Defueling Conflict: Notes from the Field

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KEY MESSAGES

• Natural resources and their management can either fuel fragility and conflict or serve as critical instruments for promoting peace and long-term development.
• Identifying the relationships between natural resources and conflict strengthens outcomes in fragile and conflict-affected situations, allowing communities to build resilience and improve their livelihoods.
• Environmental and social safeguards can serve as key entry point for addressing conflict risks.
• Selecting relevant indicators to capture environmental peacebuilding outcomes is critical for monitoring and measuring impact.
• Strengthening institutional capacity is essential for scaling conflict-sensitive and environmental peacebuilding efforts, with the report sharing proven strategies from the World Bank’s experience.

BACKGROUND

The rise in fragility, conflict, and violence (FCV), environmental degradation, and climate change are threatening to reverse development gains. Over the past decade, violent conflicts have tripled, becoming more protracted and driving significant regional spillovers. Natural resources underpin many conflict-affected situations worldwide: at least 35 percent of internal armed conflicts in recent decades have been triggered, financed, or aggravated by natural resources. Moreover, 70 percent of the most climate-vulnerable countries are also among the most fragile.

Natural resource management (NRM) can play a crucial role in breaking the cycle of conflict. Environmental interventions can help mitigate resource-related tensions and promote peace by addressing underlying drivers such as resource scarcity, environmental degradation, and economic instability. Inclusive governance further supports social cohesion while strengthening communities’ resilience to shocks in ways that account for the diverse needs of affected groups.

Understanding and addressing these interconnected challenges requires integrated approaches, through conflict-sensitive environmental initiatives that avoid maladaptation, mitigate social conflict risks, and seize opportunities for benefits at the intersection of poverty reduction, peacebuilding, and resilience. For rural communities heavily dependent on natural resource assets, sustainable and inclusive governance of these resources is essential to strengthen adaptive capacities, improve livelihoods, and support long-term development.

HIIGHLIGHTS

Defueling Conflict: Notes from the Field explores the operationalization of conflict sensitivity and environmental peacebuilding, synthesizing tools and lessons learned from the World Bank's engagement in this field. It builds directly on the 2022 World Bank report Defueling Conflict: Environment and Natural Resource Management as a Pathway to Peace, which clarified the linkages between the environment, FCV risks, and peacebuilding opportunities. While the 2022 report provided the “why,” this new publication focuses on the “how,” demonstrating practical applications across key project and strategic entry points:

• Upstream analytics that inform downstream operations (e.g., Risk and Resilience Assessments, Country Climate and Development Reports);
• Project design (contextual risks analysis, theories of change);
• Safeguards;
• Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL); and
• Institutional capacity building.

Together, these reports call for greater investment in environmental issues and NRM in FCV-affected contexts and provide practical guidance for operational and programmatic efforts.

The report aims to:

• Provide practical tools to integrate FCV and NRM considerations across the program cycle. It offers actionable tools to integrate conflict sensitivity and environmental peacebuilding into operations, with the aim of enhancing the sustainability and resilience of development outcomes. These tools span upstream analytics, safeguards, and the results chain (theories of change, monitoring, evaluation, learning, indicators). These approaches are informed by real-world pilots and lessons from NRM projects in FCV settings.
• Demonstrate innovative methods to measure and monitor outcomes, and to build the evidence base. The report showcases methods for framing, measuring, and communicating environmental peacebuilding and conflict-sensitivity outcomes. By clarifying the rationale for intervention —across climate adaptation, land use, and other sectors—it supports the World Bank’s commitment to prevention under the FCV Strategy and strengthens evidence generation in FCV contexts.
• Serve as a resource for institutions looking to build environmental peacebuilding and conflict sensitivity capacities. It highlights entry points and shares lessons from the World Bank’s evolving FCV engagement. This reflects similar shifts across organizations working along the humanitarian-development-peace nexus and those advancing climate and conservation efforts in fragile settings.

How can you use this report? Designed as a flexible toolbox, each chapter of this report can be used on its own. Practitioners can jump straight to the tools and templates they need; task teams can draw from real-world applications and lessons learned; and readers seeking conceptual clarity can explore the analytical chapters that unpack the linkages between NRM, conflict sensitivity, and peacebuilding.

This publication was prepared by the Environment Department at the World Bank with the support of the State and Peacebuilding Fund.