Plumbing for evidence in peacebuilding

A plumber is called to a house to investigate reports of a leak. All the frustrated homeowner knows is that water is pouring onto the bathroom floor, their belongings are getting wet, costs are mounting and time is of the essence. A trained professional, the plumber wades into the bathroom and, showing no sign of panic, proceeds methodically to check each of the appliances in the room. The showerhead is dripping, but this cannot explain the rapidly growing puddle on the floor.

She deduces there must be a leak behind the wall, but which pipe, joint or valve is it? She turns off the water supply and, carefully, removes sections of the wall until she discovers a failed connection. She selects a new part from the truck parked downstairs, installs it quickly and turns the water back on to test it. Satisfied it is performing as expected, she writes up a bill for the owner and asks them if they’d like to fix the leaky showerhead while they’re at it.

Fixing leaks in a war zone. How can we be confident that we are stemming the tide of violence?

Now imagine a policymaker is tasked with preventing conflict-related deaths, injuries and destruction in their country or region. They sit down to examine the source: is more “water” coming from fissures in the pipeline of youth as they move through the education system or from radicalization owing to a firehose of online misinformation? They attempt to select a “part” – a particular social policy program, for instance – that seems like it might work, but they can’t be certain due to the lack of robust past experience to draw from. They seek to test whether it works but find they need specialized academic expertise to run a rigorous evaluation. Finally, they cannot clearly recommend one solution over another to the relevant authorities because it’s unclear how much either will cost at the scale required to stem the leak satisfactorily.

Recent decades have seen a welcome emphasis on “what works” in development policymaking and programming overall, with the field of conflict prevention benefiting to a lesser but still significant extent. Consequential debates have emerged over whether ranges of techniques as broad as “social contact” – roughly speaking, programs that facilitate encounters between members of outgroups that in other situations find themselves in conflict – actually deliver on their intuitive promise of improving social cohesion. Yet in her essay “The Economist as Plumber”, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Esther Duflo has argued that modern development economics should be “more concerned about ‘how’ to do things than about ‘what’ to do”. Clearly, techniques – social contact among them – for preventing violence between opposing groups can work. The more relevant question is how we can get them to work most efficiently?

At the risk of over-analogizing, we must take a plumber’s approach to the question of why there are so few examples of successful plumbing in the field of conflict prevention. We need to look deeply into the reasons why policy and programmatic design choices are so infrequently made on the basis of sound science, not to apportion blame for failures when they occur but to engineer solutions that can create a more robust pipeline for the use of evidence in preventing conflict. Inevitably, if we are ever to engineer more peaceful societies, we need more plumbers. Those plumbers need more tools. The tools themselves need greater diversity and fine-tuning. But we also need to know how to prioritize, and quickly. Water is pouring out into the street, inundating the shared future of humanity with it.