Failure and Turn Around in Peacebuilding Projects
Peacebuilding aims to prevent a relapse into conflict in countries that have recently recovered from significant violence and war. The United Nations (UN) Peacebuilding Support Office (PBSO), located at the UN headquarters in New York City, funds and coordinates peacebuilding projects in these challenging environments. The Capstone team was tasked with helping the PBSO understand patterns in the failure of these projects (as well as in the turnaround of previously failing projects) in order to assist in their early identification and to suggest management interventions.
The Capstone team utilized a mixed methods approach, combining both qualitative analysis of the self-reported reasons for failure for peacebuilding projects with a quantitative analysis of the variables that PBSO tracked. Furthermore, the team analyzed these reasons for failure and turnaround at the macro level and at the country level, including a case study undertaken in Liberia, where the team spent over a week conducting 15 interviews with personnel on the ground. At the macro level, a spike in the number of failing projects and reported reasons for failure from 2014-2015 coincided with an expansion in the PBSO reporting template as well as with the outbreak of Ebola in West Africa, where many projects were located and which interacted with other causes of failure.
Most significantly, the failures reflected poor contingency planning in case of implementation delays and a lack of programmatic flexibility. At the country level and in the case study in Liberia, the most salient causes of failure were problems with staff project management and project design, especially a lack of implementation plan flexibility and short project life cycles, as well as a widespread confusion regarding the in-country institutional structure of peacebuilding and the UN system. The team’s recommendations included improvements to risk management, project flexibility, staff training, reporting, and record-keeping. In particular, the team suggested an in-country contingency fund, a hotline and task tracker, a contingency plan requirement for project submission, disseminating ‘one-pager’ training materials, and additional standardizations to the reporting and tracking of project data.