GPPi awarded 2-year research grant by German Foundation for Peace Research

The German Foundation for Peace Research (DSF) awarded GPPi a grant for a two-year research project Learning to Build Peace? The United Nations, Peacebuilding and Organizational Learning. The project will start on 1 February 2007. It builds on a DSF-funded pilot project that GPPi completed in October 2006. The pilot project’s report (Learning to Build Peace? United Nations Peacebuilding and Organizational Learning. Developing a Research Framework by Thorsten Benner, Andrea Binder and Philipp Rotmann) will be published later this year.

The issue of the UN’s (in)ability to learn with regard to its peacebuilding operations ranks increasingly high on the agenda of policymakers in both New York and national capitals. Most recently after the World Summit in September 2005, member states created the Peacebuilding Commission and the Peacebuilding Support Office, respectively, to ​“develop best practices” and to ​“gather and analyze […] best practices with respect to cross-cutting peacebuilding issues.” Within the UN bureaucracy, following the momentum created by the Report of the Panel on UN Peace Operations (the so-called ​“Brahimi Report”) in 2000, the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) has expanded its activities in policy development beyond its traditional realm of peacekeeping to include a wider set of challenges associated with peacebuilding. A central part of this expansion was the substantial strengthening of the Peacekeeping Best Practices Section (PBPS) which had been notoriously understaffed and under resourced. Recently, the Best Practices Section has started two complementary initiatives to improve learning. The Guidance Project collects lessons learned and policy guidance from across the UN system and external sources (expert communities and member states) to feed into new doctrine and procedures. The Knowledge Management Team within PBPS supports the collection of new lessons and experiences from the field by a new set of reporting tools.

For the period since the start of the implementation of the Brahimi report in 2001, the project will seek to answer the following questions: How have the UN’s doctrines and guidelines on peacebuilding evolved? How has the UN (not) learned from past experience and new knowledge? Which factors facilitate or hinder organizational learning? To this end, we develop a framework for analysis for a detailed process tracing of organizational learning in a single case study zooming in on four different focal issues taken from the areas of security, welfare, governance (Sicherheit, Wohlfahrt, Herrschaft) and a cross-cutting challenge such as the coordination of different actors.

The proposed project seeks to break new ground both theoretically and empirically. Theoretically, we will develop a framework for analyzing and operationalizing organizational learning, a concept that until now has largely remained at the metaphorical level. This framework will be tailored and applied to an international organization, adding a political dimension to a field that until now has mostly focused on corporations. In doing so, we bring together approaches from International Relations with organization theory — a literature so far underutilized for both the analysis of peacebuilding and the study of international organizations in general. At the same time, our study seeks to contribute to correcting one theoretical weakness of the existing literature on peacebuilding which (according to one prominent observer) has ​“paid relatively little attention to the conceptual foundations of peacebuilding itself, or the basic premises upon which these operations are based.”

Empirically, the study will be one of the first to open up the ​“black box” of the UN peacebuilding bureaucracy by means of an empirically rich process-tracing of (non-) learning. At the same time, the results promise to be relevant for the practice of UN peacebuilding (e.g. questions on the design of learning systems at DPKO and the PBSO).

The project will closely cooperate with a number of German and international partners including the DSF-funded project on Administrative Science Meets Peacekeeping at the University of Konstanz and the International Protectorates Program run by the Centre for International Studies, University of Cambridge in cooperation with the Global Public Policy Institute.