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 polarized and 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.
Our approach to Conflict Sensitivity partnerships
- 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 accompany the process over time.
- We recognise the dilemmas inherent to working in polarized, fragile and conflict-affected contexts. We believe that conflict sensitivity is about making informed choices to act responsibly and achieve impact in such contexts.
- With our international partners, conflict sensitivity aligns with commitments to better supporting local leadership.
- With our local partners, conflict sensitivity focuses on strategic positioning, inclusive stakeholder engagement and collaboration with actors across dividing lines.
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
Our approach to collective initiatives
We support initiatives that enable collective learning and influencing across different sectors and levels of action. We invest in efforts that convene two main types of actors:
- Practitioners working to strengthen conflict-sensitive practice across peacebuilding, humanitarian, development and environmental action
- Funders, within environmental, climate, humanitarian and development sectors, who are keen to strengthen how they support actors in conflict contexts.