Sustaining Social Cohesion. “Project Institutions” as Conditions for Long-term Attitudinal Change and Cooperation

This paper examines how “project institutions”, rules and organizations created by implementers and participants during people-to-people (P2P) peacebuilding interventions, sustain positive intergroup attitudes and collaboration beyond project closure. While contact theory has focused on short-term intervention outcomes, long-term pathways remain undertheorized. We utilize quantitative and qualitative data to conduct an evaluation of ten USAID-funded P2P activities in Colombia, Nigeria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Zimbabwe. Using qualitative comparative analysis (QCA), this paper identifies project institutions as a key condition for enduring attitudinal and behavioral change and specifies the mechanisms by which institutions operate post-closure. Findings show that institutions persist through positive feedback — coordination with local entities, high setup costs that foster continued use, and low-cost upkeep enabled by communication technologies. By bridging contact and institutional, this paper illuminates program design factors that may enable resilience of engineered norms, organizations, and attitudes and should be causally tested in future studies.