Advanced Level Training will be organized from 23 to 26 October 2012, Ferme du Grand Spinois, Belgium. The course will run from 23-26 October 2012 inclusive. Participants are expected to arrive on Monday evening on the 22nd for a welcome dinner and depart on the 27th in the morning after the final dinner on the 26th October. The course is an advanced course and called Pelican “γ”.
The management of the course is ensured by Channel Research. The course is intended for those who have previously participated in evaluation and monitoring of conflict mitigation programmes, or in programming of peace interventions, and conflict sensitivity. This will be the sixth year of the course in Belgium, and is based on pooling the specialists’ experience of the field, as well as the expertise of the participants. It is situated at a broader policy level than the previous sister course delivered annually by Channel Research intermediate-level course (β).
The course is recommended to participants from aid agencies (headquarters and field personnel), donor governments, consultancies and academia who want to understand the key challenges of uncertainty and the optimal ways in which they can be addressed.
The evaluation of conflict prevention and peace-building (CPPB) activities has been a major challenge to policy-makers, practitioners and evaluators alike. At the core of this challenge is an underlying difficulty in making the link between interventions and the causes of conflict that they seek to address (whether directly or indirectly). This leads us to question what criteria should performance be based on.
Furthermore, many interventions may not be about peace building per se, and yet aid agencies may expect their programmes to be ‘conflict sensitive’. So, how should this is assessed? Our premise for the course is that three broad global trends are forcing us towards considering different ways to address the evaluation challenge. One of these, and a major focus of the course, is to undertake “evaluation without objectives”.
These three trends are:
- · The Paris Declaration leads to a stronger commitment to national development strategies (ownership) – around which donors can provide support (alignment) and work to streamline their efforts in-country (harmonization). While this 4 is mostly done in reference to PRSPs in stable environments (i.e. those with no large-scale crises or volatility), in unstable environments there is no such relevant framework against which to assess support.
- · Fragile states principles: this is related, but in many unstable environments it leads to a prevalence of project approaches that steer away from the Paris Declaration thinking. As a consequence evaluations, and particularly joint evaluations, have to look at the sum of many projects that have evolved due to decisions by certain actors at certain points in time. This means that in general there is no clear overarching strategy.
- · Stabilization operations: there is now a consensus that peace operations and stabilization operations have to take the protection of the population as the central element. This however remains primarily oriented towards adversaries. This relies on tools like centre of gravity analysis, and tends to seek to isolate the adversary from the population.
This training follows in the wake of a growing number of methodological developments for evaluations in conflict prevention and peace-building (broadly defined as reducing levels of violence through non-coercive methods).
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