Lessons Learned on Community Driven Reconstruction

The International Rescue Committee (IRC) was founded in 1933 to assist people fleeing the rise of fascism in Europe. It has since evolved into a pre-eminent agency supporting conflict-affected communities from crisis through peace, regeneration and stable development. In 2002, the IRC established the Post Conflict Development Initiative (PCDI), a strategic center mandated to inform and support the development of IRC policy and practice related to transitional and post conflict interventions. This paper, produced by Lizanne McBride and Naina Patel of the PCDI, is a baseline analysis of lessons learned on IRC’s Community Driven Reconstruction or CDR work, an approach used in recovery and reconstruction programming.

To vet initial findings, PCDI worked with IRC field staff in a seminar sponsored by IRC and Stanford University's Center for Democracy, Development and Rule of Law (CDDRL). PCDI also used the lessons learned as basis to work with CDDRL scholars on developing an effective monitoring and evaluation system that could measure impact with confidence in programs going forward. This paper and the work undertaken at Stanford represent an institutional commitment to build a more sophisticated evidence base for transitional programming. To this end, IRC has recently collaborated with scholars from Stanford and Columbia Universities to conduct randomized impact evaluations in two new CDR programs, and will disseminate results for improved program and practice as they become available.