Introducing the Conflict Sensitivity Wheel

Turning the Wheel: a tool to make climate adaptation more conflict-sensitive

In many parts of the world, the communities most exposed to droughts, floods, and heat stress are also affected by violence, inequality, or weak governance. Adaptation policies are meant to help societies cope with these pressures. However, if they ignore conflict dynamics, adaptation efforts can unintentionally worsen them.

Across different contexts, adaptation projects that aim to protect livelihoods or manage resources have reinforced old grievances, widened inequality, or triggered new disputes. When adaptation is designed without understanding how power, participation, and legitimacy work in fragile environments, it risks becoming part of the problem it is meant to solve.

This challenge inspired the development of the Conflict Sensitivity Wheel (CSW), a framework and tool designed to evaluate how climate adaptation policies perform in conflict-affected or fragile settings. The CSW helps practitioners, researchers, and policymakers identify where and how governance arrangements can foster peace by actively avoiding negative unintended consequences and contributing to a sustainable peace.

Why we need Conflict-Sensitive Adaptation

Academic and policy dialogues on climate and security linkages often focus on how the effects of climate impacts, like resource scarcity or loss of livelihoods, may exacerbate the drivers of conflict. Much less attention has been paid to how adaptation policies themselves can shape conflict dynamics.

Climate adaptation is rarely neutral. Building a dam, reforesting a landscape, or allocating water for irrigation may, for instance, improve resilience for some groups while restricting access for others. These trade-offs are particularly sensitive in places already marked by inequality or violence.

Existing approaches to “conflict sensitivity” often focus on assessing whether projects or interventions do harm. But this project-level view fails to account for the broader policy structures—the laws, institutions, and budgets—that determine who participates in decision-making across levels of governance, and how benefits and costs are distributed between social groups.

The Conflict Sensitivity Wheel fills this gap. It allows analysts to assess conflict sensitivity across entire governance systems, showing how climate adaptation instruments interact with political and social realities at multiple levels.

The three pillars of governance in the Conflict Sensitivity Wheel 

The CSW brings together three complementary governance theories (polycentrism, adaptive governance, and political ecology), each addressing a different dimension of how institutions for climate adaptation handle complexity and conflict. Together, these three perspectives form the backbone of the CSW, linking multi-level governance, institutional structures and processes, and social justice within a single analytical framework.

• Polycentrism: Polycentrism refers to governance systems where decision-making power is distributed across many centers rather than concentrated at the top. In adaptation policy, this means empowering local institutions to plan and act based on their context while keeping coordination across levels. Multiple overlapping authorities can compensate for one another’s failures, sustain key functions during crises, and ensure decisions reflect local realities. For conflict-sensitive adaptation, polycentrism matters because local actors are often the first to perceive and respond to tensions. When authority and resources are decentralized, it becomes easier to recognize and address conflict risks early on. However, decentralized systems need legitimacy, accountability, and clear coordination to function effectively.
• Adaptive Governance: Adaptive governance emphasizes institutions that are flexible, responsive, and capable of learning in the face of uncertain social, political and ecological change. Climate impacts and social dynamics evolve in unpredictable ways; hence policies must be able to adjust through feedback and experimentation. In practice, this means creating mechanisms for monitoring, sharing lessons, and incorporating local knowledge. Institutions that can adapt to new information are better equipped to manage uncertainty and respond to tensions before escalation.
• Political Ecology: Political ecology focuses on the power relations that shape vulnerability and grievances. It asks who gains and who loses from environmental change and from the policies meant to address it. This perspective highlights that adaptation is not only a technical challenge but also a political one. Structural inequalities, such as land tenure insecurity, gender exclusion, or corruption, determine who can benefit from adaptation resources. A conflict-sensitive policy must therefore confront these root causes of vulnerability and injustice, not only manage their symptoms.

The Conflict Sensitivity Wheel

The Conflict Sensitivity Wheel operationalizes these governance theories through 22 criteria and 49 indicators that span the policy cycle, from formulation to implementation and review. Each criterion can be evaluated as either de jure (how a policy is formally designed) or de facto (how it works in practice).

Rather than generating a single conflict sensitivity “score,” the Wheel is meant to help practitioners identify where conflict sensitivity is strong, weak, or missing. It serves as both a diagnostic and a guide for action, helping institutions determine crucial points where conflict-sensitive approaches can be strengthened.

