Speech by Garry Wiseman, Manager, UNDP Pacific Centre at opening of the Strengthening
Capacities for Peace and Development in the Pacific Workshop in Nadi, Fiji 3-11th May.

Peace peacebuilders, from governments, civil society, regional organizations and the UN
Colleagues, Ladies and Gentleman

I am pleased to welcome you here today and to make a few remarks which I hope will help
set the scene for a successful induction workshop, as the first part of an initial yearlong
process of supporting you to prevent conflict and build peace in the region.
Firstly a little background on the conflict situation in the Pacific

As all of you are very aware, some Pacific Islands Countries have experienced a variety of
localized forms of violent conflict. The longest running and most violent was the civil war in
Bougainville. But there has also been: tribal conflict in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea;
inter-communal violence in Solomon Islands; political instability in Fiji; and social unrest in
Tonga and Vanuatu. While the ones mentioned dominate the news, it is in fact local level
violent inter-group conflict and more general issues of criminality that are amongst the most
pressing security concerns in the Pacific.

The damage and loss of lives during conflict seem small by global standards but have a
serious impact on the stability and development of the countries and communities involved
or affected. For example, in Bougainville it estimated that 10% of the population were killed
during the crisis and a further 60,000 people displaced. In Solomon Islands, the conflict
resulted in over 300 people losing their lives and some 50,000 people displaced resulting
from threats, abductions and destruction of property. Conflict has also resulted in
contracted economic growth and severe reductions in human development indices.
Let me now turn to some key connections and specific issues around conflict and peace
building

1. The connection between development and peace building
Even though comprehensive conflict analysis processes undertaken in Fiji and the Solomon
Islands have highlighted the nexus between governance, development, and sustainable
peace, many of the initiatives in the region, both from governments and civil society
organizations, continue to focus primarily on third-party mediation, forgiveness ceremonies,
and psychological trauma-healing through reconciliation events and counseling.
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. There is also a lack of progress in moving from analysis to
action; actors need to be supported in concrete steps of how to respond to the causes of
conflict and build on the capacities for peace.

2. Disconnect between regional and national discourse on security: Whilst
regional cooperation needs of Pacific nations on ‘traditional’ security issues are well mapped,
policy formulation, identifying public security priorities, and the development of institutional
capacities to participate in effective governance frameworks, remain areas for further
cooperation at regional and national levels.

3. Gender inequality and distortions of tradition:
Distortions of tradition have impacted severely on the status of women in the Pacific. The unequal status and powerrelations
of women’s condition is most graphically illustrated by extreme forms of genderbased
violence (GBV). Women are also inadequately represented in decision-making.

4. Governments across the region tend to have weak or fragile relationships
with civil society.
This weak relationship between governments and civil society also
makes managing conflicts in a non-violent manner more difficult; the detachment weakens
society’s capacity to manage socio-economic changes without resorting to violence.
This workshop will examine how UNDP can support you to respond to some of these difficult
challenges.

We are not kidding ourselves that this workshop or the initiative to address the Capacities
for Peace and Development in the Pacific will somehow resolve any or all of these
challenges. This can only be achieved if governments, civil society and citizens of the Pacific
Islands find lasting solutions for themselves to these problems. However, the project, which
is a sub-project of the Centre’s Crisis Prevention and Recovery programme, aims to make a
contribution by bringing together the different actors to share experiences, discuss the
difficult issues and begin to strengthen leadership and capacities for peace in the Pacific.
You are here today as the fruition of 3 years of consultations, need assessments, mappings
and validation at different levels and with different stakeholder groups. I see around the
room numerous people that have been involved in the process, and I am very happy that
you are still as committed to this process.

For those of you that have only been engaged more recently, it is worth just revisiting how
we have arrived where we are today.

The CPAD project, we in the UN love acronyms! Follows on from the earlier efforts to design
a Pacific Institute for Peace and Development often referred to as simply – PIPAD. And
while we have determined that the institute approach is not appropriate the earlier work did
at least lead to the design of a curriculum and set of training and capacity development
materials on key peace and development challenges.

In late 2008 the Pacific Centre based on consultations with key partners, decided that PIPAD
was not exactly what was wanted in the region, we then set about having a re-think. To
focus on building on existing capacities, institutions and other initiatives that already
exist in the region and not develop a new, stand alone institute.

UNDP does not see its role as a training centre, but rather as a capacity building institution
for advancing Peacebuilding in the region. As a consequence, the long-term sustainability
of the project relies on it being grounded in institutions and networks in the region. The
diverse challenges faced by the 15 Pacific countries in a region spread across one fifth of the
earth’s surface make for a unique challenge in making this a reality.

Any capacity building strategy will need to be based on robust and dynamic networks. Yet
these networks must have various centres of gravity where ownership is felt by a handful of
organizations in order for the broader network to be sustainable and encourage innovation.
The network must therefore be organic and evolve in a manner that reflects Pacific realities
and demands. But it also requires a conscious strategy from the outset to develop the
capacity of a handful of organizations to carry the Community of Practice forward in the
future.

The initiative has been designed to help bring together regional inter-governmental
agencies, government officials and civil society to work together to build peace in the
Pacific. Peacebuilding involves a system of interconnected people, roles and activities. No
one person, activity or level of society is capable of designing and delivering peace on its
own. All things are linked and mutually affect one another.

This is the beginning of a yearlong capacity building programme that aims to build a cadre
of Peacebuilders in the Pacific – representing governments, CROP agencies and Civil Society
Organizations – to work together on regional and national Peacebuilding interventions. The
main goal of the project is to build a community of peace practitioners in the Pacific to share
resources, materials, approaches and tap into the expertise that lies within people working
on these issues on a daily basis in the ergion. It’s a structured space (both virtual and faceto-
face) to reflect and learn from one another on an ongoing basis. It’s a space to collect
stories, manuals, curricula and case studies and make them available to whoever needs
them. The project will fund small peace activities in order to put theory into practice.

You are here over the next week or so to work out how the “community” should function;
explore key concepts in conflict and peace analysis, how to design strategic and
programming responses to build better peace (what’s working, what isn’t); as well as
determine which policy issues you feel are critical to take up in the Pacific region.

This is about you!

Sharing your experiences in the field, observations and reflections on your own practice and
experimenting and planning with shared and / or new ideas.

This is about you all working together to prevent conflict in the region and build peace.
I will now let you start working together to address that most challenging task.

Thank you.