 |
Over the past 20 years, peacebuilding has rapidly grown as a field. Thousands of organizations are having an increasingly positive impact on reducing conflict and facilitating peaceful transformation of societies. Activities range from grassroots work at the community level to facilitating improved relations between identity groups, to working at the national level building societal resilience, and at the regional and international levels to develop improved institutional and human capacity to respond to conflict.
In order to maximize the impact of peacebuilding there is a need to develop a long-term approach, and vision, as well as sustainable programs and institutions. However, there is a fundamental challenge regarding the long-term needs of countries in conflict, and the relatively short-term nature of funding provided by most donor organizations. Although in recent years the recognition of the need for sustainable peacebuilding work has increased, in practice there has been little consensus of what sustainability means, or how to achieve it in a competitive and often short term driven funding environment.
This paper focuses on two main issues. The first is the concept of sustainability and how donors and peacebuilding organizations operationalize the term in practice. The second is exploring innovative ways that peacebuilding organizations are advancing sustainable financing through new tools such as social entrepreneurship, crowdfunding, social impact bonds, and other innovations as the field grows into peacebuilding 3.0.