The movement for cost-effectiveness in peacebuilding

Traditional philanthropy buys a problem. It looks for a place where things seem wrong, unequal or poorly organized, and moves money to those who are working on helping people affected. Concern is met with coin. Outrage is met with outlay.

Newer philanthropy demands solutions. It requires that invested sums be used to make problems go away, regardless of the outrage they cause. It invests in the hope of a fix rather than outrage at the existence of the problem.

Peacebuilding has not yet benefited from this transition. This is because war is often treated as a natural disaster: highly destructive perhaps, but never preventable and therefore to some extent inevitable. Many peacebuilders have therefore resigned themselves and their organizations to chipping away at a mountain of unknown size, contenting donors with funding the status quo rather than demanding a solution.

The radical idea that war may in fact be a solvable phenomenon has only recently begun to percolate. A new wave of empirical research shows that there are (at least incremental) steps that can be taken to reduce the likelihood of unnecessary conflict.

Are peacebuilding funders throwing money at a mountain of unknown size?

So how should we decide where to invest?

A number of organizations rate the cost-effectiveness of various charities in the global development domain. GiveWell, the most prominent of these, has carried the gold standard in cost-effectiveness research for the past two decades, benchmarking charities against alternatives (including cash) to recommend the charitable destinations where philanthropists will get the greatest social bang for their buck.

No peacebuilding intervention has ever made GiveWell's Top Charities list. The reasons are understandable: with a much sparser literature to draw from and unique challenges of context and geography to deal with, the peacebuilding sector has been unable to produce the required evidence to show its impact (we think this is a solvable problem).

But the fact remains that many philanthropists do contribute to peacebuilding and demand evidence of cost-effectiveness to guide their contributions. Currently they have nowhere to turn for this evidence and are asked to invest on faith alone.

On October 17-18, 2024, the University of California-Berkeley’s Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA) and the United Nations Office for Countering Terrorism’s (UNOCT) International Hub for Behavioral Insights jointly hosted an event on the sidelines of the Empirical Studies of Conflict (ESOC) Project Annual Meeting at the University of California-Los Angeles featuring 18 carefully selected experts from government, civil society, academia and international institutions to discuss the opportunity to “engineer peace” through an improved research-to-practice pipeline in the field of conflict prevention. Discussion centered on the role of a new research-to-practice hub that would seek to catalyze a) the production of empirical research on preventing and countering extremism and political violence and b) the translation of this research into deployable and cost-effective interventions that could meaningfully reduce the burden of conflict around the world. 

Peace Per Dollar is a Version 1.0 of this vision. Before we can produce more empirical interventional research and translate it, we need to answer basic questions and establish norms for what cost-effectiveness should look like in this sector. Which interventions are relevant for comparison? What needs to be measured? Critically: how sensitive are donor decisions to new evidence that might change their perspective on the value of a given peacebuilding technique?

Our goals at this early stage are humble. We need to first articulate -- and gain acceptance for -- our methodology for cost-effectiveness. That means setting down parameters that allow us to compare different kinds of peacebuilding interventions. Then, we need to gather data on both impact and cost, both of which are lacking in the current empirical literature (the latter is nearly non-existent). Finally, we need to tighten confidence intervals by offering support to organizations who seek to improve the rigor of their impact and/or cost estimates.

These are all analytical tasks. If we succeed in execute these, will we see a response from both sides of the philanthropic market? Will new donors emerge? Will legacy peacebuilding organizations seek to demonstrate more rigorously that they can be worthy destinations for funding? If we build it, will they come?

We don't know. But we think there are many more people out there who care about ending destructive wars and promoting peace than one might assume. Those people will appreciate an attempt to transform the peacebuilding sector into a shop for solutions rather than problems.