Advancing Change towards Sustainable Peace: Financing Locally-Led Peacebuilding Action

Global peacebuilding policy widely recognises that sustainable peace requires the meaningful engagement of local stakeholders. Indeed, peacebuilding and sustaining peace is meaningless, if it exists only within the global policy arena. Thus, peacebuilding and sustaining peace needs to be operationalised at the local level to generate real impact for those affected by conflict.

To achieve this, we need local peacebuilders to be enabled to lead root-cause analysis, crisis response and long-term resilience building. However, only 12% of the tiny envelope of funding available for peacebuilding reaches local peacebuilders. A compounding factor making access to this limited amount of funding difficult for local peacebuilders lies in the restricted administrative requirements put forward by donors.

The global support in policy for the participation of local peacebuilders is yet to be operationalised in practice through three avenues of change in the global action aimed at supporting peacebuilders: 1) change in mindset, 2) change in practice and 3) change of expectations.

This short policy brief shares good practices and brings forward key recommendations on how peacebuilders can become meaningful partners in peacebuilding and sustaining peace. 

On 25 April, GPPAC member Khaled Emam from Egypt shared what the three avenues of change mean concretely during a roundtable discussion on the funding of local peacebuilding organised by UN PBSO ahead of the High-Level Meeting on Financing for Peacebuilding. Read it here.