During the last decade, multilateral organizations, aid agencies and peace building organizations have become increasingly involved in countries suffering from the aftermath of internal wars and violent conflicts. Thus, these organizations have been confronted with complex and ever-changing conflict settings. Accordingly, the felt need to better understand and address causes of violent conflicts and to play an active role in conflict prevention and peaceful conflict transformation has increased significantly, resulting in the development of new or adapted project management tools.

The elaboration of different planning and management tools such as Do-No-Harm and Peace and Conflict Impact Assessment (PCIA) in the mid 1990s, which make it possible to analyze peace and conflict related issues, coincided with the commissioning of a series of evaluations and studies assessing humanitarian relief and development assistance in areas of conflict. Shortly afterwards, peace building organizations started to increasingly debate appropriate methods of evaluation. Two different strands of discussions evolved: While the relief and development community was, amongst other things, focuzing on avoiding unintended negative impacts of aid delivery (“do no harm”), peace building organizations were concerned with how to assess increased trust or tolerance between formally hostile groups. The exchange of respective experiences and lessons learned, as well as methods and tools , between the two “communities” has remained limited, and already existing assessment criteria, approaches and tools have been only slowly integrated into emerging peace and conflict-sensitive evaluation methods.