This paper summarises current debates on conflict, aid and peacebuilding and suggests that humanitarian agencies can go beyond avoiding negative impacts on conflict (‘Do No Harm’), to contributing positively to conflict transformation and peacebuilding (‘Do Good’) in a way that respects their core mandates and key humanitarian principles. The paper argues that this may be achieved by incorporating a ‘conflict sensitive’ approach in planning and programming. ‘Conflict sensitivity’ can be defined as the capacity of an organisation to:
• Understand the (conflict) context in which it operates;
• Understand the interaction between its intervention and the (conflict) context; and
• Act upon the understanding of this interaction in order to avoid negative impacts and maximise positive impacts on the (conflict) context and the intervention.2
The paper’s starting point is a recognition of the very real operational dilemmas faced by humanitarian agencies working in conflict areas, and the realisation of staff on the ground that existing agency approaches do not always adequately address these dilemmas. The paper aims to contribute to the formation of an understanding of practicable policy and operational responses to such dilemmas.
1. Humanitarian Assistance and Conflict
In an environment where conflict in (rather than between) states is the main cause of humanitarian need, agencies cannot ignore the imperative to ensure that their actions do not generate or fuel conflict. Many have taken steps to minimise the potential negative impact of their interventions, but there is considerable ambivalence over whether humanitarian assistance can be purposefully tailored to contribute positively to conflict transformation.
Humanitarian assistance does not in and of itself create either war or peace, and the ultimate responsibility for ensuring peace and stability falls to national governments and the international community. However, poorly planned and/or executed aid programmes in conflict zones may fail to reduce suffering or may at worst inadvertently exacerbate it. Negative consequences include contributing to the economy of war, bestowing unrepresentative legitimacy on warring parties and fuelling tensions between communities by the perceived favouring of one community over another.
Changing realities of humanitarian aid delivery, agencies’ experiences of undesired impacts and an increasing politicisation of aid has pushed the issue of the relationship between humanitarian assistance and conflict to the top of the aid agenda. Faced with real operational dilemmas, humanitarians want to understand the potential contribution of humanitarian assistance – in conjunction with longer-term development aid – to conflict transformation and peacebuilding. At the same time, a policy of ‘coherence’ or ‘integration’ of humanitarian and political objectives is increasingly pursued on the ground. However, efforts to strengthen the peacebuilding impact of humanitarian assistance are regarded by some as likely to undermine core humanitarian principles and affect humanitarian access negatively.
That humanitarian assistance operates within a highly political context is not a recent phenomenon. Traditionally, agencies have adopted a series of strategies to resist the undermining of the effectiveness of their actions by competing political agendas of both warring parties and international donor governments. These strategies have included the development of codes of conduct, minimum standards and codes of best practice. Humanitarian principles, however, cannot always adequately inform the practical choices by staff on the ground in conflict areas, where the provision of resources inevitably has an impact beyond improving the situation of the targeted populations, because it affects the local social, economic and political dynamics. As violent conflict is more often than not the primary cause of human need, any effort to respond successfully to this need depends on addressing conflict and supporting opportunities for sustainable peace.
While politicisation of aid by donor governments may challenge humanitarian principles, an emphasis on ‘human security’ may benefit humanitarian agencies, as it widens the concept of security to involve addressing all threats to the survival, daily life and human dignity of human beings. This approach should, if implemented, imply sufficient long-term external support for overcoming the effects on communities of poor governance, poverty and economic vulnerability – all factors that otherwise increase the likelihood of conflict. Human security, however, is itself increasingly under threat, as certain powerful donor governments pursue ‘hard security’ issues directly and through their influence on other actors.
2. Conflict Sensitivity – Constraints and Ways Forward
Humanitarian agencies trying to be conflict sensitive face a number of challenges that, generally, fall into three broad categories: policy, operations, and internal management and capacity. Policy challenges range from competing and conflicting government agendas, which fail to provide a framework of support for humanitarian action, to restrictive funding parameters, which limit agencies’ ability to invest in systematic conflict sensitivity. Operational challenges include diversion of aid to belligerents and threats to staff security. Both can potentially be alleviated by greater understanding of conflict dynamics, which can provide agencies with a basis for making more informed decisions about aid provision and security arrangements. Challenges of internal management and capacity include insufficient resources and high staff turnover, which lead to a loss of institutional memory and undermine agencies’ analytical capacity.
