World Peace: Assessing

My scientific training leads me to believe that it is essential to measure progress toward a culture of peace at the local level. But it should not be reduced to a simple formula, or calling in "experts" to do the job. Instead, it needs to be a process of regular assessment to know if the initiatives we take are successful or not, what works and what doesn't work, and whether we are making progress.

The process of assessment, to be consistent with the basic principles of a culture of peace, needs to be participatory and educational. The people who are concerned with the various areas of a culture of peace need to be those who are engaged in the process of assessment, and they need to be engaged in a participatory way, so that they take part in the decision-making of how, what, and when to make the assessments. In other words it should be "self-assessment" rather than "outside-assessment". And the entire process should be designed to be educational, so that those who take part are constantly learning as they go forward, and constantly teaching those with whom they come into contact. In fact, this reflects the fundamental nature of culture itself which is a process that involves the entire society and in which everyone is constantly learning and teaching at the same time. As the original UNESCO document, Co-operation to promote a culture of peace (140EX/28), stated in 1992: "the guiding principle would be that each person has something to learn from everyone else, and has something to give in return."

The use of indices for a culture of peace should never be used to "prove" that one entity (country, city or civil society organization) is better than another. An especially bad example of this kind of misuse of indices is the use of testing scores to compare schools. This has become national policy in the United States and Canada with disastrous results. Schools and teachers are required to compete for funding, which leads to widespread cheating and a loss of confidence in the entire system of education.

Instead of comparing one organization to another, indices are useful to indicate whether the local situation is improving from year to year, and which areas of the index are improving or regressing. This is comparable to stock exchange indices; they are useful not for absolute comparisons between one stock exchange and another, but rather to show trends within a particular stock exchange and within each sector of stocks in a particular exchange.

Another useful result will be new ideas for initiatives to address weaknesses that emerge during the process of assessing the policies and programmes that are already in place. In fact, the forward-looking proposals may turn out to be even more important than the backward-looking assessments.

At the level of the town or city, the annual assessment of a culture of peace index can be an important central task for a culture of peace commission. In keeping with the above analysis, the index should be different for each town or city, reflecting its own particular cultural context and allowing the people of that community to be involved in the measurement process and the development of new initiatives.

The assessment should be based on the programme areas identified by the United Nations Declaration and Programme of Action on a Culture of Peace. This is the only way to attain universally valid results in a subject which otherwise would be politicized and controversial. Seven of the programme areas in the UN document can be applied directly to the municipal level as well as at the national level. The eighth area, international peace and security, does not apply directly and therefore it may be applied as two separate programme areas: 8) security, i.e. public safety; and 9) solidarity with other municipalities on an international level.

It is important that the index initiative be an occasion for outreach and involvement of new people that are not already on the commission or in the city government. This not only ensures that there is no conflict of interest in the process, but it also helps to mobilize and educate new constituencies of the culture of peace. In the long run, this mobilization and education is essential to progress toward a culture of peace. Here are some examples of constituencies that can be engaged:

* For the assessment of education for a culture of peace: teachers, school board members and administrators, and students themselves, etc.

* For the assessment of security and disarmament: police, police monitoring boards, community groups that have been formed in response to violence, etc.

* For the assessment of the free flow of information: journalists from both mainsteam and alternative media, citizen groups for access to information, etc.

* For the measurement of democratic participation: activists from both mainsteam and alternative political parties, neighborhood betterment organizations, electoral commissions, etc.

* For the assessment of women's equality: women activists from all kinds of organizations, neighborhoods, ethnic groups, etc.

* For the assessment of sustainable development: activists from ecological and environmental organizations, city commissions dealing with development, Chambers of Commerce, local agricultural and farmers markets initiatives, etc.

* for the assessment of human rights, a mix of organizations, including trade unions, that defend the rights of workers, children, women, handicapped, poor people, older people, immigrants, indigenous peoples, racial minorities, etc.

* for the assessment of understanding, tolerance and solidarity, those working for inter-religious and/or inter-ethnic dialogue, traditional peace movement activists who work against the labeling of enemies, etc.

Here is one way that a session might proceed with a group assessing one of the programmes area:

1) Think of the most important policies and programmes addressing this area in the preceding one to five years, and how effective they have been.

2) Can their effectiveness be measured separately for each of the various neighborhoods of the city?

3) Next think of the most important policies and programmes in this programme area that you would like to see in the future.

