June 30, 2026
Rosalina Ferrajolo
Peacebuilding or Dealmaking? Italy's real investment in sustainable peace and development
What happens when peace in regions affected by protracted conflict is administered as corporate restructuring? The priorities of contemporary multilateralism are often obscured by the language of cooperation, governance and development. To understand what truly matters, one need only follow the money.
Presented as an alternative to a United Nations system long criticised by Donald Trump as ineffective, the Comprehensive Plan to End Gaza Conflict received international backing through Security Council Resolution S/RES/2803(2025), adopted on 17 November 2025. Proposed by the Trump administration, the Board of Peace (BoP) brings together 28 founding states and 21 observers, including the European Union, under a framework that promises a more “nimble” approach to peacebuilding in the name of effectiveness and common sense. In addition to securing approval for a temporary International Stabilisation Force (ISF) and support from the World Bank and other major financial institutions, the BoP established the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG), an externally constituted authority tasked with exercising civil governance over Gaza under a framework designed, financed, and overseen by actors beyond the territory itself. The move signals a broader shift in which questions of sovereignty, representation, and political self-determination are recast as matters of institutional management.
Yet the language of managerial efficiency sits uneasily alongside the realities of post-conflict reconstruction. The very notion of “nimble peacebuilding”, as articulated on the Board of Peace’s official website, appears almost oxymoronic, suggesting that the slow, contested, and deeply political work of building peace can be streamlined through the logic of corporate governance.
The response among European states was far from uniform. Hungary and Bulgaria were the only EU member states to express an interest in joining the Board as permanent members, while France, Ireland, Spain and Slovenia declined the invitation outright, citing concerns over the Board of Peace’s governance and accountability structure and underlying assumptions. Other invitees occupied a more ambiguous position. Italy, alongside Germany, the United Kingdom and the European Union, initially rejected membership before subsequently opting for observer status.
Rome justified its refusal on constitutional grounds, arguing that the Board’s statute violated the principle of equality among states enshrined in Article 11 of the Italian Constitution by concentrating authority disproportionately in the hands of the United States. Yet statements by Deputy Prime Minister Antonio Tajani suggest that Italy’s reservations were directed less at the Board’s underlying conception of conflict resolution and peacebuilding than at the distribution of influence within it.
The objection, in other words, was not to a model of peace based on exclusion of affected communities and organised through technocratic governance, but to one in which Italy’s capacity to shape outcomes was structurally constrained. Rather than challenging the logic of the Board itself, Rome appeared to contest the terms on which institutional participation and authority were allocated. Whether that stance is reflected in Meloni’s own approach to conflict resolution is another matter.
This raises the question: where do Italy’s priorities lie when it comes to building peace?
If the debate surrounding the Board concerns the distribution of authority within emerging architectures of peace governance, Italy’s funding contribution to global peace and development offers a useful lens through which to examine how those preferences are translated into practice. Funding allocations cannot reveal intentions in themselves, but they can provide a window into the institutional logics that governments choose to privilege.
At first glance, Italy’s aid profile appears firmly committed to multilateral cooperation: the OECD’s Development Co-operation Profile for Italy recorded a 12% increase in contributions to the multilateral system between 2023 and 2024. Yet a closer examination suggests a more nuanced picture.
The overwhelming majority of bilateral Official Development Assistance (ODA) continues to flow through public-sector institutions and multilateral organisations, while civil society organisations (CSOs) — the channels closest to local contexts — occupy a comparatively marginal position. The OECD reports a marked contraction between 2022 and 2024: from USD 356.93 to 191.74 million in total ODA disbursed to and through CSOs, a reduction of 46.3% in two years. This disbursement amounts to just 5.7 per cent of Italy’s bilateral ODA, down from 7.4 per cent the previous year. Looking specifically at support to Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) — a subset of CSOs — the decline appears even more significant over the medium term: from USD 180.3 million in 2019 to 121.9 million, a contraction of over USD 58 million, equal to 32.4%. More striking still is the destination of this funding. Only 34.7 % of CSO-related assistance reached organisations based in developing countries, meaning that almost two-thirds flowed instead to international organisations or entities headquartered within donor states themselves.
For example, Meloni’s government allocated USD 525.2 million to the United Nations system. However, it becomes clear that USD 367.1 million, 69.9 per cent of the total, was earmarked rather than provided as core funding. But what does this mean? OECD reporting distinguishes between core support and earmarked funding, the latter referring to resources channelled through CSOs to implement projects initiated by the donor. As per OECD data, nearly seven dollars out of every ten channelled through the UN arrived with conditions attached, specifying their intended use and limiting the discretion of recipient institutions.
The implications therefore extend beyond questions of efficiency or aid delivery. If local ownership has long been presented as a cornerstone of sustainable peacebuilding, these figures suggest that those closest to conflict remain only partial participants in the financial architectures established in their name. Even within the limited share of aid allocated to civil society, a significant proportion remains structured through donor-defined priorities. In such cases, civil society organisations function less as autonomous political actors than as implementing partners operating within frameworks designed elsewhere.
To be sure, these patterns are not unique to Italy. The widespread use of earmarked funding, the predominance of donor-country and international intermediaries, and the comparatively limited transfer of resources and decision-making authority to local actors are recurrent features across OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) donors.
If anything, Italy’s aid profile illustrates a broader structural tendency within contemporary development and peacebuilding architectures: a preference for managing cooperation through institutions and oversight mechanisms rather than ceding meaningful control to those most directly affected by conflict.
This trend however sits rather uneasily alongside a growing body of development and peacebuilding scholarship advocating for localisation, understood by the OECD as a process of strengthening the leadership, ownership and decision-making capacity of civil society actors by transferring not only resources, but also meaningful control over how they are used.
To conclude, taken together, the ODA trends presented in this piece point towards a broader reconfiguration of peace and development governance. Resources continue to circulate through multilateral institutions, international organisations and civil society channels, yet decision-making authority remains concentrated upstream. The result is not the abandonment of cooperation, but its increasing organisation around mechanisms of oversight, coordination and managerial control — the same logic that, in Gaza, found its most explicit institutional form in the NCAG: an authority designed to administer civil governance while leaving its design, financing, and oversight in the hands of actors beyond the territory itself.
Italy, like the other DAC countries, is therefore not withdrawing from multilateralism; rather, it is participating in a form of managed multilateralism in which donor priorities remain embedded within ostensibly cooperative frameworks. The preference is not for unilateral action, but for retaining influence over the terms through which cooperation is exercised — a preference Rome made explicit in its objection to the Board of Peace, which targeted not the principle of externally administered peace but its own position within the hierarchy administering it.
The Meloni government’s reaction to Trump’s Board of Peace thus proves nothing but consistent with Italy’s multilateral investment: both approaches promise inclusion while withholding control, and both describe the outcome using terms borrowed from boardroom language rather than the language of self-determination. A reality in which member states convene in the name of concepts as facile as “nimble peacebuilding” or “common-sense governance” is one where the good of conflict-affected communities is eclipsed by the sheer grandstanding of the multilateral stage. And the proof is in the pudding.