Governing reconciliation: Metagovernance, alignment, and sustainable peace in Northern Ireland

Abstract

Peace can endure institutionally while remaining socially and politically fragile. This article asks what forms of alignment post-agreement governance in Northern Ireland has produced, around which policy objects, and why these have remained insufficiently connected around reconciliation as a durable and actionable objective. Drawing on archival and documentary research and thirty-one semi-structured interviews with governmental, political, European Union and civil-society actors, it examines reconciliation not as an assumed outcome of a peace settlement, but as a policy object that must be defined, institutionalised and connected across governance domains. Bringing technocratic peacebuilding into dialogue with metagovernance, the article conceptualises metagovernance as the strategic organisation of alignment around policy objects and distinguishes alignment from coordination. It identifies three empirical configurations. The constitutional settlement generated procedural alignment around political stability, institutional continuity and the management of disagreement. EU-supported programmes produced programmatic alignment around participation, funding and project delivery. Civil-society practice generated relational alignment around coexistence, cooperation and social repair. These forms of alignment have sustained political interaction, organised resources and enabled locally grounded reconciliation, but they remain differentiated by object, scale, depth and duration. The central problem is therefore not an absence of alignment, but that these partial achievements have not developed cumulatively around reconciliation as a shared, cross-domain orientation. The article shows that technocratic peacebuilding is both productive and strategically selective: it can generate significant governance capacities while privileging some policy objects over others. Sustainable peace consequently depends not only on institutional survival, but also on whether the arrangements that maintain stability are connected to processes of social repair and relational transformation.