Strands - Conflict Sensitive Development

The Conflict-Sensitive Development strand of the Consortium Initiative was initially run by Catholic Relief Services (CRS), and has been taken over, with slight changes in scale and objectives, by International Alert (Alert) in August 2006.

By conflict sensitivity the Consortium Initiative understands the ability of an organisation to:

* Understand the context in which it operates (i.e. the geographic and social environment where conflict exists);

* Understand the interaction between its intervention and the context;

* Act upon the understanding of this interaction, in order to avoid negative impacts and maximise positive impacts.

The main focus of the strand remained the establishment and operationalisation of a conflict-sensitive coalition of international and local development actors. Whereas CRS, during the first three years of the project, concentrated more on grass-roots level work to actively promote and contribute to peacebuilding through the development work done in Armenia, Azerbaijan and in the broader South Caucasus region, Alert is focusing more on research, donor-debate and an overall creation of awareness about the impact development work can have, for the better or for the worse, on conflict contexts.