African Peacebuilding Coordination Programme

Peacebuilding, or transforming a conflict system so as to address the roots of the conflict and to develop the basis of a lasting and just peace, is an inherently complex process involving a multiplicity of actors and stakeholders engaged in a variety of tasks. Coordination amongst these actors is usually not easy to achieve, and individual peacebuilding activities and projects do not always coherently relate to each other or to a national peacebuilding framework. The more peacebuilding activities, projects and programmes are conducted without a coordinated or coherent approach being in place, the more competition, duplication and unnecessary overlap result, often resulting in confusion, rivalry for resources, and at times even creating causes for conflict rather than reducing these. This poses challenges both to the delivery of peace dividends and the sustainability of the peace being developed. Further, local ownership of peacebuilding processes is often lacking, and often local actors lack the capacity to drive peacebuilding processes. This poses challenges to peacebuilding efforts whilst the international community remains engaged in a post-conflict country, yet these challenges are exacerbated once the international community withdraws, as peace processes that are not locally designed, driven and owned become unsustainable and threaten a return to conflict.

The United Nations has attempted to deal with this challenge by establishing the United Nations Peacebuilding Commission. Similarly, the African Union has created a Post-Conflict Reconstruction and Development Policy Framework (AU - PCRD), and is currently laying the foundations for an institutional response to peacebuilding processes on the African continent. The concept of peacebuilding has also gained renewed attention by the revival in academic and policy discourses of the distinctions between conflict prevention, peacemaking, peacekeeping and peacebuilding. ACCORD closed out the previous Finnish-funded African Civil-Military Coordination (ACMC) Programme in 2007, and in its place has launched the African Peacebuilding Coordination Programme (APCP), which looks at broader coherence and coordination questions in African countries transitioning from conflict. The African Peacebuilding Coordination Programme at ACCORD, also funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Finland, seeks to work towards enhancing coherence and coordination across the peace, security, humanitarian, development, human rights and Rule of Law (RoL) dimensions of peacebuilding operations in Africa so as to enhance the planning and coordination dimensions of African peacebuilding operations, to support local ownership of peacebuilding processes, and to contribute to the development of sustainable peace processes in countries transitioning from conflict.

In this regard, the Programme works in Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Liberia and Sudan. The Programme aims to (1) conduct and disseminate research on peacebuilding in these countries, (2) develop training materials and other resources related to peacebuilding coordination for use by those directly engaged in the planning and implementation of peacebuilding operations, (3) contribute to peacebuilding policy development and implementation both within the African continent and beyond, and (4) conduct training courses, host workshops and facilitate capacity-development programmes aimed at contributing to the skill-set and strengthening the capacity of those directly engaged in and responsible for peacebuilding operations to coordinate; attain greater levels of coherence; jointly plan, implement and assess their activities; and raise local involvement and ownership in peacebuilding processes. The Programme aims to work with a broad range of stakeholders engaged in the peacebuilding processes in these four countries (including national governments, the African Union (AU) the United Nations (UN) System, UN or AU peace support operation, the World Bank, donor governments, international and local Non-Governmental Organisations and civil society).

Through its work, the Programme seeks to positively contribute to the skill-set and capacity of those directly engaged in the planning and implementation of peacebuilding activities, projects and programmes; to aid in the attainment of enhanced levels of coherence and coordination in peacebuilding systems in Africa; to assist governments, civil society and other stakeholders in the design and implementation of peacebuilding frameworks; and to contribute to the development and implementation of peacebuilding and post-conflict reconstruction and development policies, both within Africa and beyond the continent. In 2008 the Programme is working with stakeholders representing different actors engaged in the peacebuilding processes in Burundi, the DRC, Liberia and Sudan, and is conducting in-country consultations, workshops and training courses in each of these countries. This will be done so as to build the foundations of the Programme, and to generate sufficient local input into the work of the Programme. From 2009 onwards, the Programme aims to expand its training and capacity-development components so as to contribute to the capacity of stakeholders to enhance coherence and coordination in peacebuilding processes at the national, regional and continental levels in Africa.