Much academic and practitioner literature has placed an emphasis on the need to capture ‘local voices’ in societies experiencing conflict and transitions out of conflict. The rationale behind this is that ‘local voices’ will be authentic and truly reflect the needs and aspirations of local populations. Listening to these voices, the thinking goes, will result in better and more sustainable peacebuilding and conflict transformation policy. There has been something of a rediscovery of all things local among many peacebuilding donors, international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) and non governmental organizations (NGOs) who share the belief that ‘local ownership’ and ‘local participation’ provide the key to sensitive programming.
But capturing local voices, as part of a wider process of monitoring peace and conflict, is easier said than done. It throws up a number of methodological problems that will be discussed in this brief chapter. In particular, we will focus on how we can square the desire to capture local voices with the demands of scientific rigour that are often imposed by academia and donors. To put the matter in somewhat blunt terms, capturing local voices often demands semi-anthropological approaches to research that are time consuming, people centric and possibly ‘woolly’. On the other hand, the demands for rigour might point us in the direction of scientific and possibly quantitative methodologies. Is it possible to reconcile these demands?
This chapter will seek to answer that question with reference to the Everyday Peace Indicators (EPI) project, an ongoing research project that seeks to capture people’s own measures of social change.