What makes peacebuilding sustainable?
Peacebuilding works when countries lead it themselves.?Building on A New Agenda for Peace,?the Pact for the Future?marked?a paradigm shift?by reaching consensus on a new, universal, nationally owned and led approach to?conflict?prevention and sustaining peace. Indeed, for any peacebuilding efforts to be sustainable, they must be nationally led and nationally owned.?The Peacebuilding Fund’s Terms of Reference notes that national ownership?remains?the core principle for the Fund.?This foundational document further highlights that the?support extended through the?PBF?must have a direct and positive impact on the sustainability of the peacebuilding process.?
Sustainability?principle ensures that the peacebuilding results?are durable and resilient?beyond the life of interventions.?National ownership?principle ensures that these changes are driven by, and embedded within, the national and local institutions and communities they are meant to serve.?In the Peacebuilding Fund’s practice, national ownership of peacebuilding efforts is both a means and an end – it is?an outcome when?national and local actors carry forward?and institutionalize results after PBF’s?support ends, as well?as a process of empowerment and participation that enables sustainability.?
The?analysis?of?ten?PBF country portfolio evaluations and?five?thematic?reviews?identified?important lessons on what makes peacebuilding?results?sustainable.?
Lesson 1: Institutional and policy embedding is the primary driver of long-term impact.?
Interventions are more?sustainable?when embedded in existing government or community structures, such as ministries, local councils, peace committees, or customary mechanisms, and aligned with national or sectoral strategies (such as?security sector reform, justice, youth, land governance).?In?Guinea, PBF’s support anchored each project in a responsible line ministry or directorate that co-led design, implementation, supervision, and final evaluation – an approach explicitly aimed at strengthening national ownership and sustainability.?In?Madagascar,?community-based?consultation structures?(神马午夜福利网s Locales de Concertation) were?established?and recognized?as?conflict?management platforms?by the local governments, which helped solidify their role beyond the project’s cycle.?
Lesson 2: Co-creation with national and local actors is a prerequisite for relevance, legitimacy, and ownership. Empowering and?publicly recognizing?local leaders and CSOs as custodians is the most reliable path to sustainability.?
When communities, government counterparts, and civil?society actors jointly design?peacebuilding?interventions, they not only ensure relevance but also build the trust and relationships needed to sustain outcomes after external support ends.?Investing in the capacities of civil society organizations, and supporting linkages between different networks and groups, may be among the most catalytic and sustainable of investments.?The evidence shows that when the PBF and its partners?publicly recognize?and institutionalize the role of local mediators, women peacebuilders, or youth councils, they strengthen not only ownership but also the?sustainability?of these mechanisms within formal governance processes.?In?Burundi, the use of locally respected facilitators was highly effective, as their credibility allowed them to serve as trusted bridges?between communities and?government authorities.??
Lesson 3:?Exit strategies?must be?a central component?of project architecture from?inception, not as an end-of-cycle afterthought.?
Stronger continuity and ownership are associated with portfolios that plan phased handovers early,?designate?future custodians with defined responsibilities, and?maintain?after-care to?consolidate?capacity once external funding winds down.?In?The Gambia, several PBF-supported projects incorporated exit measures from the outset, including training and transferring day-to-day responsibilities to locally mandated committees.?Socializing?exit arrangements?with?partners and beneficiaries well before the final months?can enable?local actors?to?effectively assume ownership.?The?Central African Republic?(CAR) portfolio evaluation points to the importance of clarity on who will?operate?and resource services after the projects, while?the evaluation of?the?PBF’s portfolio in?Mauritania?recommends a government-endorsed exit architecture to sustain gains and promote national ownership beyond project cycles.?
Lesson 4: A diversified approach to financial durability, combining in-kind contributions, community models, and strategic partnerships, signals stronger ownership and sustainability.?
In-kind contributions are an early and often undervalued signal of ownership. Modest but real government budget lines can anchor activities in public systems and create a basis for gradual scale-up.?Successful operations and maintenance (O&M) and cost-sharing models?can also be promising, for example, as?observed?in?The Gambia.?Community Borehole Management Committees collected user fees to fund maintenance, and the system was still functioning three years after closure,?demonstrating?a viable?financing?mechanism that outlived the project.?PBF-funded projects also attract and activate private sector investment. In?Mauritania, a PBF-funded biogas initiative supported youth cooperatives to convert organic waste into energy. The project’s commercial potential drew local investors interested in replicating the model, showing early signs that an environmentally sustainable business could also sustain itself economically once PBF’s support concluded.?
Lesson 5: Adaptive?Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL)?systems that empower local actors are critical for real-time course-correction, but their potential is often unrealized due to systemic weaknesses.?
When?Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL)?structures?and processes?are nationally led, harmonized, and regularly updated, they enable collective decision-making, learning, and course-correction.?MEL is?a?core mechanism for sustaining peacebuilding results. By integrating local actors into monitoring and review processes, national steering bodies not only improve data quality and accountability but also deepen shared ownership over results and their interpretation.?The use of provincial steering committees in?the?Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)?for real-time monitoring and project management is a positive example.?However, the potential of MEL is often undermined by the lack of portfolio-wide results frameworks, or the failure to build local partner capacity in data collection and analysis, hindering local leadership in learning and adaptation.?
The evidence synthesized from across the UN Peacebuilding Fund's portfolio evaluations and thematic reviews is clear and consistent – sustainability and national ownership are the direct outcomes of a deliberate, politically astute, and locally-grounded process that must begin at the earliest stages of intervention design.?Collective?lessons from the PBF-supported?programming?provide a powerful and evidence-based roadmap to support the building of a more durable and locally?owned peace.?