Market Failures in International Peacebuilding, Lessons from Burma
- Billy Ford
- Mar 9
- 7 min read
By: Billy Ford
March 9, 2026
This article is a summary of a SEAPI working paper. The author welcomes feedback through the comments below or email (bford14@gmail.com). |
International peacebuilding is being reshaped under stress: conflicts are intensifying and proliferating, while budgets contract and the international system frays. This paper draws on more than 10 years of the author's experience in Burma to argue that many persistent frustrations in peacebuilding are not isolated "implementation problems," but structural failures in how the peacebuilding "market" is organized.
These failures drive chronic underinvestment because peacebuilders cannot capture the value they create and are left working on small, short-term grants to tackle trillion-dollar problems. It also argues that misdiagnosing these failures leads practitioners and donors to repeat approaches with weak evidence and limited impact.
The paper separates challenges into two overlapping categories: (1) systemic "market failures" that require incentive and institutional redesign, and (2) operational and implementation constraints that are widespread but likely solvable with better tools and workflows.
A core premise of the paper is that peace is a public good that faces classic public goods problems, but with the added complication that the "provider" is an international donor ecosystem rather than a local government; so, incentives and interests are misaligned, and decisions are made with perverse accountability and poor information.
The Market Failures Holding Peacebuilding Back
The Resources Problem
The benefits of peacebuilding are diffuse and non-excludable. Those most harmed by conflict are often the least able to pay and have the least political power. As a result, peacebuilding suffers from chronic underinvestment and mismatch in scale between the enormous economic cost of violence and the comparatively small and short-term funding.
The cost of conflict in Burma, for example, is well over $30 billion annually. In a world with efficient markets for public goods, a verified 1% reduction in expected conflict costs would be worth $300 million in avoided losses. In practice, peacebuilders cannot capture that value because there is no market that prices "units of peace", verifies attribution, and obliges beneficiaries to pay. Furthermore, without predictable revenue, collateral, or receivables, organizations cannot borrow at scale, making long-term investments impossible.
The core issue is that the sector's entire investment model is fundamentally mis-scaled to the problem. Peacebuilders are financed like short-term service contractors, paid for activities and compliance rather than outcomes, and forced into constant fundraising cycles that discourage compounding investments in data, capabilities, institutional durability, and scale. We end up stitching together short grants for decades-long problems, working at the margins of enormous and highly capital-intensive challenges.
Recommendations: Deploy financing structures that reduce free-riding and reward verified results at a scale commensurate with their value. This could include outcome-based contracts, parametric “peace insurance” payouts triggered by violence thresholds, peace impact bonds, progressive matching of local contributions, advance commitments (“if you deliver X, we will pay Y”), and working capital funds for vetted organizations. Such efforts would be enabled through new systems for third-party verification, pre-agreed indicators, and (where appropriate) smart contracts/stablecoin payment systems that reduce financial risk for local partners. |
The Demand Problem
In industries that grow fast, demand signals and evidence of what works drive innovation. In peacebuilding, the clearest demand signal (and the one that pays) comes from donor RfPs rather than from conflict-affected communities. Community needs are often hard to hear, hard to aggregate, and sometimes unsafe to express. Meanwhile, a small number of government and philanthropic funders, who are primarily accountable to taxpayers and their board members, not conflict-affected communities, dominate the peacebuilding market. The result is a market that tends toward risk-averse, compliance-optimized programming and "good news" reporting, with weak accountability to intended beneficiaries. This yields a monopsony-like dynamic in which those closest to the problem have the least ability to shape priorities.
Recommendations: Implement mechanisms such as country-level funds where local civil society coalitions set priorities and commission work, plus practical requirements that force consultation to matter and community scorecards that carry budget consequences. Shift power to conflict-affected communities by matching modest community contributions where safe, without turning co-finance into a barrier for poorer communities. |
The Evidence Problem
Measurement and attribution in peacebuilding is inherently difficult: it is hard to attribute the absence of something like violence to a program or policy. It is even harder without the ability to randomly assign treatment, which is logistically impossible and ethically dubious in most conflict settings. Worse, many donors, since they are political actors, often do not reward rigorous evidence even when it exists. As a result, the best available evidence often measures proximate indicators of peace (trust, intergroup contact) rather than violence reduction itself. Unlike fields that compound knowledge, in peacebuilding it often feels like we reset to zero with each grant cycle, rehashing the same ideas with little new evidence to go on.
A further obstacle is the practitioner-academic disconnect. Academics are often incentivized by publication and tenure boards who prioritize methodological purity. Practitioners operate under uncertainty and severe operational constraints. Even when useful research exists, many teams lack time and skills to translate it into design decisions.
