Programme rationale

Development, humanitarian assistance and peace-building work have an impact on the dynamics of conflict and peace, which can be positive or negative. Well-planned interventions can indeed have the potential to create the conditions for sustainable peace. They can also exacerbate or create conflict particularly when these are not carefully designed, planned or implemented in a conflict-sensitive manner, at both the project and sectoral level. For instance, if not planned in a conflict-sensitive way, water irrigation schemes, as a development intervention, may cause conflicts between pastoralist groups living downstream over access to water.

Understanding the relationship between such interventions in the field of development, humanitarian assistance and peace-building and conflict dynamics is difficult for practitioners and it is essential that they are equipped with effective tools in order to make the right decisions. There is thus a need for a new initiative to systematically examine conflict sensitive approaches, to ensure that practitioners understand how they can pursue a development, humanitarian or peace-building approach that does promote peace.

To address these issues, a consortium of northern and southern organisations will implement a two-year programme in several regions to integrate conflict-sensitive practice into development, humanitarian and peace-building activities. The programme is managed by the Forum on Early Warning and Early Response (FEWER), International Alert (Alert) and Saferworld (SW), in direct partnership with the Africa Peace Forum (APFO) in Kenya, the Centre for Conflict Resolution (CECORE) in Uganda and the Consortium on Humanitarian Agencies (CHA) in Sri Lanka.

Approach

The programme involves a unique and complementary partnership between international NGOs and southern-based national NGOs and their partners. In particular, it aims to promote mutual accountability and learning and deepen and strengthen North/South linkages. It also looks to enhance the capacity of development, humanitarian and peace practitioners, as well as local governments and civil society organisations to contribute more effectively to conflict prevention and peace building.

Components

• Producing a resource pack that brings together existing approaches, tools and guidelines in relation to conflict sensitive planning, implementation, management and evaluation.
• Implementing national applications and field-testing to ensure the applicability of the resource pack and selected tools on the ground in relation to specific projects currently being designed, implemented or evaluated by donors, governments and/or local and international NGOs.
• Conducting a series of awareness raising and training activities for a wide-ranging constituency, to enable the resource pack to be used effectively, thereby spreading the practice of conflict-sensitive development.

Methodology

• Documenting and assessing a range of available approaches and tools used by practitioners.
• Testing the resource pack with practitioners and piloting some of these tools in Kenya, Uganda and Sri Lanka.
• Drawing lessons-learnt from the application of conflict-sensitive tools and making these lessons available to a wide community.
• Feeding back results from the testing to further develop and update the resource pack.
• Facilitating dialogue between southern NGOs and communities, their governments and donors, thus promoting the representation of civil society perspectives in policy dialogue and planning.