PeaceCon 2024: Embracing complexity to advance social cohesion

At PeaceCon 2024, Pact, Mercy Corps, Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) and Catholic Relief Services (CRS) will present on diverse ways to design, implement and evaluate programs that aim to increase social cohesion, in a panel titled “Building Cohesive Societies: Comparing and Contrasting Social Cohesion Tools and Strategies Across Contexts.”

Social cohesion is the “glue” that binds communities and societies together, and includes concepts of trust, collective and individual participation, and resilience. It has long been acknowledged as a critical enabler to reducing conflict, strengthening peace and building resilient communities, in addition to being the heart of advancing and sustaining development goals. Social cohesion not only enables peacebuilding, but also inclusive, equitable and accountable governance.

However, numerous challenges remain in understanding, defining and measuring social cohesion. There is no universal way to conceptualize, implement or measure interventions aiming for sustained improvements in social cohesion and trust. These discrepancies prevail because every context is unique, and interventions must be tailored to the context and to the political economy of each intervention and the system in which it navigates. Rather than seek a single approach or single set of lessons, this PeaceCon panel aims to embrace and share the varied yet evidence-based approaches that organizations have taken to tackle this complex challenge.

Pact will share its experience advancing social cohesion in Colombia by taking a human rights-based approach to social cohesion in a project that was focused on citizen security. Pact developed Rumbos (“Pathways”), a weighted index that measures social integration and community cohesion. Rumbos is comprised of three domains – community cohesion, social integration and governance – which are further broken down into 12 subdomains and 37 indicators. Designed to help guide project strategies, inform project adaptation and measure change over time for interventions supporting Venezuelan migrants in Colombia, Rumbos helped Pact design, adapt and measure its human rights and citizen security intervention, and has informed Government of Colombia policies and practices. Lina Maria Jaramilla Rojas will present the challenges the project faced and the participatory approach the project took to engage communities and stakeholders in the development and implementation of Rumbos.

Mercy Corps recently released the COALESCE Handbook for Social Cohesion, which helps program implementers in designing, implementing and measuring interventions that seek to increase social cohesion. It is intended both for practitioners that focus on social cohesion as part of peace and good governance programming, as well as for those seeking to integrate social cohesion interventions into other development or humanitarian programs. Ted Holmquist will introduce the background to developing COALESCE, beginning with an exploration of the complexity in defining and measuring social cohesion. He will also describe the core elements of the COALESE approach to strengthening social cohesion, and zoom in on some of the ways they can be applied in programs, namely to address the interlinked challenges of conflict and climate change through natural resource management. 

IPA’s Peace and Recovery Program, which aims to improve outcomes for conflict- and crisis-affected populations, has implemented and supported some of the first rigorous impact evaluations on social cohesion programs, measuring outcomes such as intergroup trust, willingness to help and sense of belonging. During the panel, P&R Director Ricardo Morel will present on innovative methods for measuring social cohesion across diverse contexts and explore how combining measurement approaches within a single evaluation can lead to deeper insights into program impacts. Learn more about IPA’s remote surveying experience, and the two cases Ricardo will describe in Sierra Leone and in Iraq.

CRS will share an innovative, evidence-based resilience tool to detect, monitor and respond to social cohesion dynamics in food security and resilience programming. Even with an array of food security and resilience indicators, CRS' resilience team found that they were lacking insight into social dynamics that were driving households' vulnerability, namely social tensions as a stressor, alongside physical stressors like drought or social dynamics that hinder or facilitate recovery and resilience. To gain greater insight into these dynamics, CRS development a new Monthly Interval Resilience Analysis (MIRA) module to monitor social cohesion and will share its experience piloting it in the Central African Republic. Using community-embedded enumerators, CRS' MIRA tool collects data from households on a range of food security and resilience measures, including dietary diversity, household hunger score and the reduced coping strategies index. Collected data advances through an automated pathway and to online dashboards, and summary reports are shared back to communities to inform local advocacy and decision-making. 

Together, these four presentations – in addition to participatory breakout sessions – will demonstrate the different ways four organizations have tackled social cohesion programming and evaluation. Audience members will come away with practical advice on how to take these experiences and apply them in their own work.

Follow #PeaceCon2024 and #StatusQuoNoMore on social media for more about the conference, read more about the session, including speaker bios, at our event listing, and access the presentation.