Sustainable peace requires coordinating work across multiple different areas including economic development, political institutions, and security. This coordination is a challenge, and peacebuilding needs good approaches for setting up and promoting better coordination.
OEF believes that networked coordination is one approach that can be used. Traditional approaches to coordination are either ad-hoc and relatively unstructured or heavily hierarchical. Networked coordination is neither: it is organized and structured, but based on non-hierarchical information sharing with the goal of maximizing participants’ individual contributions to a larger goal. This approach may help to address some of the challenges that have been evident in past attempts at coordinating multiple groups in peacebuilding.
OEF’s new policy brief “Networks and Coordination in Peacebuilding” provides an introduction into the idea of networked coordination, how it works and where it has been used in the peacebuilding field in the past, both by OEF and other organizations. It also identifies several design principles that can help institutions interested in networkedcoordination build effective systems for coordination and collaboration.
