Reflective Peacebuilding: A Planning, Monitoring, and Learning Tool Kit

John Paul Lederach, Reina Neufeldt, and Hal Culbertson

Kroc Institute and Catholic Relief Services, 2007

This toolkit is the product of a collaborative effort between the Kroc Institute and Catholic Relief Services' Southeast East Asia Regional Office.

The goal of this Toolkit is to improve peacebuilders’ ability to be reflective practitioners; this involves enhancing peacebuilders’ capacity to design and impact transformative change, and track and improve upon those changes over time, in unpredictable conflict contexts.

The tools themselves can stand alone or augment established design, monitoring, evaluation and learning systems and practices. They are intended to help focus on dimensions specific to peacebuilding work and provide practitioners with resources for enhancing their creativity in developing context-specific learning, monitoring and evaluation systems.

The Toolkit includes resources to foster learning before, during and after implementation of peacebuilding programs.

Content overview:

• Chapters one to three explore the connections between learning and effective peacebuilding practice, and suggest practices for reflection and learning as individuals and communities.
• Chapter four focuses on ethical considerations for monitoring, evaluation and learning.
• Chapters five through eight examine the types of change that peacebuilding practice promotes, and provide tools to further understand change, as well as to develop indicators to trace those changes over time.
• Chapters nine and ten address planning for long-term change and scaling up activities.
• Chapters eleven and twelve highlight monitoring and evaluation practices.
• The book concludes with a chapter on documentation practices that can enhance learning.