Measuring what Matters in Peace Operations and Crisis Management

Book excerpt: The international community has become increasingly interested in measuring the effectiveness of its activities in war-affected environments. This interest is partially motivated by a need to calculate the costs of these very expensive ventures and partially by the recognition that activities have not always been successful. While stakeholders are interested in measuring the effectiveness of their work in places like Afghanistan, they may be reticent to discover that their military, policing, and humanitarian activities are ineffectual or, worse, have had negative effects on recipient populations recovering from armed conflicts. Sarah Jane Meharg analyses why various mechanisms - results-based management, measures of effectiveness, log frames, essential task matrices - are used in attempts to reduce complex intervention activities to simple success stories. She argues that the stakeholders involved could benefit from a deeper understanding of the theories, concepts, philosophies, and assumptions of other stakeholders in the peace operations and crisis management environment. She suggests ways to achieve this understanding through the strategic exercise of measuring effectiveness in relation to organizational requirements and recipient population's priorities in post-conflict societies.Measuring What Matters in Peace Operations and Crisis Managementprovides policy advice on stakeholder approaches and advances the thinking on measuring progress in general. Primary field research for this book was conducted by Canada's Pearson Peacekeeping Centre.