In response to these challenges, participants in International Alert’s (Alert) consultations identified a number of recommendations to donor agencies, international NGOs and local partners. These range from undertaking training in (and use of) appropriate analytical tools to conducting advocacy with relevant parties in order to create opportunities for humanitarian access. As international NGOs are highly dependent on the policy and resource decisions that shape the overall parameters of their work, meeting these challenges demands increased donor-agency consultation prior to the launching of aid efforts and support for conflict sensitive approaches and critical reflection throughout the intervention.
3. Conclusion
The reactive nature and short time frames of emergency aid tend to exclude possibilities for planning to make a long-term impact on the underlying causes of conflict. Complex emergencies in conflict zones, however, do not develop overnight, but are normally preceded by widespread human rights abuses, a breakdown of state structures etc. Needs indicators in complex and evolving conflict environments rarely conform to a tidy relief-rehabilitation-development continuum, and emergency services do not become unnecessary overnight. The implication of this for aid agencies is that they have an opportunity to seek to influence the planning of aid at a much earlier stage by advocating for a higher profile for humanitarian issues in the overarching policy frameworks that define the parameters of their interventions.
The challenge of linking humanitarian assistance to peacebuilding objectives tends to be obscured by the conflicting political agendas that accompany the allocation and monitoring of aid resources. Seeking to rebuild local capacity to withstand and transform violent conflict is entirely consistent with traditional humanitarian principles. But it does require analysing the root causes and dynamics of conflict and the political context of each crisis, which implies more systematic information gathering and organisational learning from past experience. Based on this, agencies must complement operational activity with targeted advocacy to keep donors and international governments aware of how and why conflict impacts on human suffering.
Humanitarian agencies can contribute to an environment conducive to sustainable peace in three ways. Firstly, they can strengthen the affected population’s capacity to resist the effects of violent attacks by providing food, shelter etc. Secondly, they can act as witnesses to remind warring parties of their responsibilities, thereby protecting the population. Thirdly, they can adopt a human security approach that contributes to creating an environment where people can meet their own basic needs. In many cases, and in particular in high-intensity conflict, local communities rank security issues alongside (and as a prerequisite for satisfying) humanitarian need. Conversely, experience shows that inter-community dialogue and community-level peacebuilding may be fragile without humanitarian assistance to meet material needs, like food, shelter and health.
As humanitarian, development and peacebuilding responses to crises are inter-linked, so are the different levels of conflict at which these responses take place. At a local level, humanitarian assistance can complement and reinforce peacebuilding efforts of civil society organisations that are representative and legitimate within their own communities. However, higher-level complementarity between foreign diplomatic efforts and the humanitarian response may compromise humanitarian neutrality and access. For this reason, and because humanitarian assistance has limited effectiveness as a foreign policy tool, donor agencies should not attempt to persuade humanitarian organisations to undertake ‘Track 1’ conflict resolution.
More importantly, developing the conflict sensitivity of agencies’ core programmes is likely to have more positive impacts on peace than stand-alone peacebuilding programming. However, mainstreaming conflict sensitivity across programmes may be more demanding and many agencies choose to undertake various forms of often separate peacebuilding programmes. Alert’s experience and emerging practice of some humanitarian agencies themselves indicates that peacebuilding programmes that are linked to concrete socioeconomic opportunities are often the most effective. Learning from peacebuilding programmes should therefore inform the mainstreaming of conflict sensitivity across all programmes through existing agency frameworks, e.g. a sustainable-livelihoods or rights-based approach.
Listening more to local perspectives and helping the ‘owners’ of the conflict develop capacity to transform and prevent crisis is key to both humanitarian effectiveness and conflict sensitivity. Accountability and transparency of decision-making both down- and upstream are prerequisites if humanitarian interventions are to contribute to community peacebuilding. This requires greater consultation with local civil society actors and a better understanding of the power dynamics of the given situation, including analysis of conflict dynamics.
