Integration Resource Kit - Intro

From Peacebuilding

This Resource Kit is structured in four modules exploring specific aspects of the interaction between aid and conflict. Each module, after a short introduction, provides offline and online content resources and a number of training activities that have been specifically designed for the contents introduced. In addition to these, check out our Activities to Process Content as facilitation techniques you can use when introducing new contents to your group.

Less experienced facilitators might find useful the sample agendas provided at the bottom of this page.

Contents 1 1st Module – Existing Frameworks: I) Do No Harm 2 2nd Module – Existing Frameworks: II) PCIA and Conflict Sensitivity 3 3rd Module - Aid, Conflict and Security: A Critical Analysis of Trends 4 4th Module: Exploring a Church Perspective 5 Sample Agendas

1st Module – Existing Frameworks: I) Do No Harm

The Do No Harm framework is a result of a project launched at the beginning of the Nineties by Collaborative for Development Action - and involving a number of international NGOs - focused on learning how aid given in conflict interacts with it. The experience shows that development and relief programs can worsen conflict in two ways:

i) feeding inter-group tensions, strengthening dividers and supporting local capacities for war; ii) weakening inter-group connections and local capacities for peace. Conversely, they can help peace by weakening inter-group tensions and feeding connections.

The Do No Harm approach provides a framework for:

i) identifying dividers, tensions and war capacities and assessing their importance; ii) identifying connectors and local capacities for peace and assessing their importance; iii) analysing the aid agency and its programme and assessing their impact on dividers, tensions, war capacities and connectors and capacities for peace.

2nd Module – Existing Frameworks: II) PCIA and Conflict Sensitivity

The Peace and Conflict Impact Assessment (PCIA) – or Conflict Impact Assessment (CIA) - is a framework for planning and management that aid agencies can use to analyse a situation and identify strategic opportunities to help prevent conflict and build peace. It provides a framework for: assessing the conflict environment; identifying conflict parties and peace builders; defining program objectives and activities; imputing analysis into a planning framework.

This framework, together with the Do No Harm and other less known approaches, fed into the Conflict Sensitivity framework. The latter does not offer new tools but presents broad recommendations on “conflict-sensitive practice”. In a nutshell, conflict sensitivity for an organisation means: i) Understanding the context where it operates; ii) Understanding the interaction between the organisation’s intervention and the context; iii) Acting upon this understanding in order to maximise positive impacts and minimise negative impacts. A central element of this framework is conflict analysis.

3rd Module - Aid, Conflict and Security: A Critical Analysis of Trends

The contents and activities in this module are relevant especially when working with policy and decision makers in agencies’ HQ as well as with Church leadership. Yet, some of the activities can be adapted for field managers and staff.

The frameworks developed for understanding how aid interacts with conflict – presented in the first and second module of this Resource Kit – are aligned with a policy shift in major international institutions and donors. Two trends seem to emerge:

1. A progressive shift from reaction to conflict prevention;

1. A progressive radicalisation of funding for development that links development assistance tight to security concerns.

Why are donor countries interested in conflict prevention? What happens when donors link development funding tighter to security concerns? What potential do development programs have to condition national/regional social, political and economic evolutionary trends in the “South”, and how?

This module proposes a critical analysis of relevant texts of the World Bank, the UN and the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee. DAC’s document Helping Prevent Violent Conflict is central for illustrating the alleged donors’ shift. Also DAC’s Security System Reform attacks the topic from a different perspective, locating the discourse explicitly on “security”. World Bank’s document Breaking the Conflict Trap focuses on civil/internal war as a trap for development and suggests why the WB is interested in conflict prevention. UN’s Human Security Now and A More Secure World set the discourse at a higher level - with a sophisticated rationale - but they both seem to complement other documents presented. Professor Duffield’s article proposes a sceptical critique for exploring the link between development assistance and conflict – or security.

Most activities are concerned with interpretation of these texts. They try to foster an understanding of development and security trends that goes beyond following the latest trends and buzz words uncritically. They support participants in a workshop to break through a superficial understanding of the texts and dig deeper, in order to explore connections, trends, interests and less evident rationale.

4th Module: Exploring a Church Perspective

Caritas, as a pastoral and social agent of the Catholic Church, needs to explore and develop its original understanding of the relationship between aid and conflict rather then just replicating frameworks developed by donor governments and secular agencies. Existing literature and applied models are useful sources from which to learn, but developing praxis for making aid sensitive to peace needs to grow from the very identity of Caritas and the social doctrine of the Church.

This module is more concerned with posing the right questions than with giving answers. Caritas agencies across the globe and national Churches have “lived through” the relationship between aid and conflict; they have developed their own approaches. A necessary step toward developing a Caritas way of making aid more sensitive to peace is eliciting the experiences and extracting meaning from existing praxis.

Sample Agendas

This Resource Kit is structured as a toolbox.The contents and activities are designed in order for you to choose what to draw and decide how to use it. Though, if you are not an experienced facilitator you might need a little help on how to use this resource. Below you can find a few sample agendas for this end. Please consider that these are just a few of the many possible examples of how to organise the tools provided.

1-Day Workshop - Introducing the Do No Harm Framework