22 March 2006

GPPi awarded research grant by German Foundation for Peace Research

The German Foundation for Peace Research (Deutsche Stiftung Friedensforschung) awarded GPPi a research grant for a 5 month project entitled Learning to Build Peace? The United Nations, Transitional Administration, Strategic Planning and Organizational Learning. Developing a Research Framework.

The project seeks to add an important dimension to the evolving debate on the UN's institutional and operational performance in transitional administration (cases such as Eastern Slavonia, East Timor, Kosovo, Bosnia and Afghanistan). This is a timely endeavor as we now not only have a set of cases to learn from but also, in the form of the Peacebuilding Commission and the Peacebuilding Support Office, a new set of institutions that are tasked with identifying and integrating lessons learned into current and future practice.

 

The 5-month project will focus on developing a research framework that will be the basis for an in-depth follow-up study. In addition to survey the relevant literature in the different disciplines (international relations, public administration, sociology of organizations) we will conduct interviews with practitioners and researchers. We will also undertake a basic mapping of mechanisms and processes for organizational learning that are in place, both at headquarters and within missions. We also aim to build a network of researchers and research institutions working on issues of peacebuilding and organizational learning.

 

The project is part of the International Protectorates Program run by the Centre for International Studies, University of Cambridge (James Mayall, Ricardo Soares De Oliveira) in cooperation with the Global Public Policy Institute. The program started with a conference at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center on February 6-10, 2006. For more information on this program and the Learning to Build Peace project, please see our http://www.gppi.net/?protectorates.

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