4) Break this down into short-term and long-term perspectives:

a) policies and programmes that could be instituted in the next few years and how they could be evaluated, if possible, by neighborhood.

b) policies and programmes that could be instituted in the next 20 years and how they could be evaluated and, if possible by neighborhood.

A score resulting from this approach is especially designed for long-term assessment. It does not start at zero, because it assumes some progress has been made. Also the index will not be at maximum, because progress has not yet been achieved on the future objectives, and it will not reach its maximum in a few years, because some of the objectives are long-term.

The process of measuring a culture of peace should be an educational experience for all who are involved in it. It is an example of "educating cities." This is similar to the findings mentioned above concerning participation in another city-wide process, the participatory budgeting process that has been so effective in South America. Just as the citizens involved in participatory budgeting learn how a city works and how its budget process works, so, too, citizens involved in measuring a culture of peace will come to learn what the culture of peace is all about. The learning process in each case goes beyond those making the assessment: City administrators learn from citizen participation; and all those involved with the culture of peace will learn from the citizens who take part in its measurement. Finally, the general public can learn from media presentations of the process.

In order to reflect the holistic quality of the culture of peace, the overall index in any particular town or city should be the sum of sub-indices, one for each of the programme areas of a culture of peace, and each of the sub-indices should be given equal weight, since they are all important. At first glance, this might not seem very important, but since the entire exercise is in part a process of education, one needs to respect the holistic quality of the culture of peace.

By measuring all of the programme areas for the culture of peace each year, it can be seen whether particular policies are succeeding, and it should be possible to find weaknesses and unmet needs and to propose new policies and programmes to address them. In other words, the culture of peace index can help the municipal authorities to make policy decisions. There are several guidelines that flow from this:

First, it is important that the index and sub-indices should be real numbers, either quantitative measures or quantitative representations of qualitative assessments. Otherwise, it will not be possible to make comparisons from one year to another and to know whether the assessment index and sub-indices are improving or regressing.

Second, the index and sub-indices should include both short-term and long-term measures. Short-term measures should be included to that the index can accurately reflect policy decisions from one year to another and to know if they are effective. Long-term measures should be included so that the index can show progress over many years and decades. After all, it took the culture of war 5,000 years to reach its full maturity, and we can expect the culture of peace to take many centuries to mature.

Third, they should be easy to measure, i.e. they should involve measurements that are not so time-consuming and/or expensive that they cannot be done every year.

Fourth, they should be appropriate for the town, city or province concerned. This can only be determined by people from that community who are engaged by the culture of peace commission to measure a particular programme area. And this means that each community will have a unique measure that cannot be directly compared to that of other communities, and only compared to itself from one year to another in order to see trends. No doubt, it will be useful for those involved in the process to look at the methods used by other cities, some of which are mentioned below. However, they should not simply copy the methods used in other cities and towns but should develop a unique measure appropriate to their own community.

Fifth, it will be useful if the index and sub-indexes can be measured in the same way across the many administrative subdivisions of the community, especially in the case of large cities. In each community this may vary; for example, it could be measured by election districts, administrative districts or school districts. This will be very useful for evaluation of policies and establishing future priorities. There is, of course, the danger that this could be mis-used as we have discussed above concerning school testing. Since this kind of mis-use of statistics contradicts the basic principles of a culture of peace, one of the tasks of a culture of peace commission is to guard against this danger and prevent its occurrence.

Once the process of measuring the culture of peace has been established and carried out over a few years, it should prove to have other very important uses. For example:

* A culture of peace index can be used in advertising for tourism. Tourism, in fact, is the largest non-agricultural industry in the world, when you include airlines, hotels, etc.. "Come to our city and see a culture of peace in action!" can be an effective advertising slogan. Peace is very attractive for tourists. First of all, its opposite, violent conflict, is the most powerful obstacle to tourism: no one wishes to be a tourist where there is the threat of being the victim of violence. And second, since a culture of peace is informative, it means that the city can offer the tourist a learning experience.

* A culture of peace index can be very well integrated into the practice of "twinning" with cities or towns in other parts of the world. Twinned cities can exchange their experiences with measuring a culture of peace and adopting policies to strengthen the culture of peace in the community.

* A culture of peace index will focus attention on important tasks that might otherwise escape notice. For example, by taking seriously the possibility of the crash of the culture of war, it can initiate planning for local food production as discussed further in the following chapters.

* Work for a culture of peace will provide a common task with other towns and cities around the world that are also assessing their culture of peace, and will make possible a new level of international solidarity that is not mediated by the state.

Continued on next page

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