Integrating Social Cohesion for Enhanced Outcomes

This Learning Brief provides insights from an extensive evidence mapping study commissioned by CRS to understand whether, how and to what extent integration of social cohesion and justice programming yields larger and more sustainable improvements in outcomes across the humanitarian-development peacebuilding nexus.

The methodology of the study included a review of existing literature and an in-depth analysis of outcomes from 17 CRS projects on social cohesion and justice, including 10 projects where these elements are integrated with programming of other sectors.

The relationship of social cohesion and justice integration to humanitarian and development outcomes remains largely unexplored. This gap begins in the design phase: projects are generally not designed with clear theories of change articulating how the elements contribute to one another, nor are monitoring and evaluation systems geared to tracking this interplay. CRS has become more intentional in designing programs employing social cohesion and justice approaches to augment humanitarian and development outcomes: paying greater attention to its role in a project’s theory of change; adopting standardized tools and indicators to track frequently sought outcomes and developing a means of assessing collective, systemic local capacity for peaceful conflict management; and investing in further research via quasi-experimental designs and longitudinal studies. Future areas of research and programming focus – to capitalize on CRS strengths as well as to help fill recognized gaps and opportunities noted in the external literature – include the impacts of integration with natural resource management, disaster risk reduction, resilience and refugee/IDP returns, in addition to general livelihoods programming and enhancing local dispute management capacities.