Deadline: 7 June 2020
With this 2020 Western Balkans call, PeaceNexus wishes to partner with organisations that contribute to social cohesion in Albania, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia and organisations that work on the regional level.
PeaceNexus is particularly interested in supporting actors that work to increase the quality and intensity of collaboration across ethnic and national lines, thus contributing to regional mobility, dialogue and reconciliation. Likewise, they wish to support organizations able to mobilise and engage citizens in support of transitional justice and democratic reforms.
PeaceNexus has been supporting organisations in the Western Balkans since 2014 and currently supports 9 organisations across the region.
Under this call, they do not support specific projects nor provide institutional (core) funding. Instead, they provide: conflict sensitivity support to help organisations adapt to their context and contribute to social cohesion; organisational development support to help peacebuilding organisations become more effective; or inclusive dialogue with business support to enable relevant actors to facilitate collaborative solutions to business-community-government issues that are relevant for social cohesion.
In these uncertain times, PeaceNexus believes that it is critical to continue investing in organisations and initiatives geared towards social cohesion. While the scale of funding and the type of accompaniment they offer is not compatible with emergency funding nor operational support, they believe that their process support can be catalytic in helping organisations adapt to changing circumstances. In all three areas of support, they work with partners to help them overcome internal or external challenges that hinder their effectiveness and ability to reach their own goals. If you are selected for their support, they will start by visiting you (as soon as possible) to make sure they understand the specificities of your situation and can accompany you accordingly.
What can be supported under this call?
Conflict sensitivity (CS) Support – Helping organisations adapt to their context and contribute to social cohesion
- Rationale:
- Conflict sensitivity is typically defined as the ability of an organisation to:
- Understand the context in which it operates
- Understand the interactions between its actions and the context
- Act upon this understanding to avoid negative impacts and maximise positive impacts on lines of tension present in the context
- The concept is relevant in environments such as the Western Balkans, where societies have moved away from violent conflict but remain affected by underlying lines of tension and polarisation. Due to the legacy of the past, Western Balkans organisations often face context-sensitivity challenges: for example, they can do harm by unintentionally reinforcing existing prejudices between different groups. At the same time, organisations often have untapped potential to contribute to social cohesion, regardless of whether they work on reconciliation directly, or have a different mandate focused for example on journalism, democratic engagement, education or culture. They aim to help realise through this potential by helping organisations adapt to their context.
- Conflict sensitivity is typically defined as the ability of an organisation to:
- For Whom: They welcome applications from all organisations that want to maximise the positive impact of their work by better adapting to their context. They are particularly keen to support:
- organisations/networks that work regionally and/or connect diverse stakeholders within and across divided communities at the local level
- grant-making organisations and foundations aiming to develop conflictsensitive funding & partnership practices
- Type of support: Facilitated process of organisational change focused on helping you to adapt to your context, including in terms of your organisational functioning. This can be about developing tools and capacities for regular context analysis or adapting M&E to better track your impact on the context. It can also be about ensuring diversity and inclusion in your human resources management or developing new programmes with explicit social cohesion ambitions.
Organisational Development (OD) Support – Helping peacebuilding organisations become more effective
- Rationale: They believe that if organisations manage to overcome internal challenges, then their interventions will be delivered more effectively and they will make more relevant, inclusive and sustainable contributions to peacebuilding.
- For whom: They welcome applications from organisations that want to address internal challenges to maximise their impact on reconciliation and peaceful democratic development. They seek out change-makers with a demonstrated potential to challenge the status quo.
- Type of support: Facilitated process of organisational strengthening, for example to help your organisation clarify its identity and positioning; improve its ability to assess results and strengthen organisational learning; improve its governance mechanisms and practice.
Inclusive Dialogue with Business (IDB) Support – Enabling business-community-government dialogue in divided communities
- Rationale: They believe that while economic development has a high potential to positively contribute to stability and peaceful relations, it is also often a source of tension in environments that have not fully recovered from past conflicts or affected by social polarisation. Therefore, citizens, governments and businesses all have a stake in promoting economic development that is well managed and realises its potential to build social and economic resilience. This is why they support inclusive dialogue: when it is well-facilitated and prepared, it can be a powerful tool to enable these actors to solve disputes early on and eventually identify sustainable win-win decisions.
- For whom: Applicants can be any civil society organisation (either working at local or national level), informal community group, government institution or business that is a stakeholder regarding a particular case of economic development involving the private sector in divided communities or across multi-ethnic areas. Prospective applicants need to be directly affected by the issue at hand and be ready to participate in a multi-stakeholder dialogue.
- Type of Support: Process support to multiple stakeholders to conduct a dialogue and jointly identify implementable solutions. The process support is used to prepare for and/or convene preventive and problem-solving dialogue sessions between multiple stakeholders and can include the services of mediators or technical experts.
For more information, visit https://peacenexus.org/western-balkans-call/