When Crisis Is the Norm: What Can the Multilateral System Learn from Local Practices and Approaches?

When crisis is your everyday reality, local actors move fluidly across peacebuilding, humanitarian aid, development, and human rights work. They innovate out of necessity, coordinating across sectors, adapting constantly, and finding creative ways to keep people safe and services running in unpredictable environments. In doing so, they embody what a whole-of-system approach looks like in practice. Yet at the global level, peacebuilding often remains siloed from humanitarian and human rights work. 

On the eve of the third CSO–UN Dialogue on Peacebuilding in Geneva, GPPAC, Interpeace, PartnersGlobal, Humanity United, Action Aid Denmark, and the the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights convened local peacebuilders, civil society and UN representatives, donors and Member States to explore the gap between local realities and the multilateral system and to discuss ways to bridge it. Read the key insights emerging from the discussion in this summary note.