A greener peace in the Hirshabelle State of Somalia

The Berghof Foundation works closely with the Hirshabelle State administration and partners directly with the Hirshabelle Ministry of Reconciliation. This project is a consortium implemented together with IOM and UNEP.

The project is generously funded by the Royal Danish Embassy to Somalia.

To effectively support the people of Jowhar district in leading their own systemic change that promotes the wellbeing of peace, people and environment, we developed three interdisciplinary workstreams that center the transformation of attitudes, relationships and physical conditions. Berghof will contribute to achieving this goal by supporting the following activities:

COMMUNITY-OWNED CLIMATE SECURITY ACTION PLANNING

The baseline for the project constitutes the development of a district-level Climate Security Action Plan (CSAP). CSAPs are developed through a community-owned and participatory process to assist the people and institutions of Jowhar to understand, design, and implement strategies to address the causes for climate-compounded instability and overcome inhibitors of sustainable peace. As such, they entail multiple stages to gather, analyze, validate and contextualize different security challenges in Jowhar, their causes and perpetuating factors, emerging opportunities for peace as well as an appropriate course of action for communities to champion bottom-up solutions.

The Jowhar CSAP was completed in November 2024, using three distinct steps during its development. More than 400 community representatives actively collaborated with the Berghof team by:

1. Participating in a researcher-led Environmental Assessment to capture and understand the state of Jowhar’s natural landscapes and resources.
2. Conducting comprehensive Community Consultations to discuss the most prominent challenges to local security and peace, along with specific strategies to address them through collective action.
3. Reflecting during CSAP Validation Forums to review the preliminary findings, examine the identified community priorities, refine key strategies, and collaboratively outline next steps.

In addition, a celebratory public launch event of the CSAP brought together another 100 people in February 2025, marking the transition from understanding the problem to joint actioning of solutions proposed in the final CSAP, such as the with subsequent Sustained Dialogue (SD) series and IOM’s implementation of infrastructure initiatives.

The CSAP identified three strategic areas for Jowhar: water, land, and systems-wellbeing (people and infrastructure). For each of the strategic areas, a series of community strategies have been selected for further implementation, combining infrastructural and peacebuilding elements; these strategies will be supported and implemented by the consortium partners. Each implementation initiative is embedded in a continuous dialogue process to ensure community endorsement, consensual decision making and the promotion of lasting peace.

SUSTAINED DIALOGUE

The Sustained Dialogue (SD) activities create an inclusive and recurring platform for genuine interactions, joint analysis and consensus-building for Jowhar’s communities. The SDs are organized across CSAP themes, locations and community segments covering the entire district of Jowhar. The sustained dialogues aim to build social bridges and mutual understanding across divides and conflict lines identified in the CSAP by supporting the people to engage in continuous conversations that:

• Emphasise meaningful interactions of people with differing experiences and backgrounds.
• Create opportunities for joint learning and understanding of the root causes of community conflict.
• Reassess underlying assumptions that fuel division and insecurity withing and between communities.
• Explore shared meaning and interests that are mutually beneficial as well as focused on bolstering the growth of a resilient, regenerative social and ecological system.
• Re-build broken relationships and develop coalitions to enable active community collaboration.
• Centre on societal transformation for durable (positive) peace.

As such, SDs aim to help Jowhar’s communities reframe competition over resource management, access to infrastructure and power dynamics as identified at the CSAP.

CIVIC LEARNING AND PUBLIC ASSEMBLIES FOR PEACE

In the later stages of the project, the Berghof Foundation team will provide a series of tailored initiatives to further strengthen the capacity of key state and community stakeholders and promote large-scale community discourse.

In a comprehensive package, the Berghof team supports Jowhar’s community representatives and state institutions with capacity strengthening workshops on different thematic and methodological topics. These spaces for civic learning target the expansion of skills and mechanisms to support local authorities to effectively respond to Jowhar’s mediation and peacebuilding needs. Additionally, the dialogues aim to close capacity gaps that hinder conflict transformation and community peacebuilding efforts at the climate-conflict-and peace nexus.

In addition to supporting local conflict transformation capacities, this project also identified the need to boost collaboration between socio-political institutions and the local communities as part of a wider effort for durable peace, environmental restoration and community resilience. Community assemblies, shirarka, will serve as public platforms to discuss EP*informed initiatives, to foster dialogue on connecting governance and community action, as well as align shared visions for Jowhar. The public shirarka play a pivotal role in bridging public understanding on this nexus-project and establish collaborative mechanisms among diverse actors at multiple levels.