©PeaceLab
On behalf of the Advisory Board to the German Government for Civilian Crisis Prevention and Peacebuilding, a new study authored by researchers of the German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE) assesses the policy coherence for peace in the German Africa policies. In their report Julian Bergmann, Ina Friesen, Christine Hackenesch and Julia Leininger analyse whether and how policy coherence for peace is reflected in the German political strategies for cooperation with Africa. The study defines policy coherence for peace as the interaction between policies with regard to the overarching objective of fostering sustainable peace, as set out in the German Government’s guidelines on crisis prevention, conflict management and peacebuilding.
The study finds that the strategy papers display a high degree of substantive coherence in terms of the challenges identified in Africa, the German Government’s policy objectives and the instruments to achieve them. However, they only reflect selectively the key elements of the German Government’s vision statement on peacebuilding. The authors recommend that the German Government initiates a consultation process to determine how to implement the vision statement on peacebuilding at the strategic level and in governmental practice and what principles would need to be further fleshed out to this end. In particular, they ask the German Government to develop a clearer understanding of what crisis prevention involves, what constitutes suitable means of prevention and how these means can strategically be deployed.
The study (in German) is accessible via this link.
A shorter blogpost on the study is accessible on the PeaceLab Blog website.