Sustaining Social Cohesion: “Project Institutions” as Conditions for Long-term Peacebuilding

This paper examines how “project institutions”—rules and organizations created by implementers and participants in the context of people-to-people (P2P) peacebuilding interventions—can sustain positive intergroup attitudes and cooperation beyond project closure. While existing literature on contact theory focuses on studying intervention outcomes in the short-term, pathways towards long-term impact remain understudied and undertheorized. Leveraging institutional theory and a qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) of ten USAID-funded P2P activities in Colombia, Nigeria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Zimbabwe, this paper identifies project institutions as a key condition towards enduring social cohesion and specifies the mechanisms by which they continue to operate in intervention communities. Findings suggest that project institutions are sustained through positive feedback mechanisms, including coordination with local entities, high setup costs that foster continued use, and low-cost upkeep enabled by communication technologies. These pathways, presented for further study, may enable the engineering of resilient norms, organizations, and cohesion in the Global South.