This is a recording of the M&E Thursday Talk from Thursday, May 24th as Tilman Brück and Neil T. N. Ferguson of the International Security and Development Center hosted “Do Jobs Aid Peace? The Impact of Employment Programming on Peace.”
That employment builds peace backstops over 2,450 interventions; and good theories suggest the idea should hold (ironically enough, with or without employment impacts). From weight of numbers, a logical assumption is that sufficient academic-quality evaluations exist to conduct a meta-analysis. Alas. Not to be deterred, we conducted a “pseudo-meta-analysis” linking program locations to surveys. Fear of crime goes down, but other indicators are less consistent (and trust in government worsens!), which might suggest we capture a signalling process, rather than real attitudinal change. But what of the programs? Agencies mandate a final report, so it should be fairly easy to establish the impacts, right? We conducted a systematic review of 400 programs. Amazingly, of those 400 (and of 30 looked at in great detail), none has been evaluated for peace-related outcomes. So much for that idea. And that brings us to where we are now. Which is ending where we should have started; with the case-study evidence…