For the past six years, the Secure Livelihoods Research Consortium (SLRC) has been seeking to understand how processes of post-conflict recovery and state-building play out in some of the world’s most challenging contexts – and to equip policy-makers and practitioners with better information on how to support those processes. In 2012 SLRC surveyed almost 10,000 people across five countries: the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Uganda. Three years later more than 8,400 of the original respondents were found and re-interviewed. The conclusion? State-building is as much about cultivating relationships and negotiating politics as it is about investing in tangible deliverables. Getting the right ‘building blocks’ in place is important, but so too is the ‘glue’ that holds them all together. Today, SLRC publishes its final reports from phase one. Here, three researchers who have been on the programme since its inception reflect on some of the big surprises. |
