Dr Treasa Kenny has been awarded an IRC New Foundations Award for her Project Glencree Centre for Peace and Reconciliation: Evaluation of Programmes

Tuesday, May 18, 2021 - 15:00

Evaluation of facilitated dialogues in conflict, post-conflict or in transitional conflict settings are not common in an Irish context.  It is increasingly important, however, to be able to capture learning about the dialogue process itself because this is not only integral to peacebuilding and community inclusion, but also to the sustainability of peace and community transformation initiatives.  Glencree Centre for Peace and Reconciliation (Glencree) is an independent NGO and charity whose mission is to promote peace and reconciliation which includes working with communities in conflict across the island of Ireland and abroad. Its work has developed since its foundation in 1974. Glencree acts as an impartial facilitator and creates safe confidential spaces for dialogue to support people and organisations to find their own solutions to violent conflict, furthering reconciliation and building lasting peace.  It has learnt that transforming conflict and building peace requires the creation of improbable relationships. This means, for example, facilitating engagement and dialogue between opposing political factions in the conflict on this island, former enemies, people who have endured tremendous trauma or simply people who do not trust or maybe even feel or have felt ‘hatred’ towards others. engagement in inclusive processes of dialogue and shared learning.

This IRC New Foundations project brings together the Glencree Centre for Peace and Reconciliation (Glencree) with Dr Treasa Kenny of the Law Department, Maynooth University.  Glencree wishes to learn about relevant evaluation processes to ensure that evaluation is more integrated into the design of future programmes in Glencree.  Specifically, Glencree has an interest in formative evaluation processes - those that make allow for programmes to develop in consultation with participants and others.  This will contribute significantly to the short term, medium term and long-term delivery of transformative change through peace dialogue initiatives.

The project focus is on developing an evaluation framework which will include new ways for stakeholders to relate to evaluators and inclusion of stakeholders in the development of the evaluation design, methods of data collection, data analysis and interpretation. This project sets out to demonstrate if/how Glencree’s facilitated dialogue approach contributes at a macro and micro level to developing the changes involved in building sustainable peace in Ireland. The project will explore the development of an appropriate evaluation framework that conceptually captures Glencree’s facilitated dialogue concept across its various Programmes. Such a framework needs to be agile enough to deal with the shared and the unique aspects of individual Programmes across Glencree, and this framework needs to be integrated into Programme design and Programme monitoring and evaluation.