How does development assistance interact with conflict? How can assistance be provided without it being misused to pursue political and military advantage? This handbook from the the ‘Do No Harm’ (DNH) Project offers a framework for addressing these issues. It aims to help assistance workers deal more effectively with the complexities of providing assistance in conflict contexts.
Whilst assistance can neither cause nor end conflict, it can be a significant factor in conflict contexts. The DNH Project focusses on how those involved in providing assistance can assume responsibility and hold themselves accountable for the effects of their interventions. The DNH ‘Analytical Framework’ was developed from the programming experience of many assistance workers. It provides a tool for mapping the interactions of assistance and conflict and can be used to plan, monitor and evaluate both humanitarian and development assistance plans.
Those involved in DNH are often aware of the negative impacts of some of their programmes, but see them as unavoidable. DNH is useful because it enables us to identify a variety of programming options when things are going badly:
- It prompts us to identify conflict-exacerbating impacts of assistance much sooner than is typical without the analysis.
- It heightens our awareness of inter-group relations in project sites and enables us to play a conscious role in helping people come together.
- It reveals the interconnections among programming decisions – about where we work, with whom, how we see the criteria for assistance recipients, who we hire locally and how we relate to local authorities.
- It provides a common reference point for considering the impacts of our assistance on conflict that brings a new cohesiveness to staff interactions, and to work with local counterparts.
The framework is descriptive rather than prescriptive. It can also be used in other ways, for example for Peace and Conflict Impact Analysis (PCIA). The framework has seven steps:
- Identify which conflicts are dangerous in terms of their destructiveness and therefore relevant for DNH analysis.
- Analyse what divides groups. This is critical to understanding how assistance programmes feed into, or lessen, these forces.
- Identify how people might remain connected across sub-group lines despite divisions created through the conflict. To assess the impact of assistance programmes on conflict, it is important to identify and understand connecters and local capacities for peace (LCPs).
- Conduct a thorough review of all aspects of the assistance programme. For example, where and why is assistance offered?
- Analyse the interactions of each aspect of the assistance programme with the existing dividers/tensions and connectors/LCPs. For example, who gains and who loses from assistance?
- Examine steps one to four and if assistance exacerbates inter-group dividers, rethink how to provide the same programme in a way that eliminates its negative, conflict-worsening aspects.
- Once a better programming option has been selected, re-evaluate the impacts of the new approach on the dividers and connectors.
