Conflict Sensitivity Community Hub

Conflict sensitivity hubs: what works, what doesn’t and what next?

Elizabeth Laruni

In a world where conflicts are on the rise and becoming more complex, more humanitarian and development aid is taking place in contexts of increased fragility and insecurity. At the same time budgets are further under strain and the aid landscape has shifted, making it even more important to navigate conflict sensitivity challenges well.

In this time of challenge and flux, it’s important to maintain and grow spaces for humanitarian, development and peacebuilding practitioners to come together to share experiences, exchange ideas on how to overcome common barriers and identify what works. The Conflict Sensitivity Community (CSC) Hub is one such platform for collaboration and learning. It brings together a global network of organisations and individuals interested in sharing real world examples of conflict sensitivity.

In a recent CSC Hub global exchange series, lessons were drawn from conflict sensitivity (CS) hubs and facilities in DRC, Ethiopia, Honduras, Myanmar, South Sudan and West Africa, including Benin, Burkina Faso and Niger. The four-day webinar series brought together CSH coordinators, implementing partners, and technical experts to exchange experiences, consolidate learning, and discuss forward-looking strategies for conflict sensitivity support across the humanitarian, development and peacebuilding (HDP) nexus. Through providing research, analysis, training, coaching and accompaniment, these hubs support local, national and international humanitarian and development partners to adapt their approaches to be more effective in specific conflict settings.

The country specific and regional hubs are each at different stages of development, have various governance structures and models of intervention. Whilst peace and conflict dynamics differ across contexts, the exchanges highlighted common lessons and experiences across the various hubs: CS hubs work best when they are locally grounded, adaptive, collaborative and sustained over time.

What works

The context should guide the objectives, structure, management, partnerships and approaches of any CS facility. Ongoing, applied context analysis is essential.. For example, the Conflict Sensitivity Resource Facility (CSRF) in South Sudan found that understanding power, change levers and opportunities for peace was useful in helping partners to unpack complex conflict systems. This systems approach is a critical tool for unpacking power dynamics and identifying “change levers” in complex ecosystems.

Ongoing and timely analysis rooted in on-the-ground realities was a valuable tool for all the CS facilities, especially in contexts where conflict dynamics shift rapidly and where it is not always clear how interventions interact with systems.

Putting the local context front and centre also requires an acknowledgement that CS hubs are an actor in the context, with the objectives, staffing, funding and perceptions all having a role to play. Understanding how to navigate relationships is essential in terms of how the hubs are perceived and their legitimacy to operate. Exchanges across the hubs highlighted the sensitivities related to balancing relationships with local and national government actors, with the opportunities and risks associated with formal or informal state partnerships varying significantly across contexts.   

Collaboration should be diverse and emphasise shared values, mutual learning and local and national leadership. Effective partnerships and collaborations are driven not simply by common interests, but by a shared commitment to strengthening conflict-sensitive practice. This came out most consistently in the experiences of the West Africa CS Hubs. Rather than being established as a donor-driven project, the hubs emerged organically following a regional learning event in Dakar in 2019, where practitioners from across the region recognised that they faced many of the same challenges: aid unintentionally becoming a source of tension, weak and conflicting approaches to the contexts and to conflict sensitivity, and fragmented learning. What began as an informal exchange and learning space has since evolved into four established hub spaces: the regional West and Central Africa hub, and national hubs in Burkina Faso, Niger and recently Benin, committed to strengthening and sharing conflict-sensitive practice together.  

Engaging with non-traditional actors is crucial. The hubs played an important role in engaging with non-traditional actors who play critical roles in conflict and peace, but who were previously not part of conflict sensitivity networks.

For example, the DRC CS Hub has supported efforts to assist women farmers in improving the production and marketing of their products in South Kivu, North Kivu and Tanganyika. The hub produced guidance and support for the International Committee in Support of the Transition (CIAT) as they implemented the “Bean Cultivation and Women’s Empowerment (CHEFe)” project. CIAT and their partners gained a better understanding of the conflict context of the area and were able to assess the risks and opportunities of their intervention, ensuring that it would have a significant positive impact within the community.

In Honduras the Conflict Sensitivity Integration Hub (CSIH) conducted peace and conflict assessments (PCAs) focusing explicitly on the role of private sector actors, including in the waste management industry where gang control of businesses and corruption is rife. These assessments provided recommendations for new projects to serve the needs of a vulnerable population whilst mitigating the identified risks.

Similarly, the West Africa hubs deliberately engage actors who are not traditionally part of humanitarian coordination spaces, including government institutions, universities, pastoralist organisations and youth networks. Their participation has broadened discussions around conflict sensitivity beyond project implementation to include public policy, education and social cohesion.

