7. Monitoring and Evaluation in Peacebuilding: Reclaiming the Lost Opportunities for Improving Peacebuilding in Practice

In this chapter, Pravina Makan-Lakha shares the African Centre for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes’ (ACCORD) experiences and challenges with developing monitoring and evaluation (M&E) within its role as a peacebuilding and conflict resolution organisation. Most M&E approaches towards evaluating programming in peacebuilding have been developed in the development aid contexts to help the donor assess whether its financial contributions have been used effectively. ACCORD has had to adapt the logical frameworks and assumptions of the development aid paradigm to the highly dynamic and complex reality of its peacebuilding work. In the process ACCORD has learned valuable lessons that are consistent with insights from Complexity. This chapter shares some of the lessons learnt from using M&E as a tool to stimulate organisational learning to improve responses to peacebuilding and conflict resolution.