Will 1) identify indicators specifically relevant to the people living in the context of a particular conflict, and
2) be used to adapt & refine global indicators over time.
Peace Impact Framework:
Understand Your Impact
Understand Your Impact
Why
Our field is facing a challenge in understanding & telling the story of peace. Currently, research measures are high-level and not clearly linked to key decision points for practitioners. Practitioner & local knowledge is not standard or codified & is not rigorously considered essential to our understanding. We have a wealth of research, experience & input from a wide variety of experts across the world. We need an approach that harnesses that experience & expertise & creates a structure by which these people can interact & engage with each other so the evidence they are producing propels us forward.
What
Our work needs to be grounded in lived realities of conflict to be rigorous. Knowledge & experience from those living and working in conflict should be at the center of rigorous & effective frameworks. Social normative factors should be recognized equally to institutional, economic, physical & environmental factors. We’ve struggled to measure norms, but complexity does not negate their necessity. This challenge needs to be overcome if we’re to understand the influence of peacebuilding on conflict. Conflict should be analyzed the way it evolves—across borders, in physical & virtual spaces. Our analysis remains limited by staying within the lines. We seek to understand conflict holistically to effectively analyze transformation over time.
Vertical relationships should be considered as thoroughly as horizontal ones. We seek to understand how government, leaders & power brokers relate to the public & vice versa. There is a need to go beyond mutual trust to understand what responsive & inclusive governance looks like in the modern world.
How
The Framework includes three pillars from which knowledge is generated. These pillars should influence & inform each other for our field to continue to evolve & make sure our understanding of conflict is relevant. These pillars capture local lived experience & expertise, create a set of aligned measures that can be analyzed across contexts & encourage expert observation & reflection to capture intended & unintended effects.
Approach
Pillar 1: Lived Experience
Pillar 1: Lived Experience
Pillar 2: Aligned Measures
Pillar 2: Aligned Measures
Through a consultative process with more than 70 organizations worldwide as well as a review of academic literature on peace & conflict, we identified 10 indicators (two per theme) that are most important to track in order to measure our impact on peace.
If we commit to systematically tracking these across programs & across different contexts, we can collectively tell the story of peace in a way that is measurable & concrete.
Pillar 3: Shared Reflection
Pillar 3: Shared Reflection
Tracks unexpected and intermediate outcomes that build to larger changes in conflict. By documenting this systematically, we can identify the patterns and processes of change.