Peace Impact Framework

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Why

From poverty reduction to health, education, economic growth, gender equality, climate action and more, peace is essential for all interventions working towards healthy, safe, and just societies. Peace matters for us all. We need to build evidence and identify the investments in peace that have the best outcomes for people and practitioners affected by conflict.

What

Imagine if we could track what really matters for peace and drive our conversation and our investment toward that. A new framework makes this possible by identifying essential elements of peace and how to measure it, based on the work and input from people in more than 180 organizations in 45 countries worldwide – from local community organizers to government representatives to academics. From their insights, five vital signs for peace emerged, and there are three essential approaches to evidence to understand and measure it. The Peace Impact Framework creates a structure to track the vital signs of peace in any society.

How

1. Align to the vital signs: Identify what you measure by choosing the vital signs where your work is most relevant.
2. Choose your data approaches: Identify how you measure. What matches the ways you are able to speak to results?
3. Name other themes of your work that are not focused only on peace, but may also deepen our understanding of healthy societies.
4. Share data, research and evaluations on ConnexUs.
5. Join ConnexUs to learn more and contribute to the communities of practice and the evidence.

The Approaches

Lived Experience

People living in conflict know what safety, security, peace, and stability mean to them and how violence impacts them. Lived experiences are essential for understanding conflict and peace and bringing greater accountability and rigor to our work. One way that practitioners are achieving this is through the Grounded Accountability Model, a research approach that engages diverse community members to define these concepts as they see them.

Click here for tools to guide you through the Lived Experience approach.

Aligned Measures

Through a consultative process with organizations in more than 90 countries worldwide, as well as a review of academic literature on peace and conflict, certain themes and indicators for measuring peace kept surfacing. Ten indicators were chosen as a simple and actionable set to track and measure peace, almost like vital signs. If we commit to systematically tracking these, we can tell a collective story about peace, and bring our results together to create understanding.

Click here for tools to guide you through the Aligned Measures.

Expert Observations

Practitioners working and living in conflict observe and analyze their contexts and their results every day, just from doing their work. Many shifts in conflicts are incremental and unexpected. These types of change do not make it into the typical indicators and measures used by our field. However, systematic observations by practitioners, whose expertise gives them a unique lens, helps capture conflict dynamics and our contributions to change in ways that other approaches may not.

Click here for tools to guide you through Expert Observations.

Vital Signs

Physical Violence