conflict. He has worked with various

nongovernmental organizations in the Balkans, the Middle East and Northern Ireland.

Contacts: pweinberger@usip.org; (202) 429-4761.
About USIP

The United States Institute of Peace is an independent, nonpartisan institution, created and funded by

Congress to prevent and resolve violent international conflicts. USIP’s mission is to increase the United

States’ capacity to manage international conflict—to think, act, teach and train—and to devise practical

approaches to peacebuilding.

USIP’s Strategic Goals

• To help prevent, manage, and resolve violent international conflict both within and between states

• To promote post-conflict stability and development

• To increase peacebuilding capacity, tools, and intellectual capital worldwide

• To build and shape the field of international conflict prevention and management and to

professionalize its practice

• To build knowledge and create innovative tools for peacebuilding

• To bridge research and practice in preventing, managing and resolving violent conflicts

• To teach, train, inform policymakers, practitioners, students and the public about the challenges of

conflict prevention, management and resolution and how to respond to those challenges

Board of Directors

J. Robinson West (Chair), Chairman, PFC Energy

George E. Moose (Vice Chairman), Adjunct Professor of Practice, The George Washington University

Judy Ansley, Former Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Adviser under President

George W. Bush

Eric Edelman, Hertog Distinguished Practitioner in Residence, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced

International Studies

Kerry Kennedy, President, Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights

Ikram U. Khan, President, Quality Care Consultants, LLC

Stephen D. Krasner, Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations, Stanford University

John A. Lancaster, Former Executive Director of the National Council on Independent Living

Jeremy A. Rabkin, Professor, George Mason School of Law

Judy Van Rest, Executive Vice President, International Republican Institute

Nancy Zirkin, Executive Vice President, Leadership Conference on Civil Rights

Members ex officio

Michael H. Posner, Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor

James N. Miller, Principal Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy

Ann E. Rondeau, Vice Admiral, U.S. Navy; President, National Defense University

Richard H. Solomon, President, United States Institute of Peace (nonvoting)

88 •