Conducting Conflict Assessments: Guidance Notes

This booklet offers DFID staff and partner agencies' staff guidance notes for analysing conflicts, assessing the effects of aid on conflicts, and developing conflict sensitive policies and programmes.

Based on DFID experience in conflict assessment, the authors offer a three-step strategy to assessing the impacts of conflict on development programming and the impact of development programming on conflicts.

-The first step of the programme is the analysis of the conflict itself. This analysis focuses on the structures, actors and dynamics of the conflict.
-The second step is the analysis of international responses to the conflict, focusing on international actors, development actors, and the linkages between development programmes and conflicts.
-The final step is the development of strategies and options to respond to conflict. These strategies should be formulated in terms of encouraging conflict sensitive donor approaches and common donor response to conflicts. Strategies should be developed in the following areas: security, political, economic, and social.

[Summary Source: based on Eldis]