Why we work on Conflict Sensitivity
Growing inequality, political violence, environmental degradation, and climate change present serious challenges to an increasing number of countries. These are particularly acute in fragile contexts. Involving a range of actors to address these challenges is critical; governments, local civil society and international organisations all have roles to play.
Many organisations recognise the need to better understand the connection between their work and conflict. How to act upon this remains a challenge. Applying conflict sensitivity in practice requires internal investment at both the organisational and operational levels. Often, there is no dedicated funding or accompaniment for such work. This is where we focus our support at PeaceNexus.
How we work on Conflict Sensitivity We support local civil society, governmental institutions and international organisations with a high impact in fragile and conflict-affected contexts to improve their practices, so their actions do not fuel violence and contribute to peaceful change where possible. Key elements of our approach include:
- We use an organisational change approach that aims to build internal capacities over the long-term. We help our partners to set priorities and align resources behind them, through a process that involves different parts of their institution.
- We enable our partners to recruit the most appropriate external expertise and stay involved to accompany the process over time.
- We recognise the dilemmas inherent to working in fragile and conflict-affected contexts. We believe that conflict sensitivity is about making informed choices to act responsibly and achieve impact in such contexts.
We help partners to:
- Understand why and how to undertake conflict analysis, and how to use it to shape policies and programmes
- Anticipate and manage conflict risks
- Secure leadership commitment to driving new practice, including more flexible operations and stronger monitoring and learning to adapt to context changes
- Build staff and partner’s capacity to understand and work on conflict
- Review partnership approaches and improve ways to work with other actors operating in the same context
- Review strategies to initiate or increase work directly focused on building peace
Through our collective initiatives, we support communities of practice for change champions. These enable learning and mutual support for practitioners leading efforts to manage conflict challenges and seize opportunities to strengthen social cohesion in their work. The communities we support include practitioners working:
- at the nexus of environment and peace
- at the nexus of humanitarian, development and peace action
- within and across different sectors in some of our focus countries and regions.