Conflict-sensitive indicators fall into three principal categories:

• Conflict indicators, developed during the conflict analysis stage, are used to monitor the progression of conflict factors against an appropriate baseline, and to provide targets against which to set contingency planning

• Project indicators monitor the efficiency, effectiveness, impact and sustainability of the project

• Interaction indicators, developed during the planning stage by taking the information gathered during the conflict analysis and applying it to the project planning process, are used to monitor and evaluate the interaction between the project and conflict factors by (a) measuring the impact the project is having on conflict (eg restricted access to safe drinking water no longer antagonises ethnic minority); and, obversely, (b) measuring the impact conflict factors are having on the project (eg number of staff approached by militants for financial ‘donations’; rising tensions make inter-group activities difficult to conduct).

Chapter 2 (section 3) provides a description of conflict indicators, and Chapter 3.3 (step 2(c)) details the development of interaction indicators. Most organisations already employ programme or project indicators as a means of measuring the outputs and impact of their work against a baseline determined at the outset. Given the wealth of information available on project indicators², they are not examined here in any depth. However, as a conflict-sensitive project will have conflict-related outputs and impacts, these will need to be reflected in the project indicators. Project indicators should enable measurement of the various aspects (profiles, actors, causes and dynamics) of the context that may be affected by the project.

Interventions are commonly undertaken in partnership. It will be useful to have indicators that measure the impact of the actions of each partner. This is not simply to attribute credit, or blame, but rather to identify which approaches worked well, which did not work well, and why. Contribution programming is a way of attributing impact to different actors, and of understanding that no one actor alone is entirely responsible for a given situation. It is also a key concept in the area of conflict where real results are the consequence of the combined actions of different parties (see Module 3 for further details).