Over the last month or so I have been tidying up the last few bits of administration relating to Co-operation Ireland’s contract under the Executive Programme on Paramilitarism, Criminality and Organised Crime [EPPOC].

This has put me in somewhat of a reflective mood as I look back over all that has happened and been achieved since I first became involved in the programme back in 2018.

Our brief, within what became known a ‘Communities in Transition’ or CIT project was to ‘develop ambitious initiatives to build capacity in Communities in Transition.’

As strategic partner, alongside Ulster University, Queen’s University Belfast and Institute for Conflict Research we led a community engagement process that enabled us to turn this vague policy commitment into concrete, deliverable actions and impactful community led projects.

My vision for CIT was rooted in Co-operation Ireland’s longstanding experience of fostering collaborative responses to shared challenges within and across community divides. 

Whilst what was delivered through Communities in Transition is important, paramount for me was how activity is delivered – in a way that puts local people at heart of decision making, empowering them to address challenges in their local area through collaborative approaches based on trust and mutual respect. 

This community-driven approach ensured that solutions were not imposed from the outside but developed from within, reflecting the unique needs and aspirations of each community.

Commissioned projects were deliberately structured to be flexible, allowing delivery partners to co-design activities and interventions alongside participants.

This approach incorporated forums and engagement platforms to encourage collaboration, underpinned by the belief that everyone has a positive contribution to make towards societal improvement. Change, we believe, is best achieved through collective action grounded in personal relationships.

In 2021 a new phase of CIT funding was announced, and with it a new objective to ‘Build Community Resilience to paramilitarism, criminality and coercive control’.

Whilst similar to community capacity the adoption of the concept of ‘community resilience’ by the EPPOC created a need for a shared understanding of what community resilience is and how it might be measured.

One of my most significant achievements within CIT was to develop an agreed understanding of community resilience (the capacity of a community to respond positively to ongoing adversity and risk) and a framework to measure the impact of CIT on community resilience.

This framework, created using a participatory approach, has now been adopted by the Northern Ireland Office (NIO) and across the Executive Programme for Paramilitarism and Organised Crime.

In designing this framework I drew on the work of InterPeace and their publication ‘Assessing Resilience of Peace’. They suggest there are three different types of resilience, aborptive resilience (the ability to keep going in the face of adversity), adaptive resilience (the ability to find a way to work around adversity) and transformative resilience (the ability to remove adversity). 

In the 20 years I have worked with communities in Northern Ireland I have witnessed both absorptive and adaptive resilience in abundance, particularly from CIT delivery partners and participants.

However, I believe transformative resilience to paramilitarism, criminality and organised crime cannot be increased at a local community level without also working to address those structural issues, like poverty, that make some communities in Northern Ireland more vulnerable to criminality and coercive control. 

From the outset of the Communities in Transition project we recognised one of these issues is the disconnection people have from the decisions that affect them, particularly if there is a perception that paramilitary ‘gatekeepers’ control or are enabled to act as community spokespersons.

Deliberative democracy approaches are a potential solution to this issue, which is why at Co-operation Ireland we developed our own capacity to facilitate deliberative dialogue processes through the three years of the Voice Matters Project.

Moving forward I firmly believe there needs to be continued investment in community led initiatives that enable communities to effect positive change in their local area.

Alone this will not lead to an end to paramilitary groups. There also needs to be a process, using deliberative democracy processes, that will enable people from all spectrums of society to have a say and play a role in identifying and building on those factors that will make Northern Ireland as a whole more resilient to paramilitarism, criminality and organised crime.