Peacebuilding must learn while acting

Peacebuilding operates in societies where change is political, contested and rarely linear. Yet international support can still be organised around an appealingly simple logic: analyse the problem, design an intervention, implement it and measure the result.

That logic becomes increasingly difficult to sustain when the environment itself is changing.

Hybrid threats exploit existing political and social divisions. Democratic institutions face pressure to protect societies without compromising the principles they exist to defend. Climate and environmental risks interact with inequality, governance and conflict. International partnerships are shaped not only by mandates and resources but by trust, power and competing expectations.

The challenge is not simply that the environments in which peace and security actors operate have become more complex. It is that uncertainty is inherent to them.

This broader theme ran through FBA Learning Days 2026, which brought researchers and practitioners together to examine evidence and operational experience from conflict-affected settings. Across different sessions, discussions returned to the importance of context, continuous learning and the ability to adapt as conditions change.

It points to a consequential shift in practice: the purpose of evidence is not always to tell us in advance what will work. It is also to help us recognise when our assumptions need to be adjusted and to change course accordingly.

Societies cannot be treated as problems to be fixed

Cedric de Coning, Research Professor at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, described one of the underlying problems:

– We have made a fundamental category error by approaching the problem of peace as something that can be fixed.

A society, he argued, is closer to a complex adaptive system than to a machine. External actors can support processes of change, but they cannot diagnose a society, apply a predetermined solution and expect to produce peace.

The practical alternative is not to abandon strategy or evidence. It is to work differently with both.

Adaptive peacebuilding means acting, observing what happens and using what is learned to determine the next step. The challenge is institutional as much as analytical.

Development and peacebuilding interventions are frequently funded on the basis of plans, targets and expected results defined before implementation begins. In this context, accountability is often understood as knowing exactly what our resources will achieve. But in a complex conflict environment, the ability to adjust an intervention may be precisely what makes it effective.

The policy challenge is therefore to distinguish accountability from false certainty.

Evidence-based practice should therefore support adaptation rather than turn the original plan into a commitment in itself.

Adaptation requires judgement, not lower ambition

The same tension appears in support to governance in fragile and conflict-affected settings.

“Good enough governance” can sound like an argument for accepting lower standards. That misses the point. The challenge is how to maintain rights, inclusion and accountability as a long-term direction while making realistic judgements about what can be achieved now, in what sequence and within what political constraints and trade-offs.

This requires questions conventional results frameworks do not always capture. What is a realistic step forward at this moment? Who defines it? Who carries the risk? What are the red lines? And what evidence would lead us to continue, adapt, pause or stop?

Such questions also expose assumptions that deserve greater scrutiny. More state capacity does not automatically produce greater legitimacy. International “best practice” does not move unchanged from one political context to another. And setbacks do not necessarily mean that reform has failed.

For peacebuilding practice, analysis therefore cannot be something completed before implementation and then filed away.

Analysis has to travel with the work.

That principle also changes how partnership should be understood.

Local actors are not simply implementation partners for interventions designed elsewhere. They are part of the process through which problems are understood, assumptions are tested and the next step is decided.

Many partnership failures begin before implementation, when ready-made solutions arrive before partners share an understanding of the problem, or when programmes respond more readily to international systems than to the realities of conflict-affected societies.

One practical implication is to clarify from the outset what kind of partnership is being built: strategic, operational or tactical. Different assumptions about the level and purpose of a partnership can create friction long before implementation begins.

Trust, transparency and shared problem definition matter. A deeper issue is how power is shared. Genuine partnership requires international actors not only to share responsibility for implementation, but to approach problem definition itself as a joint process.

A changing security landscape demands connected knowledge

Adaptivity is needed not only because individual conflict contexts change, but because the boundaries between peacebuilding, security, democratic governance and climate adaptation are themselves becoming harder to draw.

Hybrid threats are a clear example.

Strategic actors can exploit mistrust, polarisation, institutional weaknesses, contested identities and political grievances. Security analysis therefore increasingly needs to understand dynamics familiar to peacebuilding and democratic governance: legitimacy, trust, identity, political conflict and relations between people, communities and public institutions.

Peacebuilding and democracy practitioners, in turn, need to understand the wider security context: strategic actors and their objectives, geopolitical competition, and how societal tensions, institutional vulnerabilities and dependencies may be used as part of strategic influence.

This does not mean collapsing peacebuilding, democratic governance and security policy into one another.

Low trust can be exploited, but distrust in an institution may also be legitimate. Political disagreement can create openings for manipulation, but disagreement is an essential feature of democracy. The fact that an external actor exploits a societal conflict does not make the conflict itself illegitimate.

This is why resilience cannot simply mean eliminating vulnerability or maximising the state's capacity to act. Authoritarian systems and corrupt networks can also be remarkably resilient.

The more important question is: what is it that we want to be resilient, against what, and for what purpose?

For democratic societies, the challenge is to withstand pressure without weakening pluralism, accountability, the rule of law and the legitimacy that make the system worth defending.

Climate and environmental pressures illustrate a related point.

Climate adaptation can create opportunities to reduce vulnerability, strengthen institutions and build trust. But climate cooperation does not automatically produce peace. What matters is how interventions are carried out.

Processes built around participation, transparency, accountability and functioning institutions can strengthen cooperation. Poorly designed interventions can instead create new winners and losers, or place responsibility on local actors without transferring the power and resources needed to exercise it.

The implication is not that peacebuilding organisations should become technical climate actors. Concrete environmental problems can, however, provide entry points for dialogue, inclusive governance and institution-building when interventions begin with the specific political and conflict context.

Across these areas, the lesson is similar. Problems that cross institutional and thematic boundaries cannot be addressed by collapsing one field into another.

They require different forms of knowledge to meet.

Evidence should improve our ability to change our minds

Taken together, these discussions suggest a different way to think about the relationship between research, evidence and peacebuilding practice.

Research is sometimes expected to answer the practitioner's question: What works?

That question matters. But in complex environments, research can perform an equally important function: testing causal assumptions, questioning whether lessons can travel between contexts and identifying unintended consequences.

Practitioners contribute something equally important. Operational experience tests concepts against political reality. It shows where an analytical framework helps, where it fails and where the same dilemma can require very different responses in different contexts.

The result of bringing research and practice together may therefore not be a universal model.

It may be better judgement.

That distinction matters.

A changing security environment is accompanied by pressure for faster decisions, stronger evidence and demonstrable results. But greater uncertainty cannot be managed simply by demanding greater predictability from peacebuilding interventions.

For funders and policymakers, the challenge is to create accountability systems rigorous enough to identify progress and setbacks, while flexible enough to allow programmes to learn from both.

For practitioners, it means treating context analysis, follow-up and reflection as part of implementation itself.

And for FBA, it reinforces the value of creating a continuous exchange between research, policy and operational experience. The purpose of that bridge is not merely to move knowledge from research into practice. It is to allow evidence and experience to challenge one another before assumptions harden into programmes.

Peacebuilding has always taken place under uncertainty. What has changed is the security environment in which it operates – and the extent to which peacebuilding, democratic governance and security challenges now intersect. The question is therefore not only whether peacebuilding should adapt. It is whether our institutions, partnerships and systems for accountability allow different forms of knowledge to meet – and allow us to adapt as the context changes.