Holistic and sustained CS support is a collaborative effort. All the hubs provided a range of support and designed it in a flexible way to respond to partners’ needs, combining structured technical assistance with more organic needs-based engagement. Assistance was not limited to one-off trainings, rather training and capacity development was built into ongoing accompaniment involving research and analysis, process and tools development, coaching, peer networking, skills exchange and lessons learning. The Ethiopia hub, for example, highlighted the additional benefits of ongoing accompaniment in building and maintaining trust and relationships. In West Africa, this collaborative approach extends beyond individual activities to the governance of the hubs themselves, with members jointly identifying priorities, designing activities and sharing responsibility for implementation. Consistently across all contexts, there was an emphasis on co-creation and exchange enhancing results, whether this was PCA co-production, developing CS champions networks or supporting local knowledge exchange.

What doesn’t

Externally driven, tick-box exercises generate little buy-in. The finding that having compliance-focused, imposed CS requirements doesn’t yield the best results is hardly novel. However, what is critical in this moment is that CS hubs are coming up against more reticence and resistance even though the realities of the conflict contexts are driving real demand. Aid cuts, pressures on budgets, siloed humanitarian systems and the protracted nature of conflicts all impact the appetite for conflict sensitivity. A colleague from Myanmar described this increased challenge of developing buy-in as ‘CS weariness’. A consistent factor across the hubs related to the concerted effort that is needed to generate demand and sustain interest. This comes from locally led CS work, based on a deep understanding of the context, the needs partners have and challenges they face. It involves being open about trade-offs and constraints and working closely alongside partners for sustained periods, providing ongoing support rather than only simple checklist tools.

Conversations about conflict sensitivity can fall flat in the face of conflicting and urgent priorities. Practitioners and policy makers are having to make increasingly stark decisions when balancing budgets and priorities. When focused on urgent, lifesaving needs in emergency contexts, CS can seem like an additional burden, something that ‘just has to be done for the donor’ or a ‘nice to have’. In practice however, integrating CS can be a tool to guide difficult decisions around prioritising in a way that ensures relevance to the conflict context. There are also tangible benefits of using CS as a practical tool for resource prioritization during urgent crises. For example, in aid distribution it can enhance targeting, helping to channel limited resources to those most in need, whilst avoiding risks related to perceptions of aid bias which can derail programmes. Therefore, we need to be better at clearly articulating and breaking down what success looks like for partners and make the benefits of CS more tangible. Getting the message right for a specific audience and considering sensitives and application to a specific context has been key to the effectiveness of all hubs.

Where to go from here

Rethink what success looks like and focus on transformation. This involves taking CS beyond a technical, projectized exercise and frankly examining the role of CS hubs in the conflict and aid system. As platforms of exchange bringing together a range of actors these hubs are uniquely positioned to be part of a truly transformational approach, working with communities and local changemakers. This involves understanding what the context needs, different views on what success looks like and facilitating locally led networks to share knowledge and embed skills around CS.

Explore novel or hybrid funding models for sustainability. Challenges and lessons were shared regarding sustainability and the impact of funding cuts. Different hubs approached these challenges in different ways. For example, in DRC the CS hub piloted a hybrid model combining paid services and in-kind support. This focused on skills transfer and developing local networks whose work continues without direct support from the hub independent of project cycle funding. In West Africa, sustainability has been pursued through shared governance and diversified member contributions rather than reliance on external funding alone. Members contribute in different ways—including facilitation, meeting venues, staff time, expertise and financial support where possible—creating a model that values different forms of ownership. This has helped maintain momentum despite funding uncertainty while reinforcing the principle that conflict sensitivity is a shared responsibility rather than the mandate of one organisation or donor.

Invest in shared spaces for collective exchange and collaboration at different levels. As the aid system is drastically changing and funding shrinking, the need to protect spaces for collaboration and exchange is even more acute. This involves supporting and facilitating venues for horizontal and vertical learning (such as the CSC Hub), bringing together local, national and international partners. It involves strengthening collaboration through investing in networks of CS champions embedded in the local contexts from different organisations and supporting collective learning and reflection. The experience of the West Africa hubs further suggests that sustaining these spaces depends not only on continued external support, but also on shared ownership, distributed responsibilities and members seeing the hub as a collective platform for learning and collaboration. Finally, it requires developing a sense of shared purpose and language around conflict sensitivity to remain relevant and respond to the increasingly complex needs of partners working in increasingly challenging contexts.

Elizabeth Laruni is Senior Conflict Sensitivity and Gender Adviser at International Alert. She provides technical advisory support in gender and conflict analysis and sensitivity across Alert’s programming and to external clients. She has extensive experience of research and designing research methodologies, specifically on gender sensitivity and conflict sensitivity.

The author would like to thank Ruth Simpson, Camille Marie-Regnault, Emmanuel Sebujangwe and all the participants involved in the exchange series.

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