Measuring peacebuilding: challenges, tools, actions

How can the effectiveness of peacebuilding operations
in countries marked by conflict be better measured?
This policy brief examines the steps needed to improve
the measurement of peacebuilding work, highlights the
technical and political problems this work faces, and
makes recommendations for action by organisations in
the field.
The experience of peacebuilding initiatives around
the world has in recent years led to increased efforts
to develop new and improved tools to measure their
effects. Many projects are already underway, led by key
civilian and military actors such as the United Nations
itself to defence agencies, government departments,
the World Bank, and NGOs.
These various efforts reflect both the mismatch
between ambitions and results in Afghanistan and Iraq
and longer-term concerns about the limitations of data,
methodology and practices in the area of measuring
peacebuilding. There is a stark contrast here with
development goals, where monitoring procedures are
well established and far more data are available.