Recommendation:

Recommendation 1: Need for a Civilian-Facing Peacebuilding Approach and Program

Achieving a positive peace beyond the cessation of hostilities, in which peace persists and is actively promoted by civilians and conflict actors alike, cannot be attained by engaging the military in peacebuilding alone. While securitized peacebuilding is critical for preventing bad actors from spoiling peace negotiations, it may backfire if personal freedoms are seen as being disrespected. Achieving a positive peace requires a civilian-led peacebuilding process that develops civilian capacity to prevent potential conflict and to de-escalate conflict if it does happen. While PAMANA as a “development for peace” initiative engaged civilians in CDD that helped community capacity for development, we found a gap in civilian-led peacebuilding projects focused specifically on building skills around conflict resilience and prevention, such as peace education, early warning initiatives or conflict resolution training, or embedding these components alongside standard livelihood or infrastructure investments. The prospects for sustained peace depend not only on economically stable communities but also on conflict-resilient ones. The continuation of PAMANA, as well as the addition of more civilian-led peacebuilding programs, is critical for maintaining a positive peace.

Recommendation:

Recommendation 2: Increased Localization of Programming and Planning

The evaluation team recommends that project targetting and implementation strategies be localized even further than current practice. This philosophy draws from the experiences of local governments such as the province of Bohol, which has been able to maintain its insurgency-free status through intensified development and strong multi-stakeholder partnerships down to the barangay level. Even within conflict line, we found that the most important issues facing communities are extremely varied. In addition, when local implementers have a greater say in the planning of PAMANA, key stakeholders take greater ownership over the program, which was a key factor in many successful instances of PAMANA implementation up to this point.

Recommendation:

Recommendation 3: Disaggregating Theory of Change by Conflict Line

The specific mechanisms through which PAMANA programming impacted the goal of conflict reduction varied tremendously by conflict line, especially in terms of Track 1 complementarity. In addition, both the global literature and prominent policy reports treat development relating to 1) already-signed peace agreements, 2) political transitions and 3) counterinsurgency as distinct processes. In many cases the specific leadership (especially at OPAPP) in charge of planning programs in the different conflict zones had a nuanced understanding of how the broad theory of change applied to their goals. However, additional disaggregation in the initial planning stages of the program could lead to improved practices that are customized specifically to the issues that hinder peace in the different zones. One caveat to this recommendation is that we recommend increased coordination between the NPA-related and RPA and CBA-CPLA related planning due to their geographic proximity and the real historical and security challenges between these groups.

Recommendation:

Recommendation 4: Balancing “Soft” vs. “Hard” Interventions

As part of the increased localization process, many communities will see the greatest impacts of PAMANA programming if “hard” infrastructure programs (especially roads but also community infrastructure and agricultural equipment) are regularly paired with “soft” capacity-building interventions. While many citizens saw the economic benefits associated with increased access to markets and opportunities, there were significant challenges associated with translating these gains into meaningful conflict reduction. Our findings suggest that these challenges were mitigated when the timing of these different types of interventions overlapped.

Recommendation:

Recommendation 5: Reconfiguration/Rebranding with Current Peace Process Developments

While many improvements were made to previous processes of development in conflict zones, PAMANA did come with significant challenges that in some cases undercut government legitimacy, especially funding lapses and delays. As such, it is worth exploring whether rebranding the program (perhaps in a way specific to the different conflict lines) would be beneficial to future operations. This is especially the case in terms of BARMM and Normalization, where changes in governing structures may allow for improved opportunities to enhance both regional and national government legitimacy. This may also be possible in the case of CNN and the completion areas in Cordillera and Negros-Panay, where the program can be aligned with EO No. 70.

Recommendation:

Recommendation 6: Aligning the Bureaucracy

At the implementer level, many agency personnel understood the importance of conflict-sensitive practices despite challenges to personal safety. At the same time, the unique reporting requirements and the increased difficulty of implementation made it so that they were often hesitant about PAMANA. Specifically, the degree to which funds were delayed and lapsed was more likely to result in poor performance reports, making PAMANA misaligned with their own professional incentives. Future development programming in conflict zones should take this into account and readjust how implementers are evaluated relative to their “regular” work, thus increasing ground-level agency buy-in.

