This document is a background course on effective advising in statebuilding and peacebuilding contexts. Social and economic development, organizational development and institutional reform, statebuilding and peacebuilding, the delivery of social services and other public goods etc. are not solely ‘technical’ challenges. Around each of these and related issues we find competing interests, power asymmetries, perceptions about who benefits and loses from the status quo and from possible or proposed changes. This makes the issues ‘political’ in the broad sense of the word.