Report on Best practices in EU Local Capacity Building
Drawing on cross-regional fieldwork, this report identifies structural barriers and practical lessons shaping the effectiveness of EU-supported local capacity building in peacebuilding contexts.
Executive summary
This study draws on 80 interviews conducted with civil society, state officials, and international actors in Kosovo, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Burma/Myanmar, Somalia/Somaliland and Cambodia in 2017–18 to identify barriers to building local capacities in peacebuilding and best practices. While each local capacity building initiative must be tailored to the local cultural and political context, common issues regarding the local context, sustained peacebuilding, funding structures and reporting requirements were raised across all of the case studies.
Local capacity building is an essential component in establishing the basis for a long-term sustainable peace in post-war or post-conflict environments. In situations where inter‐community trust has eroded and confidence in the government is limited, mechanisms must be put in place to facilitate the expression of local needs and to empower these communities to attempt to address these issues in a manner consistent with democratic governance. The dominant mode of delivering projects is through the formal civil society sector, and specifically through non-governmental organisations (NGOs).
To maximise the potential of this model, mechanisms must be put in place to facilitate greater community participation in the life cycle of peacebuilding projects, from design through to implementation and assessment. The creation of such mechanisms requires greater community engagement from the outset and longer-term projects to empower local voices.
Fostering local capacity in peacebuilding involves more than mediation, monitoring of human rights and addressing the direct causes of violence. While these are important components of peacebuilding, mechanisms to address local community needs are crucial to (re)build intra‐community trust and to (re)initiate trust in local government.
The long-term establishment of democratic government underpinned by a robust civil society has come under threat from states that have sought to restrict NGO activities. The tendency to shift donor priorities to overlap with development issues has eroded the peacebuilding capacity in some post-war and post-conflict environments. Peacebuilding must be understood and treated as a long-term process and it is recommended that a percentage of donor funds should be allocated to such activities for at least a decade after peace is nominally achieved.
NGO workers overwhelmingly identified funding and reporting mechanisms as a hindrance to the effectiveness of local capacity building. The lack of sustainable funding, the onerous nature of the reporting requirements in European languages and the relative inability to plan for more than a three-year period were universally noted to impinge upon the effectiveness of local peacebuilding.
Keywords
- Capacity building; Local turn; Best practices; Peacebuilding; Western Balkans; Horn of Africa; South East Asia