5.1. Project Implementation: Concepts

Why is it crucial to regularly review program design throughout the project lifecycle?

Unit Outline:

After mobilising the community, analysing concerns and conflict-sensitive dynamics, identifying potential solutions, and designing an intervention...it’s finally time to actually do something. Project implementation involves putting a program design into practice and achieving goals identified by community members in earlier stages of the CEAP journey. For project managers, the implementation phase involves tracking numerous details, supporting team members in completing their tasks, and being open to adjusting those tasks as needed.

Unit 5: Project Implementation begins with an overview of adaptive governance and power theory, highlighting some key concepts in management. The principles of adaptive governance and collective action remind us that the stages of Community Environmental Action Planning should be thought of as iterative processes, rather than a one-time linear progression. As illustrated on the CEAP Process Flowchart, projects should be regularly adjusted in response to participant feedback, design flaws, and contextual changes. As stressed in Unit 4, this flexibility is also critical to a conflict-sensitive approach. Power theory reminds us that collective action can create an impact greater than the sum of individual actions, motivating people with common interests to come together and achieve shared goals.

To support project leaders in their work, Module 5.1 also showcases the value of Communities of Practices, and invites CEAP facilitators to consider forming and/or joining a CoP. Modules 5.2 and 5.3 provide practical tools for the task management aspects of project implementation, while Module 5.4 focuses on keeping teams engaged and navigating any tensions that might arise.

Module Objectives:

- recognise adaptive governance as a framework for operating in conditions of uncertainty
- understand different forms of power and the value of collective action
- consider the role of Communities of Practice (CoPs) in supporting responses to the climate-peace-security nexus

Adaptive Governance

‘The only certainty is uncertainty.’ This maxim is especially true when dealing with climate change and human conflict. Both forces may produce sudden, dramatic impacts and make it challenging (if not impossible) to accurately forecast what the future will look like. We know long-term investment is critical for sustainable peace, but climate change and conflict make long-term planning difficult.

Adaptive governance is a framework that enables management and planning amidst uncertainty and information gaps. In adaptive governance, learning (and changing management strategies in response to such learning) is both an outcome and a tool. Adaptive governance processes are built with flexibility in mind, ensuring the capacity to quickly respond to unanticipated opportunities and unforeseen challenges.

Robust monitoring and assessment of a project and the broader socioenvironmental system in which it takes place can reduce uncertainty over time. Adaptive governance allows a project to constantly learn about the system it is managing and use that information to adapt.

As with any approach, adaptive governance involves trade-offs. It is important to discuss how to balance a focus on understanding and tracking the system with implementing projects based on what is currently known.

Adaptive Peacebuilding: Improving climate-related security risk management through real-time data and analysis — Ecosystem for Peace

Want to read further?

The principles of adaptive management are applied specifically to environmental peacebuilding and climate-related security risk management in this entry of the White Paper on the Future of Environmental Peacebuilding: Nurturing an Ecosystem for Peace, which highlights the role of real-time data and analysis in improving the efficacy of peace efforts.

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Power Theory and Collective Action

‘Power’, in its generic sense, refers to the capacity to bring about a particular outcome - that is, to make something happen. International relations theory generally distinguishes between ‘hard’ power (i.e., material capabilities and tangible tools such as money, technology, and physical coercion) and ‘soft’ power (i.e., control over interactions, narratives, and perceptions).

But these categories should not be considered as absolute black-and-whites – in reality, capabilities and agency are very complex. Individuals and groups often have more power than they might think, especially relationally. Ideas of hard and soft power, for example, do not adequately account for ‘people power’ - the accomplishments that communities working together can achieve. Recognising multiple forms of power, and encouraging diverse individuals and groups to see and value their unique capacities, is an important part of intersectional justice.

Feminist author Amy Allen presents an alternative framework for understanding power, identifying three ‘forms’: FLAG FOR SILJA - ARE YOU HAPPY FOR US TO CITE THIS NON-UNEP SOURCE?

power-over: the ability to limit other actors’ choices, through mechanisms such as constraint and control;
power-to: the ability of an actor to attain an end, demonstrating their empowerment and capacity; and
power-with: the ability of a group to work together to attain an end, exerted via collective action and cooperation.

The concept of "power-with" emphasizes that collective efforts create an influence greater than the sum of individual actions. When a large group of people marches together, the impact is greater than each marcher’s contribution; there’s a unique power generated through their unified action.

Through community organising, people with common interests come together to take collective action, and their power is magnified as a result of this cooperation. Community organisers strategically build solidarity between individuals and groups, helping them find shared goals and work collaboratively to achieve them.

Collective action techniques require a fair bit of facilitation, but expand your power base and support a conflict-sensitive approach. Understanding the various forms of power and coalition building can enable more effective action implementation and increase your chances of achieving project goals.

Want to consider the role of institutions?

This article in the International Journal of the Commons examines the dynamics of conflict and collective action in natural resource management. Collective action is affected by socioenvironmental and political contexts, but strategies to strengthen collective action institutions (as well as intentional, direct action from communities themselves) can support more holistic and sustainable peace.

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Addressing conflict through collective action in natural resource management | International Journal of the Commons

Community of Practice (CoP)

Groups of people engaged in collaborative knowledge development and communal resource sharing are nothing new, but scholars and practitioners have been developing strategies to do this more intentionally and efficiently. Communities of practice are one such strategy. A "community of practice" (CoP) refers to a group of people who share a thematic interest and, through their interactions, learn from and equip each other. Purposefully cultivated communities of practice can expand knowledge, develop capabilities, and strengthen relationships.

Communities of practice may be intentional or inadvertent, and more or less formal. But productive CoPs will have a defined area of interest, such as the Climate-Peace-Security nexus, which establishes common purpose and motivation for its membership. A healthy CoP is self-starting — individuals are motivated to participate due to the organic value they find in the connections and outcomes that the CoP facilitates. However, a facilitator can greatly enhance the capacity of the community of practice to pursue collective interests. Practical support (e.g., meeting scheduling, event hosting, note-taking, introduction-making, etc.) can help a group of people evolve from a loosely connected group of relative strangers into a tightly-knit collective that regularly seeks out ways to collaborate. Forging such relationships can spark any number of new initiatives and accomplishments.

Developing a CoP is not a mandatory step in Community Environmental Action Planning, but project leaders should evaluate whether establishing a CoP comprising CEAP participants would support project implementation. Project leaders may also benefit from joining an external CoP to share their local CEAP experiences and learn from others.

Ecosystem for Peace

Want to learn from an existing Community of Practice?

The Community of Practice on Environment, Climate, Conflict, and Peace (ECCP) is a collective of more than 950 people around the world, working for more than 300 organizations. Together, they strengthen networking and community building on environmental peacebuilding, conflict-sensitive conservation, climate security, and other related topics through collaboration, dialogue, and learning between institutions and individuals around the world.

There is no formal “membership” within the ECCP Community of Practice or its projects, and participation is free. Activities within ECCP are driven by participant interest and request. Those involved can choose to participate as individuals, or as representatives of their institutions.

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