Recommendations: A better approach could include lightweight, locally usable system mapping tools tied to live data (incident feeds, administrative data) to guide program adaptation. To understand key relationships in the map, we could deploy lower-cost experimentation (A/B variants, staggered rollouts) using simple mobile data collection. Where rigorous data is scarce, strengthen “middle-range” theories with explicit hypotheses and shared indicators. Reduce the distance between research and programming by embedding researchers for short deployments, developing pooled learning portfolios across geographies with shared standards, and training an AI research agent on peacebuilding evidence to flag design gaps and improve measurement. |
Operational and Implementation Challenges
Peacebuilders often operate complex, adaptive interventions in conflict zones using tools and systems designed for stable settings and linear systems. Most importantly, we lack sophisticated tool and processes to effectively manage complexity, which undermines our ability to analyze conflict systems and operate efficiently.
Conflict Analysis and Adaptive Management
Peacebuilding interventions rarely follows a linear input-to-outcome pathway. They interact with armed actors, politics, shocks, grievances, and geopolitics, among many other factors, making linear theories of change, or those built around just a handful of factors, misleading. Despite years of talk about systems thinking and adaptive management, we still lack the tools necessary to do either well. Systems mapping tools are often inaccessible to local peacebuilders who hold the most relevant information, producing elegant but inaccurate models of the world. Analysis is also distorted by common cognitive biases and power dynamics, and adaptive management is undercut by time scarcity and incentive structures that reward polished reporting over real-time adjustment.
Recommendations: Develop lightweight, offline-capable, multilingual systems mapping tools that enable co-design between peacebuilders and conflict-affected communities. Use low-cost forecasting methods (Good Judgement or Delphi Method) and Strategy Testing to surface healthy disagreement, reduce overconfidence, address intra-team power imbalance, and make thoughtful program adaptations. |
Operational Systems
In part because of scarce resources, project management in peacebuilding is often characterized by fragmented spreadsheets and ad hoc tools stitched together to answer basic operational questions, with MEL data scattered across drives and disconnected from decision-making. Program teams face incentives that prioritize audit safety over program performance, pushing risk onto local subcontractors through slow payments and English-only contracts.
Recommendations: Build or adopt low-bandwidth, multilingual, auditable finance and project management systems that tie deliverables to payments, surface essential decision information, and reward timely execution and documented learning. A new suite of customized tools could help improve payment systems (e.g., Coala Pay) and task-management systems (e.g., Notion) that can generate donor-appropriate reporting from real operational data rather than parallel paperwork. |
Labor Specialization
Peacebuilding teams are expected to have competency in budgeting, procurement, MEL, conflict analysis, hiring, communications, and more across multiple languages, distance, and conflict conditions. This creates skills mismatch, burnout, and generic programming. Hiring patterns skew toward credentialed English-speaking bureaucracy navigators, sidelining conflict-affected expertise. Underinvestment depresses wages and pushes capable people into higher-paying, lower-social-value work.
Recommendations: Build teams that promote autonomy, mastery and purpose. Protect resources and time set aside for skills-building and experimentation. Use fractional retainers to access domain experts without full-time hires. Fund embedded advisory models accountable to pro-peace stakeholders inside the conflict system, who can build trust and adapt quickly. Align reporting requirements with program workflows to avoid duplicative work. Promote transparent hiring processes that reduce bias and shift power toward local practitioners. |
Risk Management
"Do no harm" should not be interpreted as "do nothing until risk is zero." Inaction has costs, including missed windows, foregone lives saved, and legitimacy not earned, which has been especially visible in Burma's transition and post-coup dynamics.
Recommendations: Undertake disciplined action under uncertainty by making risk-return tradeoffs explicit. Take reversible moves that generate information early and adjust risk assessment continuously. Set clear decision thresholds and pre-cleared adaptation rules so teams can adjust quickly without constant re-approval. |
Conclusion
Critics of international peacebuilding often misdiagnose its challenges. The reality is that peacebuilders confront enormous problems with inadequate resources, distorted incentives, weak learning loops, and operational machinery that drains time and energy.
Many of these challenges result from fundamental public goods problems that are unlikely to be resolved in the near-term. For some challenges, though, we can rewire incentives so community priorities drive programming; build systems that make learning cumulative and usable; experiment with outcome-linked finance that can attract resources and reduce free-riding; modernize tools used for peacebuilding in low-connectivity, multilingual conflict environments; and adopt a healthier approach to risk that counts the cost of delay.
If these shifts occur, the sector can move from isolated pockets of success toward compounding progress. This is an urgent task in a world of rising conflict risk and weakening international cooperation.