Introduction: best practices in field relationship

Effectiveness in the field depends on positive, creative, and efficient relationships - of the team itself, with other governmental and non-governmental organisations, and with components of the managing organisational governance.

The following fiche includes examples of how these relationships are handled by existing organisations. The attempt will be to draw some conclusions from field relationships of peace teams which share a proximate mission but are too small to transpose directly to the work of possible large-scale intervention, and to draw others from organisations of equal or greater size but less similar in aims and history.

Team-sending peace organisations included in this study include :

Balkan Peace Team (BPT)
Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT)
Civil Peace Services in Europe
Osijek Peace Teams
Peace Brigades International (PBI)
Servicio Internacional para la Paz (SIPAZ)
Witness for Peace (WfP).

Other examples are drawn from the Cyprus Resettlement Project, the Gulf Peace Team and Mir Sada.

Larger scale organisations included international humanitarian NGOs such as CARE, International Rescue Committee etc; International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC); and transnational governmental organisations such as the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO).

At this point it is important to point out that the difference between the organisations addressed in the two categories of large and small scale organisations is not only the size of the operation, but also on the way the organisation is structured and their mandate. Many of the small scale organisations are mostly grassroots, often volunteer run, with small budgets and non-traditional methods of decision-making. The larger scale organisations are generally top down, hierarchical organisations with requirements for staff more focused on education and experience rather than the value-based recruitment of the small-scale organisations. Is it possible to hybridise these examples for greatest efficiency, unity, and participatory governance?