Where does this Guide come from?

This book grows out of the experience of the Do No Harm Project (formerly the Local Capacities for Peace Project). For twenty years, this project has looked at international interventions and traced the impacts of those interventions. This Guide is based on the experiences of humanitarians, development workers, peacebuilders, advocates and many more, from all over the world and from all types of organizations.

In 1993, a group of donor agencies, UN organizations, bilateral organizations, and international and local NGOs began working together in a collaborative learning project on how assistance interacts with conflict. The systematic exploration of this issue had never been attempted before, though we knew that many people had, over many years, been thinking about how to provide assistance in conflict. We wanted to gather the prior and ongoing experience in order to help everyone working in conflict zones.

Collectively and with a lot of hard work, we succeeded. We not only learned about how assistance interacts with conflict, both to exacerbate and mitigate it, we developed a framework to help people providing assistance think through the issues so they could take more control of their impacts. This framework and the original lessons were detailed in Mary B. Anderson’s book Do No Harm: How Aid Can Support Peace—Or War (Lynne Rienner, 1999).

Twenty years later, the lessons learned through the collaborative learning effort are widespread, appearing in policy documents and manuals of practice across the spectrum of organizations involved in assistance and other forms of intervention. The techniques have grown beyond the fields of assistance and are used from the macro of national and regional analysis to the micro of understanding of family dynamics. They are used not just by humanitarians and development workers, but by peacebuilders, advocates, corporations, militaries, governments, and, most important of all, communities. Anyone with a stake in the process of providing resources or engaging with others on a project of mutual benefit can can use Do No Harm.

The ideas have moved well beyond the limited horizons we set out toward back in 1993 when the Local Capacities for Peace Project began. This Guide tries to map as many of the routes as it can.

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