Guide to Communicating the Importance of Peacebuilding: What it is and Why it Matters

Published December 8, 2023

The peacebuilding field struggles to explain what peacebuilding is and why it matters. This inability to communicate effectively keeps peacebuilding as a second-order priority behind other development sectors, resulting in a lack of adequate funding, strong policies and laws that center peacebuilding and conflict prevention, and weak public constituencies. A recently published analysis by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) shows that peacebuilding accounted for just 9.6% of official development assistance (ODA) in 2021—a 15-year record low, wherein the U.S. contributed its smallest volume of ODA toward peace in nearly 20 years. Even when laws and policies integrate and center conflict prevention peacebuilding, such as the Global Fragility Act (GFA) and the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) Act, they are underfunded, delayed, and deprioritized, resulting in lagging implementation. Reforming peacebuilding narratives is vital given the current 30-year high in global violent conflict and fragility—in faraway places and neighborhoods just down the street. The Alliance for Peacebuilding (AfP), in partnership with the FrameWorks Institute, conducted multi-method research on how evidence-based narrative approaches can effectively make the case for peacebuilding. This guide, using the examples of the GFA and WPS Act, outlines strategic, evidence-based narrative and framing approaches for U.S. policy and lawmakers to reframe their advocacy and communication. By applying these reframing narratives, advocacy within the government and the public will be more successful at effectively making the case for what peacebuilding is and why it must be centered, integrated, and robustly resourced in strategies, policies, and laws.