Strengthening Approaches to Conflict Prevention and Peacebuilding at the UN and IFIs: Key Ideas and Recommendations

All three of the recent UN secretary-general reports on peacebuilding and sustaining peace (2018, 2019, and 2020) take note of the need to enhance collaboration between the UN—not only its development system but also its peace and security and humanitarian arms—with international financial institutions (IFIs), namely the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF).

The UN is not alone in this interest—there is now a unique opportunity following the joint Pathways for Peace report as the World Bank implements its new Fragility, Conflict, and Violence (FCV) strategy, which places partnership front and center, and as the IMF begins to incorporate the findings of a recent internal evaluation (“The IMF in Fragile States,” 2018), which argues for greater sensitivity to political dynamics in FCV contexts.

This note provides a set of recommendations, with a view to strengthening strategic and policy collaboration across the three institutions in fragile and conflict prevention situations (including FCV countries, but also partner countries facing difficult political challenges and transitions at all levels of income and capacity). These recommendations are not meant as a panacea: sustaining peace is first and foremost a question of national ownership and political will, with the UN and the IFIs playing a supportive role to national reformers. Moreover, a complex landscape of global actors beyond the UN and the IFIs, including foreign investors, bilateral partners, and regional organizations, increasingly play a critical role in peacebuilding. But strategic complementarity between the UN, World Bank, and IMF is vital not only to amplify the impacts of their respective interventions, but to provide a basis to help countries build the constituencies and alliances necessary to end violence and sustain peace.