At all levels, humanitarian, development and peacebuilding organisations use some form of pre-intervention assessment of the context in which they operate in order to identify entry points and plan their work. This is usually called a needs assessment.

Needs assessment frameworks, such as sustainable livelihoods assessments, participatory poverty assessments, participatory rural appraisals, good governance assessments and gender analyses can usefully be complemented by conflict analyses, and vice versa as explained below:

• assumptions about context: livelihood, poverty and governance frameworks assume static situations and therefore provide little guidance on how to deal with changing and fluid contexts. Conflict analysis thus helps to better understand these environments

• focus: livelihood and poverty assessments take the individual household as a starting point, seeking to establish the economic, political, social and cultural factors affecting the lives and livelihoods of its members. This perspective is a valuable addition to the “top-down” view of conflict analysis. In practice, however, these approaches often describe rather than explain poverty and tend to neglect issues of politics and power. There is little scope, for example, for exploring competition and exploitation. There also tends to be a lack of attention to the implications of weak political systems, bad governance and instability for households’ livelihood strategies. Governance assessment frameworks deal with these issues, too, but usually under the assumption of peaceful political competition and willingness to reform. These assumptions might be questioned by a conflict analysis (see section 2.5)

• external / internal view: poverty and other participatory forms of assessment help understand people’s individual perspectives and experience. These are often missing from conflict analysis, which tends to place more emphasis on the interests and strategies of organised political actors. Not infrequently, conflict analyses are conducted from an outside perspective.

It is important to recognise the distinct frameworks underlying conflict analysis and other forms of needs assessment. In practice, however, there is a growing effort and acknowledged need to carry out an integrated research and analytical process that takes account of both perspectives. The following table provides some preliminary entry points for integrating conflict analysis into needs assessments.