Breakfast seminar: The Role of UN Peacebuilding in a World Characterised by Greater Geopolitical Tensions
For every dollar invested in peace, nearly 100 are invested in preparing for war. At this seminar, we will discuss how the peacebuilding community can better mobilize the political and financial support it needs.
Breakfast seminar: Stabilising the Sahel – What is the role and responsibility of Norway and Europe?
Join us for this event, where two authors and experts on security in the Sahel reflect on challenges and lessons for the region, its neighbours, Europe and the wider world.
The Adaptive Peacebuilding Guidebook
When we hear the word “peace”, we often think of the end of a war, a peace agreement, or large-scale reconstruction efforts that follow a conflict. In reality, however, peace does not emerge the day after a conflict ends. Rather, it is nurtured gradually through everyday interactions, relationships, and collective efforts. Peace is not something that can be delivered from the outside; it is something that emerges from within societies and communities themselves. The “Adaptive Peacebuilding Guidebook” seeks to translate this understanding into a practical framework through the approach known as Adaptive Peacebuilding. The academic foundations, theories, and concepts underpinning Adaptive Peacebuilding have already been articulated in the book Adaptive Peacebuilding: A New Approach to Sustaining Peace in the 21st Century . Adaptive Peacebuilding views peacebuilding not as a process of implementing predetermined plans or applying universal solutions, but as a process through which people learn, reflect, and adapt collectively in response to changing circumstances. Based on the academic insights presented in that book, the newly published guidebook to Adaptive Peacebuilding clearly summarizes the concept of Adaptive Peacebuilding for practitioners and presents eight case studies from United Nations agencies, bilateral development agencies such as JICA, and NGOs.
From synergy to subsidy – The cultural problem of public–private partnerships in international development
This chapter explores the cultural problem of PPPs. The PPP policy agenda in international development seeks to juxtapose actors with distinct rationales and institutional logics, with the ambition to create synergy between them. In practice, however, the intentional encounter between public and private actors produces interface situations that also amplify the actors’ distinctiveness and thus the cultural problem of PPPs. The chapter draws on data collection in the World Bank and a case study in Ethiopia of a PPP development project involving an NGO and a multinational corporation. This shows the practical renderings and effects of the culture problem, here causing the private actor to withdraw from the partnership and their joint project. Thus, what was meant as a project of synergy becomes a publicly funded proxy and subsidy of private interests. At the general level, the chapter shows how the PPP agenda compels categorisation as either public or private while at the same time it seeks to merge these differences. As such, the interface dynamics and cultural problem are not only produced by the PPP agenda but may also undermine it. This chapter is part of the book 'The Politics of Public–Private Partnerships and International Development'.
Unravelling the Ps in public–private partnerships for development
With the launch of UN Agenda 2030, public–private partnerships (PPPs) became formalised as both an objective of and a means of implementing the UN Sustainable Development Goals. An established policy-oriented research agenda has long sought to make sense of the ‘jungle’ of PPPs by identifying critical success factors and chronic shortcomings. Yet the instrumentalist inclination to evaluate PPPs restricts this agenda’s theoretical horizons. Building on a relatively smaller but significant body of critical PPP work, Agenda 2030 calls for research that embraces the messiness of PPPs and treats the plasticity of the term as a feature to understand rather than a bug to be overcome. To wit, Agenda 2030 advances an inductive approach to exploring the PPP buzzword in its specific enactments and makes the case for problematising the Ps in PPP from the bottom up and from multiple perspectives. Ultimately, Agenda 2030 highlights the theoretical value of escaping the evaluation meta-narrative that delimits the theoretical potential of a great deal of existing research on PPPs for development and PPPs more broadly. In addition to helping inform and enhance our understanding of the contemporary PPP agenda, this approach is useful for making sense of the political and capitalist forces that are shaping not only Ethiopia but the world at large today. This chapter is part of the book 'The Politics of Public–Private Partnerships and International Development'.
Tracing the travels of a development model
Historicising Ethiopia’s contemporary global Public-Private Partnerships (PPP) agenda, this chapter examines how its contemporary manifestation in Ethiopia bears the imprint of the PPP model’s checkered historical and political trajectory. The underlying analytical gambit is that tracing the ‘travels’ of the PPP model – via analyses of China and the UK’s PPP waves – can both help explain how Ethiopia ended up adopting the model in the first place and understand the distinct form this adoption has taken. In the process, the analysis shows how Ethiopia’s PPP policy relies upon a highly selective process of ‘lessons’ to be ‘learned’ from (un)successful projects that partially but not entirely airbrushes out experiences that would threaten the uptake of the model. These elisions are crucial for imagining that the risks of PPP can be overcome with capacity-building and more rigorous management processes. The chapter contends that this selective learning can help account for the spread of PPPs to Ethiopia and the persistence of the PPP promotion efforts by international financial institutions globally. Taken together, the chapter makes the case for treating the PPP model as an unfolding global process. This chapter is part of the book 'The Politics of Public–Private Partnerships and International Development'
The Politics of Public–Private Partnerships and International Development – Insights from Ethiopia
With the launch of Agenda 2030, public–private partnerships (PPPs) were heralded as an important means of realising the UN Sustainable Development Goals and providing more sustainable development financing in the global south. This book explores PPPs from the bottom up, drawing on extensive empirical research in Ethiopia to illuminate the diversity of practices, arrangements and contradictions that the PPP agenda enables, generates and occludes. Despite the omnipresence of PPP talk among governments and international organisations, donor and recipient agencies, and private actors, there exists no universally agreed definition of PPPs, and in practice they encompass a remarkable diversity of activities and arrangements. This book thoroughly examines PPPs in Ethiopia, considering what actors they bring together, what power dynamics they produce, how the dynamics alter them, what PPPs and such dynamics say about changing state–society relations and how the individual Ps of PPPs get infused with context-specific meaning. By investigating how PPPs play out in practice, the book sheds new light on how this ambiguous but proliferating discourse is changing the meanings, processes and mechanisms of international development. This book illuminates the unseen consequences of translating bold sustainable development goals into practice and will be of interest to researchers and practitioners of international development.