On an organizational level, although PAMANA often spoke of convergence of government institutions, we found more examples of a lack of coordination and siloed implementation. While OPAPP is responsible for coordination and planning, a significant portion of responsibility for improving convergence is the DBM’s. While often overlooked, administrative policies often created operational bottlenecks and even roadblocks. Peacebuilding is dependent on communities having faith in the government as a partner and smooth implementation with timely disbursements and manageable procurement policies are integral to the continuation of development projects. From our findings, it was clear that instances of failed implementation could worsen community relations with the government.

Recommendation:

Recommendation 7: Indicators for the Philippine Development Plan Results Matrix

Given PAMANA’s particularities, the indicators recommended for the PDP are less about tangible program outputs but concentrate on the mechanisms that can encourage conflict sensitivity and indicators that show commitment to peace.

7.A. Strengthening CSPP at the Local Level

• LGUs with a POC

• LGUs with a POC working with the Local Development Council (LDC)

• LGUs integrating conflict analysis in their Provincial Development and Physical Framework Plan, Comprehensive Land Use Plan, Comprehensive Development Plan, Executive-Legislative Agenda, Annual Investment Plans, and other mandated plans

• LGUs with a conflict-sensitive Public Order and Public Safety Plan and CCA/DRRM Plan, factoring in human-induced disasters and complex emergencies

• LGUs with community-based projects for peacebuilding (in relation to CDP)

7.B. Ensuring Balanced Development

• Percent of planned projects implemented

• Percent of planned CDD projects implemented

• Ratio of infrastructure projects to “soft” capacity-building projects

7.C. Understanding Citizens’ Perceptions

• Legitimacy of the central government

• Representativeness of the central government

Recommendation:

Recommendation 8: Design & Mechanisms: Project-Level Data Consolidation

One set of major obstacles to effective evaluation involves the inconsistency of project-level PAMANA data, especially in recent years. Because PAMANA operations are not centralized with a single agency, consistent and enforceable reporting requirements for the different implementing agencies is crucial. In addition, start-date and end-date values for projects in the PAMANA dataset would greatly improve the ability to evaluate PAMANA’s impact on conflict. As an example, DSWD’s KALAHI-CIDSS dataset and the AFP’s Peace and Development Teams data includes these values, allowing for evaluators to track patterns of violence specifically surrounding project implementation (Berman, Downey, & Felter, 2016; Crost, Felter, & Johnston, 2014).

Recommendation:

Recommendation 9: Design & Mechanisms: Improved Coordination to Incorporate Conflict Data

Because one of the main goals of PAMANA is to reduce conflict, it is crucial to put in place procedures to regularly and reliable track PAMANA’s effects on 1) conflict affectation and 2) conflict incidence. Current options (primarily AFP J2 data, Conflict Alert, and ACLED) are not regularly consolidated and accessible to PAMANA M&E teams. In particular, improved M&E coordination with the security sector to track PAMANA’s impact on security operations is crucial. In addition, for NPA areas, it is important not to conflate conflict incidence with conflict affectation. In previous evaluations, as well as in common understandings, these two measures are often conflated with each other though they capture very different concepts. Research suggests that in addition to conflict incidence is likely to be low under full government control, it is also likely to be low under full insurgent control (Kalyvas, 2003). As such, short term spikes in violent incidence may be a necessary part of transitions to local military control that result in sustained long-term conflict reduction (this is not necessarily applicable to Bangsamoro, where certain groups are transitioning into legitimate political authorities).

Recommendation:

Recommendation 10: Design & Mechanisms: Disaggregating Outcome Data by Barangay and Individuals

To track PAMANA’s impact on key socioeconomic variables (such as education, health, and local governance quality), it is crucial to collect regular (e.g., yearly) information on these outcomes that is representative at the barangay-level. In the PDP, a number of surveys and data sources are mentioned that would be ideal indicators of these outcomes. However, because of the nature of existing procedures, it is difficult to get barangay-level representative data. In addition, for individual-level PAMANA projects, it would be valuable to collect individual-level baseline and endline data for a representative sample of the beneficiaries.

Recommendation:

Recommendation 11: Design & Mechanisms: Baselining

In general, a significant M&E challenge is posed by the lack of reliable baseline data on PAMANA beneficiary communities and individuals. In order to understand whether PAMANA had its intended effect, collecting information on beneficiaries prior to implementation is key. This may in some cases involve surveys of beneficiaries so that socioeconomic conditions, perceptions of security, and other attitudes/behaviors can be effectively tracked. We hope that the surveys conducted as part of this evaluation can be used for this purpose.