Towards Quality Financing for Peacebuilding: Community-Focused Accountability and Locally-Led Determination

On Thursday, 30 November 2023, representatives of the UN, its Member States, local peacebuilders, and experts in financing for peacebuilding gathered as part of the CSO-UN Dialogue on Peacebuilding in an informal discussion entitled: “Towards Quality Financing for Peacebuilding: Community-Focused Accountability and Locally-Led Determination”. This discussion tackled the question of innovative financing approaches, moving beyond ODAs and grants, to enable locally-led determination of impact and quality financing. 

The main takeaway from the discussion include:

• the need to ensure that donors can contribute to peacebuilding by ensuring that peacebuilding is based on community knowledge. Local actors are best placed to lead peacebuilding processes, which is why donors should support a locally-led determination of impact.
• the reminder that peacebuilding is a long-term process, which does not fit the current projectised approach of the donor community.
• Innovative financing should not replace the responsibilities for donor financing the commitments for which were made as part of the evolution of peacebuilding and sustaining peace (i.e., S/RES/2282, S/RES/2558, A/76/305). 

Recommendations emerging from the discussion include:

• Donors should encourage story-telling and other non-traditional indicator-based methods of conveying impact and data collection.
• Donors should adjust projects as needed based on changes on the ground and fund innovations in locally-led resourcing more systematically.
• Local peacebuilders should create coherent methodologies that donors can put money behind.