In the last decade, well over $10 billion has been spent on employment programs designed to contribute to peace and stability. Despite the outlay, whether these programs perform, and how they do so, remain open questions. This study conducts three reviews to derive the status quo of knowledge. First, it draws on academic literature on the microfoundations of instability to distill testable theories of how employment programs could affect stability at the micro level. Second, it analyses academic and grey literature that directly evaluates the impacts of employment programs on peace-related outcomes. Third, it conducts a systematic review of program-based learning from over 400 interventions. This study finds good theoretical reasons to believe that employment programs could contribute to peace. However, only very limited evidence exists on overall impacts on peace or on the pathways underlying the theories of change. At the program level, the review finds strong evidence that contributions to peace and stability are often simply assumed to have occurred. This provides a major challenge for the justification of continued spending on jobs for peace programs. Instead, systematic and rigorous learning on the impacts of jobs for peace programs needs to be scaled up urgently.

中文翻译：

---

就业计划能否建立和平？

在过去十年中，已在旨在促进和平与稳定的就业计划上花费了超过 100 亿美元。尽管有支出，这些程序是否执行以及如何执行仍然是悬而未决的问题。本研究进行了三项审查，以得出知识的现状。首先，它利用有关不稳定微观基础的学术文献，提炼出就业计划如何影响微观层面稳定性的可检验理论。其次，它分析了直接评估就业计划对和平相关成果影响的学术和灰色文献。第三，它对 400 多项干预措施的基于计划的学习进行了系统审查。这项研究找到了很好的理论理由来相信就业计划可以促进和平。然而，关于对和平的总体影响或变革理论所依据的途径的证据非常有限。在计划层面，审查发现强有力的证据表明，对和平与稳定的贡献往往被简单地假设为已经发生。这对继续为和平计划的就业支出的合理性提出了重大挑战。相反，迫切需要扩大对就业对和平计划影响的系统和严格的学习。