Breaking Barriers – Final Report

This is a copy of the final report from the Breaking Barriers Conference and Workshop which took place in December 2016 in Cape Town, South Africa.

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How do we ensure participation and inclusion in peacebuilding evaluation? While peacebuilding programs are often built on the power of the people and inclusive processes, true participation and inclusion is not a guaranteed facet of programming. While peacebuilding programs regularly tout the importance of locally-led initiatives, and the importance of inclusive processes, true participation and inclusion are often missing from both peacebuilding programming and evaluation. 

So what does meaningful participation and inclusion look like in peacebuilding evaluation? How can evaluation processes facilitate deeper participation and inclusion from all stakeholders? What are the barriers to participation and inclusion in peacebuilding evaluation? And, most importantly, what are actionable solutions to breaking barriers to participation and inclusion?

At the Breaking Barriers Conference and Co-Design Workshop, held from December 6-9 2016 in Cape Town, South Africa, a diverse group of local practitioners, global experts, funders, policy makers, multi-sectoral programmers, academics, and evaluators gathered to tackle these questions and work towards feasible, effective, and innovative solutions.

The Breaking Barriers Conference and Co-Design Workshop was hosted by the Peacebuilding Evaluation Consortium (PEC), DME for Peace, and Everyday Peace Indicators (EPI), with support from Search for Common Ground (Search) and George Mason University (GMU), all made possible by funding from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The three-day co-design workshop was kicked off with a conference day of panels and discussions on topics relevant to participation and inclusion in peacebuilding evaluation, such as ethical community led evaluation, the importance of embracing failure, and bottom-up crowdsourced research, with a broader group of local participants.

Through a facilitated series of interactive, design thinking exercises that utilized different approaches to enhance genuine participation in the design, analysis, and solution-generation stages of the workshop, Breaking Barriers developed four human-centered, locally-led, innovative solutions to improving participation and inclusion of evaluation practice in complex environments.

The visuals used in this report were created by Kat Haugh.