Monitoring is the process of regularly examining a project’s actual outputs and impacts during implementation. It provides the project team with current information that enables them to assess progress in meeting project objectives, and to adjust implementation activities if necessary. It also generates data that can be used for evaluation purposes.

Conflict-sensitive monitoring will enable project staff to gain a detailed understanding of the context, the intervention, and the interaction between the two. It introduces an understanding of conflict actors, profile, causes and dynamics into traditional monitoring processes and activities to inform required adjustments and changes to project or programme activities. In this way, conflict sensitive monitoring helps ensure the intervention has as positive an impact as possible on conflict dynamics.

Evaluation is a one-off assessment that typically takes place at the end of a project, although it can also be undertaken as a mid-project review. On the basis of systematically applied objective criteria, an evaluation assesses the design, implementation and overall results of an ongoing or completed project in relation to its stated goals and objectives.

Conflict-sensitive evaluation introduces a detailed understanding of actors, profile, causes and dynamics into traditional evaluation activities and processes. Conflict-sensitive evaluations are used to understand the overall impact a given intervention has had on its context, and the context on the intervention. These evaluations can then be used to adjust subsequent phases of an ongoing initiative, and / or provide lessons for future initiatives.

In other words, while traditional monitoring and evaluation focus primarily on assessing the intended and actual outputs of a given project, conflict-sensitive monitoring and evaluation also requires:

• an understanding of the context as it changes over time
• measuring of the interaction between the project and the context.

It should be noted that conflict sensitive monitoring and evaluation is still in the early stages of development; this module presents thinking current at the time of writing but should not be taken as the definitive statement on the subject. Outstanding challenges include, for example, the development of indicators (see steps 2 and 3 below). Because conflict-sensitive monitoring and evaluation is very much context- and activity- specific, it is difficult to offer specific guidance; indicators that are useful in one case are generally not transferable to other situations. Despite the challenges, this module does offer a perspective on current thinking in the area of conflict-sensitive monitoring and evaluation, including some new approaches to outstanding issues.