[February 25 – Nadi]  Like the strands of a spider’s web, peace builders need to link together and be strong enough to hold the web together, even when pushed or strained, a meeting of Pacific peace builders heard today.

The meeting, currently underway in Nadi, is discussing ways to strengthen peace and development in the Pacific through a peace building project supported by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Pacific Centre. 

The project, Strengthening Capacities for Peace and Development in the Pacific aims to bring together regional organizations, government and civil society actors to share experiences, discuss the difficult issues and begin to strengthen leadership and capacities for Peace in the Pacific. 

Participants at the meeting include representatives from regional organizations, governments, non government organizations, as well as the private sector from selected Pacific island countries.

Manager of the UNDP Pacific Centre, Garry Wiseman said the meeting was an opportunity to reflect on peace and security and the actions that could be taken to promote and sustain peace in the Pacific.

“Development is perceived as separate from peace building, even though many of the underlying causes of potential violence and tensions lie in poor and/or unequal governance and development practices,” said Mr Wiseman.

He said that there were a number of issues relating to peace building that needed to be addressed in the Pacific. These included the connection between development and peace building, the disconnect between regional and national discourse on security, gender inequality and distortions of traditions, the linkages between development processes and risk as well as weak relationship between governments and civil society.

The project, in partnership with peace builders in the region hopes to address these issues. Overall the project aims to strengthen the cadre of peace practitioners from the Pacific whose work and approach will hopefully be strengthened through skills building, up-scaled policy interventions, the regional sharing of good practices and effective peace building mechanisms suited to the Pacific - and through improved access to resources and experts made available through a peace-net portal supported by the project. The project also has a small grants mechanism to fund peace projects of those participating in the initiative. One of the key issues is not to duplicate work being done at the regional level or the national level, but rather to complement and add resources to current initiatives.

The meeting ends tomorrow.

[Ends]