Reviewing our peacebuilding approach with Dinka Agaar

Learning and review is at the centre of Peace Canal’s approach under the Peacebuilding Opportunities Fund. A new project with CAFOD and Trócaire in Partnership (CTP) is enabling a process to share experiences and lessons between peacebuilding work in the Rumbek and Yirol areas.

The first part of this process was a review workshop from 29 June to 01 July 2022 with the akut de door (grassroots peace committees) of the Dinka Agaar. The purpose was to take the ten foundational principles of our approach and reflect on how they have been applied through the work of the akut de door. This in turn would support improvements in the ongoing work with the Dinka Agaar community, and provide the foundation for a subsequent exchange workshop with the grassroots peace committees of Yirol.

In this article, we look at two aspects of the conversation with the akut de door representatives.

On the first day of the process, we worked in rotating small groups to discuss the extent to which the ten principles had been applied in our work to date. To do this, we created an alternative pole to the principle, and invited the akut de door to place markers along the scale according to their perspective on how the principle was being applied. We went through the process with the Peace Canal team the previous day and the results were similar. The responses are aggregated together in the chart below:

Reviewing application of the peacebuilding principles

Although the sample size is only 30, and we are talking with a group who have a level of investment in the process, there were several useful takeaways for further reflection.

First, on the whole the distribution of responses is not very wide. Where there is the most divergence is on two scales that both relate to the emphasis of programming around government priorities/ownership versus community priorities/ownership. As the discussion unfolded, it became clear that the framing of this question was ambiguous. Those who responded more at the government end of the scale were not suggesting that programming had not been focussed on the community ownership to date. Rather, they were making a more procedural point that we need to work with the authorisation of government.

Second, the contrast between responses at the one end of the scale and the two clearly at the other end of the scale is helpful. It shows that there was not simply a reflexive bias to that end of the scale, and then allows us to reflect on those areas:

  • The yellow box is on the scale between addressing current incidents / direct causes of conflict versus dealing with the past and the legacy of conflict. We are still clear that dealing with the past is a central component of a sustainable peace. At the same time, the institutionally weak environment, the level of resourcing available to service agreements, and the conflict threats from communities outside the system, all combine to maintain a high level of pressure on the dynamics. This is not a conducive environment for an holistic dealing with the past agenda, which requires a level of security for the deeper individual and collective psycho-social process, as well as the institutional backing needed for the more practical components. (Based on our experiences in Jonglei, we recently reviewed that context against the Swisspeace dealing with the past framework. You can read the paper here.)

  • The green box stimulates a more critical reflection on the principles. It sits on the scale between solutions drawing solely on Dinka Agaar traditions versus solutions that draw on experiences from outside those traditions. The responses here are not judging the principle. They are simply observing that the programming so far has focussed on the internal traditions and wisdom of the community. More interestingly, what comes across in the discussion around this is the community’s perception that their tradition does have all the tools necessary to deal with the conflict.  At least in the Dinka Agaar context, it raises a question as to whether this should remain one of the ‘key’ principles that guides programming.

Shifting gears from the evaluation of the process to date, the second day of the workshop looked at priorities moving forward. To this end, we were aiming to move beyond shopping lists to a more nuanced understanding of community priorities. And more than just ordinal rankings of priorities to understand more clearly the weight behind them. To this end, we divided the akut de door representatives into their sectional groupings to engage in a resource allocation exercise. The categories they were allocating were workshopped earlier with the Peace Canal team based on clustering of the ‘shopping list’ items that had been presented to them over the last two years. The results were as follows:

Community priorities for peace dividends, as identified by Akut de Door

There are common features to the allocations between sections, as well as some interesting variations. Overall, it seems clear that agricultural support programs, education and health are the main priorities, accounting in some permutation for 45% or more of allocations in all sections. The early warning and response focuses heavily on the role of the akut de door themselves, and so they have a vested interest in emphasising this. Equally, the fact that in all cases they give higher allocations to at least one other category tends to indicate there is a degree of integrity in their allocations. The emphasis on agriculture is especially encouraging from a funding perspective. Whereas effective education and health programs require significant long-term, sustained investments, agricultural initiatives can be started with relatively modest investments that in turn can become self-sustaining if well designed and managed.

In terms of variations, it is most instructive to look at Pakam and Aliam Toc 1 alongside each other. The former is the least developed and most impoverished section, the latter is the most advanced. So whereas Pakam puts the greatest emphasis of all sections on education, Aliam Toc 1 puts the greatest emphasis of all sections on small business support programs. Aliam Toc 1 are also one of the more peaceful sections, hence an unsurprising downgrading of emphasis on the role of early warning and response.

As with the first exercise, the limited sample size here means we take these results as indications to explore further rather than hard and fast conclusions. At the same time, the respondents have been closely invested in the process over the last two years and hold leadership positions within their sections outside of town biases. So we can have some confidence that they set us on the right track of questions as we move forward.

The review process was supported by CAFOD and Trócaire in Partnership (CTP), the Peacebuilding Opportunities Fund (POF) and in partnership with Toch. 

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