The Prevention up Front (PuF) Alliance is a five-year joint programme (2016-2020) between the Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict (GPPAC) and the World Federalist Movement – Institute for Global Policy (WFM-IGP) that is implemented in strategic partnership with the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs under the Dialogue and Dissent policy framework. The PuF Alliance works to strengthen the lobbying and advocacy capacities of civil society actors to advocate for conflict prevention:
- to strengthen, adopt and effectively implement norms, laws and policies in locally grounded and inclusive ways,
- to strengthen the international justice system to reduce impunity, and
- to increase access, credibility, political space and opportunities for civil society to engage with and to impact norms, policies and actions on conflict prevention.
The Alliance brings together GPPAC’s network (230 members) and two networks coordinated by WFM-IGP, namely: Coalition for the International Criminal Court (CICC) (2500 members) and International Coalition for the Responsibility to Protect (ICRtoP) (100 members). The PuF Alliance focuses on five regions: West Africa, East and Central Africa, Middle East and North Africa, South-East Asia, and the Caucasus and Eastern Europe.
“Working on advocacy and lobbying in unsafe and conflict-torn environments has never been easy. From time to time, when one reports or denounces atrocities such as massacre, violence or gender-based violence, you receive serious death threats or are arrested, imprisoned and tortured. So, learning skills and understanding strategies and mechanisms to conduct SAFE advocacy and lobbying was KEY to our improvement and successful work.” – Respondent to the story inquiry affiliated with ICRtoP
As the programme has come to end, the Alliance approached Perspectivity to evaluate its work. The Alliance was keen to find out to what extent capacities were strengthened and their goals were achieved. To do this, Perspectivity conducted an evaluation using a story inquiry, outcome harvesting and key informant interviews. The story inquiry and outcome harvesting were done through the Sprockler tool.
“The interventions of the network have helped our advocacy efforts for the adoption of laws to implement the Rome Statute in DRC. We have acquired competencies to improve our advocacy efforts with political decision-makers.” – Respondent to the story inquiry affiliated with CICC
The evaluation showed that many positive results were achieved on the international and local level. Civil society organisations involved in the Alliance reported that their lobbying and advocacy capacities improved because of participation in the programme and that this resulted in new and improved lobbying and advocacy actions. As conflict prevention and peacebuilding are complex processes, which include long-term goals that require patience and time, at the moment of the evaluation the goals of the programme were partly achieved. The evaluation showed that the Alliance used a broad variety of strategies to achieve their goals. The Alliance’s versatility was highly appreciated by the civil society organisations, but it also sometimes led to a scattered approach. The PuF Alliance members are using the results of the evaluation to draft the new plans for their work in 2021.
“GPPAC does not only provide funds but the more valuable coordination work in the implementation of this project. Compared to our past experiences on partnership programmes, this proved to be more efficient. The GPPAC as a network certainly provides vast resources – knowledge, experience and a value system/ethics that is most conducive in the work of peace and peacebuilding.” – Respondent to the story inquiry affiliated with GPPAC
More information?
- Contact Anne van Marwijk, Nele Blommestein or Marjolein Kok
- Read more about Sprockler