To maximise the positive impact of humanitarian assistance on conflict, agencies must undertake continuing analysis of underlying conflict trends, be willing to adapt in the light of changing evidence, and strengthen their ability to learn and apply lessons from partners and wider civil society constituencies. Perhaps the greatest challenge for agencies is to commit to providing structural change, if this means collaborating with political actors to promote objectives that go beyond the immediate relief of suffering, such as peacebuilding. This challenge illustrates a traditionally weak capacity to analyse, and low-key involvement in, the political context of aid. Given the constant pressure on agencies to act rather than analyse and strategise, this problem is difficult to address, although part of the solution may be to develop partnerships with independent organisations that analyse the political context. However, the question remains whether humanitarian agencies are willing to make the changes to their organisational cultures that will be necessary to make conflict sensitivity a reality.
Recommendations for humanitarian agencies include the following:
• Identify, partner with and build the capacity of local civil society organisations that are viewed by their communities as legitimate and representative and that can play a positive role in more long-term local peacebuilding efforts.
• Integrate conflict sensitive principles and methods into core programming areas (rather than establishing separate peacebuilding programmes), so as to minimise unintended negative consequences, increase accountability and strengthen positive spill-offs on peace.
• Where appropriate, seek to develop new partnerships with other international and local agencies who can assist in meeting the diverse needs created by violent conflict.
• Think through the potential impact of the humanitarian activity on the conflict dynamics and vice versa in the planning stage and incorporate women’s and men’s perspectives into the design. This includes appreciating the gendered impact of violence and the particular roles of women and men in post-conflict peacebuilding.
• Advocate for a higher profile for humanitarian issues and human security realities in overarching (donor) policy frameworks, based on in-depth understanding of realities on the ground.
• Develop and strengthen capacity to understand and analyse the operational context, including the profile, actors and causes of conflict. Comprehensive and on-going conflict analysis that extends beyond the immediate locale of operations to the national and regional levels should be considered an important element of adequate risk assessment, needs assessment and targeting.
• Invest in evaluations and lessons learned that are based on the perspectives of legitimate and representative local partners, who are committed to peaceful change, and their constituencies, and ensure that these lessons are applied in on-going and future programmes.
Conflict sensitivity requires both developing sufficient capacity within agencies and advocating for change in the external environment, in particular the political and funding climate within which agencies operate. Beyond the actions of agencies, however, the willingness and capacity of donor agencies and governments to take appropriate steps is crucial.
Recommendations for donor agencies include the following:
• Promote a co-ordinated approach to conflict analysis with other donors. A co-ordinated policy framework is a key prerequisite for subsequent conflict sensitive humanitarian operations.
• Commit staff and resources to conflict analysis and to implementing and evaluating the approach suggested by this analysis.
• Invest in developing humanitarian agencies’ analytical ability and conflict sensitive capacity generally.
• Develop stronger downward accountability and listen more willingly to advocacy messages from NGOs and, in particular, legitimate and representative local civil society organisations that are committed to peaceful change.
• Mainstream conflict transformation objectives in intervention strategies and, where this is not feasible in the short term, insist on a principled humanitarian approach.
Recommendations for Western governments’ policies and practices in conflict-affected countries include the following:
• Ensure that all policies and actions (diplomatic, military, trade) are clearly strategised, planned, implemented and evaluated with their impact upon conflict and peace dynamics in mind (rather than just assessing aid and/or humanitarian assistance in this way).
• The long-term peacebuilding impact of a ‘coherent’ approach depends on the quality of the underlying policy guiding governments and other actors. A policy or framework that is based on limited analysis and that lacks a sufficient international and local constituency should be avoided, as it is unlikely to promote sustainable peace and may damage humanitarian access.
• Avoid using humanitarian action as the sole response to complex political problems in countries and regions that are perceived to be of less strategic interest and/or consistently ‘poor performers’.
• Pursue conflict prevention and transformation objectives with respect for humanitarian values and space.
• Invest in long-term, sustainable and locally owned solutions to conflict that address accompanying humanitarian crises.
