The foundation for conflict sensitivity is a strong understanding of the context. Such an understanding helps aid organisations to identify emerging risks of doing harm and opportunities to strengthen their contribution towards peace.
At the CSRF we are frequently asked for tools that will help aid organisations to understand the context. Whilst these are often reasonable requests, our experience shows that tools often struggle to tap into the rich pool of local knowledge that often already exists within organisations.
Staff often already have a wealth of local knowledge
We are all collecting information – to greater or less extents – about our contexts on an ongoing basis even if we don’t recognise it as such. For some, newspapers, reports, and social media may be sources of information. For others, discussions at the coffee machine, the bar, and the taxi driver can be valuable sources. For most, it is some combination.
The national staff in an organisation in particular are often an overlooked source of knowledge. The experience of national staff in living through conflict and navigating contested situations has required them to maintain an awareness of history, politics and culture simply to survive.
In my experience working with practitioners in South Sudan and elsewhere, the challenge tends not to be that organisations do not have enough information. In fact, the challenge is more often with how organisations share and use the information they already have more to effectively inform their decision making. In other words, the question is how to turn ‘local knowledge’ into ‘collective intelligence’.
Tools are not always well placed to tap into this local knowledge
Many tools intended to support conflict-sensitive approaches are not really designed or used with this challenge in mind.
For example, conflict analysis is often considered as a one-off exercise carried out by nominated ‘experts’ instead of an ongoing process with broad ownership by staff. Likewise, whilst some organisations have made important progress in building feedback loops into monitoring and decision-making systems, they tend to track pre-defined indicators deemed ‘relevant’ to a particular project’s activities and miss opportunities to tap into local knowledge about emerging conflict sensitivity risks.
As a result, organisations can easily miss what is going on right under their noses. Numerous times I have encountered staff who are aware of emerging risks – such as their aid providing support to contested claims of local authorities, being redistributed to supply nearby combatants, or fuelling tension between two groups – yet do not feed this into tools or associated decision-making processes.
Sometimes tools can crowd out space for using local knowledge
In some cases, tools not only fail to capture the kind of local knowledge that may be useful from a conflict sensitivity perspective but can actively deter staff from sharing it. This is because the kind of information that is required to inform conflict-sensitive decisions tends to be more sensitive.
First, external stakeholders may not wish this information to be communicated – and this sometimes can put staff at risk. Second, conflict sensitivity risks can pose awkward dilemmas for aid workers. As soon as tools render this local knowledge formal in writing, these dilemmas are hard to avoid and frequently place new – and sometimes unwelcome – demands on decision makers.
Faced with this sensitivity, aid workers can be understandably reluctant to share local knowledge – and particularly to put it in writing.
The social element of turning local knowledge into collective intelligence
Given these multiple barriers, it might be helpful to frame efforts to promote conflict sensitivity in terms of a challenge (i.e. how can organisations effectively tap into this local knowledge to make more context-informed decisions?) rather than a solution (i.e. what tools can help us to become more conflict-sensitive?). This is useful in focusing attention on the factors that really matter in influencing conflict sensitivity. So, what does matter?
Staff and partners need to be able to recognise information as relevant and therefore worth sharing with colleagues. Staff need to be empowered and see it as their role to share such information. Staff need to have regular opportunities to share such information. And staff need to feel comfortable in sharing such information.
While policies and tools might play a role in meeting some of these conditions, an enabling social context is needed if they are to be used effectively to inform more conflict-sensitive decision making. Where these conditions are in place, staff, especially national staff, tend to find ways to surface local knowledge and address emerging risks and opportunities regardless of the tools.
How to create an enabling social context?
The CSRF places a lot of emphasis on creating spaces where aid workers can come together to encourage critical thinking, share experiences, and build mutual understanding.
In practice, this has led us to build more time, flexibility and discussion into CSRF’s training, accompaniment and outreach processes so that they contribute towards strengthening this social context and not simply as places to be ‘told the rules’ or ‘learn the tools’.
Visible leadership within organisations also has a crucial role to play. Such leadership can encourage and support staff to discuss sensitive issues and potential implications with colleagues. Conversely, the silence of leadership can actively discourage tackling these issues.
Looking forward: joining up the ‘hardware’ and ‘software’
The intention is not to dismiss the role of tools entirely, which may still constitute useful elements of a broader strategy. Instead, I want to encourage us to think more critically about their role and be open-minded about what else needs to be in place for ‘local knowledge’ to add up to ‘collective intelligence’ that can inform practice.
Part of the challenge for the CSRF is understanding how to sequence and join up processes of changing the organisational ‘hardware’ – such as policies and tools – and ‘software’ – such as relationships and organisational culture. Tools have potential to become just another ‘tick box’ exercise and, where this is the case, do more harm than good. On the other hand, when tools are introduced in the right way, they have potential to catalyse organisational change.
For a more detailed exploration of the lessons emerging from CSRF’s efforts supporting organisations to adopt more conflict-sensitive approaches, see the recently published CSRF Learning Paper.
