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Peace and Conflict Impact Assessment - PCIA
Proposed Main Users / Purpose of the Tool:
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Development organisations and partners, Non-Governmental Organisations, Private Sector.
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The worldwide increase of intrastate violent conflict, as well as
the repercussions of recent incidents of genocide and ethnic cleansing,
has created a need for developmental policy to pay more attention to
the issue of conflict transformation. The risks of political
instability and violence call for an in-depth understanding of the
local situation and demands great care with the way in which
development projects are steered.
Developmental cooperation (DC) can never be neutral or nonpartisan. It
has to be assumed that the activities implemented by a project do
affect conflict dynamics. Conflict situations at the beginning of the
1990s (Somalia and Rwanda) showed that the impact of the work of
development actors is not neutral. It can aggravate or reduce conflict.
The challenge for DC is therefore to find out how contributions to
development can be made in ways that help to reduce tensions, and thus
the likelihood of an outbreak of violence, rather than feeding into or
aggravating conflict.
As developmental cooperation strives to “do no harm”, systematic
monitoring of impact is indispensable. The attempts made so far have
resulted in frameworks for peace and conflict impact assessment (PCIA)
that are often not specific and do not offer convincing practical
approaches. As the ongoing methodological discourse on peace and
conflict impact assessment shows, PCIA is still far from being a useful
tool, as the gap between the conceptual design and actual practice has
not been closed (Feyen & Gsänger, 2001). Despite its
inefficiencies, the PCIA framework is attempting to help projects
obtain a more in-depth understanding about the interaction between
project activities and environments marked by conflict. | | |
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