05.02.10 The Challenges of Institution Building
Prospects for the UN Peacebuilding Architecture
NUPI Working Paper | 17 pages.
This Working Paper is one of nine essays that examine the possible future role of the UN’s peacebuilding architecture. They were written as part of a project co-organized by the Centre for International Policy Studies at the University of Ottawa and the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs. All of the contributors to the project were asked to identify realistic but ambitious “stretch targets” for the Peacebuilding Commission and its associated bodies over the next five to ten years. The resulting Working Papers, including this one, seek to stimulate fresh thinking about the UN’s role in peacebuilding.
The United Nations peacebuilding architecture is a new and relatively recent institutional creation, composed of three interrelated entities: the Peacebuilding Commission (PBC), the Peacebuilding Support Office (PBSO), and the Peacebuilding Fund (PBF). Like all new institutions, it reflects the concerns, the issues, the interests, and the politics of its time.
Different theories of international relations, institutions, and organizations have insights into both the constraints new institutional entities are likely to face, as well as potential ways of overcoming some of them. To address the issue of what role the UN peacebuilding architecture could realistically be expected to perform ten years from now, this paper briefly examine what different theories have to tell us about the origins of new institutions, their operational dynamics, their challenges, their constraints, their pathologies, and their realistic possibilities.
The Future of the Peacebuilding Architecture Project
>> Summary
Different theories of international relations, institutions, and organizations have insights into both the constraints the new UN peacebuilding architecture is likely to face, as well as potential ways of overcoming some of them. Emphasising that the UN remains a state-centric organization marred by political frictions, political realists would focus on the importance of leadership, interestingly echoed in the June 2009 Secretary-General’s report. Rational institutionalists tell us that issue linkage should be pursued in heterogeneous institutions, something the Peacebuilding Commission (PBC) should explicitly try to foster. Public choice analysts would advise that one recognize, and try to work within, the structure of institutional interests, by developing indicators of performance that are outcomes, rather than processoriented. Organization theorists highlight the limited repertoire of possible policy options and the means-driven nature of many decisionmaking processes, calling for outside appraisals and deliberate efforts to break routines and engage in forms of broad-based self-reflection. Constructivists emphasize the importance and potential power of ideas in framing discourse and shaping debates, and would advise that the Peacebuilding Support Office (PBSO), the Working Group on Lessons Learned (WGLL), or some other entity might become locations for the generation of new ideas about peacebuilding. In the final analysis, the success of the UN peacebuilding architecture will not be determined by the number of countries requesting its institutions’ assistance or the size of its operating budgets, but by the added value it provides. There is an extraordinary wealth of experience concerning the challenges of peacebuilding within the UN system, if it could only be mobilized in a systematic manner.
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