Thus far we have examined the different impacts, positive and negative, direct and indirect, that KDP has on local conflict and its management. We have found that KDP triggers conflicts and interacts ...with existing tensions, but that these do not become violent. The program has little direct impact on either conflict levels or conflict management; its forums and facilitators are not often used for disputes unrelated to the program. It does, however, indirectly affect conflict environments and, in so doing, helps improve medium- to long-term conflict management capacity.
These are aggregate findings representing general trends across the different research areas.
In Chapter 5 we found that in most cases KDP had little direct effect on conflict management. There are other ways, however, in which the program may lead to changes in the level and impacts of local ...conflicts and in how they are managed when they arise. This chapter examines three ways in which KDP mayindirectlyimpact conflict management capacity: through changing social structures, forms of behavior, and norms and perceptions in the localities where it works.
Development projects such as KDP aim, albeit implicitly and in often unacknowledged ways, to reshape inter- and intragroup and state-society relations. The
Assessing the efficacy of social development projects is a complex undertaking, not least because a defining feature of many such projects is the nonstandardized way in which they seek to adapt to ...idiosyncratic local circumstances and, in the process, generate outcomes (such as enhanced participation and inclusion) that do not have an established metric or emerge on a known trajectory over time (Woolcock 2009c). As such, it is extremely difficult—in analytical and empirical terms—to isolate the effects of a program from other contextual factors in the community and beyond. These include aspects of governance and local power structures,
