Knowledge Management Roundtable for Peace Operations

ESI President Gerald Knaus was invited to a roundtable organised by the United Nations' Peacekeeping Best Practices Unit in New York. The goal of this meeting was to exchange ideas and approaches to knowledge management in peace operations. How do the organizations capture lessons learned and good practices? Are there successful ways of sharing such knowledge? How does each organization overcome the unique challenges presented by crisis situations? Among others, participants included representatives from various organisations such as UNDP, OAS, ECOWAS, NATO, OSCE, and AU.

The roundtable also aimed to draft an inventory of the various tools and approaches used by the organizations invited. This inventory would identify strengths and resources of each organization and make it easier to compare them. Another aim was to explore ways to share lessons learned and best practices across organizations and to start a process to develop such a sharing mechanism.

Mr. Knaus spoke on mechanisms that organizations can use to ensure that lessons learned and knowledge gained are being applied to current and future operations. He also elaborated on the advantages and disadvantages of a centralized versus a decentralized monitoring of lessons learned.