The Wheel’s application follows four steps:

1. Data gathering: review documents, conduct interviews, focus groups, and surveys.
2. Analysis: code data using the Wheel’s indicators, marking compliance or non-compliance.
3. Interpretation: compare findings across levels and policy phases.
4. Synthesis: identify gaps, trade-offs, and opportunities to integrate conflict sensitivity.

To illustrate the Wheel’s use, the study applied it to Kenya’s County Climate Change Fund (CCCF), an example of a policy and financial instruments that aligns with the principles of Locally Led Adaptation (LLA).

Testing the Wheel: Kenya’s County Climate Change Fund

The CCCF was established in 2011 to strengthen climate resilience through locally led adaptation. Counties which have established a CCCF legislation allocate a portion of their development budget to community-driven projects, guided by Ward Climate Change Planning Committees (WCCPCs) that identify priorities and propose investments.

The framework is recognized as one of Kenya’s most innovative adaptation policies. It devolves authority, promotes participation, and uses structured planning tools to integrate climate data and local knowledge. This made it an ideal test case for the Conflict Sensitivity Wheel. 

• Polycentrism in Practice

The CCCF shows how devolved governance can improve conflict sensitivity. Ward committees act as autonomous decision-making centers that represent local priorities and strengthen community voice. By linking these committees to county structures, mainly the County Climate Change Planning Committees (CCCPCs), the CCCF creates multiple, overlapping centers of authority. These local institutions have helped communities manage resource disputes and coordinate adaptation projects. In some counties, they have become platforms for wider local development planning. 

Yet the analysis also found gaps. Peace and security actors are rarely included in county-level coordination, and cross-county collaboration remains limited. Strengthening these horizontal linkages could enhance early warning capacities and prevent localized tensions from escalating.

• Adaptive Governance

Adaptive governance depends on learning and flexibility. The CCCF performs well in terms of participatory assessments, which link climate risks with local security and conflict concerns, such as resource competition or gender-based violence. However, the flow and use of information upward, toward county and national levels, was found to be limited. Without consistent monitoring and documentation, valuable lessons from communities remain unused by county institutions for peace and security. Unstable funding adds another challenge, because when projects are interrupted or delayed, expectations are unmet, and trust can erode. Predictable, transparent financing is therefore essential not only for adaptation success but also for conflict prevention.

• Political Ecology

The CCCF recognizes inequality as a driver of vulnerability and promotes inclusive planning. Yet in practice, projects often focus on avoiding harm rather than transforming underlying injustices. For instance, committees tend to avoid implementing projects in contested areas instead of using them as opportunities for reconciliation. This cautious approach limits the program’s potential to contribute to positive peace, including the strengthening of relationships and institutions that sustain social harmony. The study also found that while accountability mechanisms are robust and corruption controls are effective, monitoring frameworks still prioritize technical outputs over social outcomes. Including indicators on cohesion, equity, and representation would help ensure adaptation contributes directly to peacebuilding.

From Assessment to Action

The findings from Kenya show that climate adaptation can support peace when governance systems distribute power, remain flexible, and address inequality. The Conflict Sensitivity Wheel provides a structured way to see whether these conditions are in place and where they can be improved.

• For practitioners, the Wheel is not just a research tool, but a practical guide. Governments and organizations can use it to review existing policies, identify risks, and design conflict-sensitive strategies before problems arise. Donors and implementing agencies can apply it to ensure that funding decisions strengthen, rather than undermine, social cohesion.
• The tool also helps bridge a persistent gap between climate and peacebuilding sectors. These policy sectors often work in parallel, with separate frameworks and priorities. The Wheel offers a shared language that connects adaptation planning with conflict prevention, fostering collaboration across disciplines.
• Applying the Wheel, however, requires careful analysis and inclusive dialogue. The Kenya case benefited from open collaboration between local governments, civil society, and researchers. In more restrictive governance settings, access to information can be a constraint. Even then, the Wheel can still guide high-level assessments by focusing on policy design and using available secondary data.
• Ultimately, the tool is most effective when used as a learning process, which brings together actors across sectors and levels to reflect on how climate policies can be designed and implemented more safely and fairly.

Acknowledgements

This work is carried out with support from the CGIAR´s Multifunctional Landscapes Science Program (MFL) and the CGIAR Climate Action Science Program. We would like to thank all funders who supported this research through their contributions to the CGIAR Trust Fund: https://www.cgiar.org/funders/