Rebuilding interethnic trust in Bosnia and Herzegovina: impact and performance evaluation of USAID/BiH trust, understanding, and responsibility for the future activity (PRO-Future)

Agency for International Development in Bosnia and Herzegovina (USAID/BiH), in line with USAID’s Evaluation Policy, to examine the USAID/BiH 2013-2017 reconciliation intervention Trust, Understanding, and Responsibility for the Future Activity (PRO-Future). PRO-Future’s goal is to increase interethnic trust in BiH by helping citizens understand and accept each other’s narratives of the past (expected outcome 1), and by engaging key influencers in supporting local reconciliation initiatives (expected outcome 2). The intervention’s underlying development hypothesis is: if BiH citizens accept alternative political and historical narratives, supported by key influencers, they will change their individual attitudes and behaviors toward one another, resulting in increased social trust within communities, enabling citizens to work together to overcome societal divisions and constructively advocate for institutional changes, which in turn will lead to social well-being and economic prosperity. This impact and performance evaluation answers four questions, informed by the main elements of PRO-Future’s development hypothesis (evaluation questions 1 and 2) and two main expected outcomes (evaluation questions 3 and 4). The first two questions examine PRO-Future’s impact on interethnic attitudes and trust in participating municipalities/cities, while the third and fourth question examine progress toward achieving the two expected outcomes. The evaluation team employed a mixed-methods approach. For the impact portion of the evaluation (evaluation questions 1 and 2), three different household surveys were combined: the PRO-Future baseline survey and the Social Cohesion and Reconciliation Index for BiH (both conducted in early 2014, with sample sizes of 3,000 and 2,000 households respectively), and the PRO-Future end-line survey (conducted in the spring of 2017 with a sample size of 4,200 households). The impact analysis was conducted by using the difference-in-differences method to examine the impact of PRO-Future on interethnic attitudes and trust within the 30 municipalities in which PRO-Future has been implemented, compared to the regions in which PRO-Future has not been implemented. The study of implementation and perceived performance (evaluation questions 3 and 4) used the PRO-Future documentation and database, 65 key informant semi-structured interviews, four focus groups with 22 participants, and an online survey of 431 PRO-Future beneficiaries. Our evaluation does not find any significant overall impact on either attitudes or trust when examining all ethnic groups together, while calculations for the three ethnicities separately found different impacts for each, including different significance levels, direction, and magnitude of impact. This indicates that further research should be done on an approach to reconciliation interventions and its potential customization based on differences between ethnicities. Despite the inconclusive/ambiguous conclusions about PRO-Future’s overall impact, all stakeholders directly included in PRO-Future who spoke to the evaluation team perceived PRO-Future as useful and having a positive influence. This seeming dichotomy indicates that PRO-Future has had an important influence but on narrow groups and types of citizens. This is further confirmed in interviews/focus group discussions, in which most note that PRO-Future’s reach was mostly toward a narrow group of the most active and open citizens, such as CSO members and activists. Our evaluation concludes that reconciliation initiatives should be continued in BiH to build on and expand the reach of the considerable achievements of PRO-Future. The evaluation conclusions related to needs for specific adjustments of any potential future reconciliation interventions based on lessons learned from PRO-Future include: i) grounding interventions more extensively in psychological theory and in a clearer and simpler logical framework; ii) considering a more systematic way of targeting beneficiaries/participants aiming to reach less receptive groups iii) focusing on fewer localities with more intensity and with a further customized and sequenced approach considering locality specificities, iv) continuing with small grant allocation, v) focusing on activities that combine a reconciliation/peace-building component with interethnic interaction based on common local/target group interest to attract broader participation; vi) continuing with the speaking-out events as the most effective type of activity in influencing participants’ individual, personal transformation, vii) strengthening key influencers’ engagement with a focus on high-level and local politicians, religious leaders, and mainstream media; and viii) working on designing specific and actionable tasks to be implemented by the government based on the Platform for Peace signed within PRO-Future.