Bringing together for the first time the Platform’s Advisory Board members, its Steering Committee and invited associates, this meeting was an opportunity for the Geneva peacebuilding community to learn more about the Peace Building Commission and its recent developments, to assess its in presence of one of its architects, and to challenge the internal thinking process within the PBC, by exposing a high-level official of the PBSO to Geneva’s practitioners.
In terms of how the Geneva Peacebuilding Platform itself could best serve the needs of the Peacebuilding community, Advisory Board members recommended that the Platform engage in a mapping of the peacebuilding landscape in Geneva so as to help stakeholders know whom to work with.
Enhanced interaction is all the more important as Geneva, by virtue of its nature and location, can ensure an open dialogue about real issues peacebuilders face in the field. Expectations in PDIII regarding the Platform would be to develop an approach able to assess what is needed in New York to strengthen the PBC and to reinforce the links between the PBC and the Security Council.
Still, the Platform should not address peacebuilding only as an institutional (PBC-driven) process but should also tackle this issue from a social, actor-based angle. It is important that the Geneva Peacebuilding Platform does not depend on an institutionalized political audience such as the PBC to evaluate its work, but rather, that it fosters a real thinking process between practitioners able to concretely advance a better understanding of the peacebuilding field reality.
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