About SeeD

Origins

SeeD’s story began in Cyprus, where a bicommunal initiative launched in 2008 sought to strengthen citizen participation in the Cyprus Peace Process. Between 2009 and 2012, Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot researchers combined public opinion research with dialogue to bring citizens’ priorities and concerns into policy discussions and peace negotiations. That experience exposed an important limitation of conventional polling. Surveys could tell decision-makers what people thought, but offered fewer answers about why they thought it, what was driving those attitudes, and which interventions might create meaningful change. The methods developed during the Cyprus 2015 Project became the backbone of what we know as SCORE today.

In 2012, the team formally established the Centre for Sustainable Peace and Democratic Development and, working with UNDP and with USAID support, developed the Social Cohesion and Reconciliation Index (SCORE). SCORE was subsequently implemented repeatedly in Cyprus and expanded internationally, beginning with Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2014. Over the following decade, SeeD learned from applications in more than 25 countries and progressively broadened its approach from diagnosing social cohesion and reconciliation to understanding risks and resilience, designing interventions and testing what works.

This evolution led to SeeD’s 4-D Approach: Discover, Deliberate, Demonstrate and Deploy. What began with participatory population research now connects diagnosis to programme design, programme design to rigorous impact assessment, and demonstrated impact to responsible adaptation and scaling.

Today, SeeD is headquartered in Cyprus and works internationally through a multidisciplinary team and network of collaborators. What has remained constant since SeeD’s origins is the principle that better solutions emerge when scientific evidence and local knowledge marry together.