Designing, implementing and monitoring policies and programmes for sustainable development is particularly challenging in fragile and conflict-affected contexts. Against this underlying fragility, regional to global threats including climate change, geopolitical instability, pandemics and financial volatility interact to generate complex and dynamic risks and trade-offs. International or national policies or programmes are often response-driven and frequently focus on one set of threats and risks to the exclusion of the broader context. Such risk perceptions, and priorities for managing risks, might not be effective in building lasting peace or promoting sustainable, equitable and resilient livelihoods and development: instead, a risk-informed approach is required. 

This report builds on its predecessor – Risk-informed development: from crisis to resilience –  to inform the potential evolution of proposed or existing policies through case study applications of a risk-informed development (RID) approach. The approach was used for systematically assessing multiple, simultaneous threats and their interactions with policies, as well as potential trade-offs from policies, in two contexts: Myanmar and Niger.

Leigh Mayhew, Florence Pichon, Sarah Opitz-Stapleton and Rebecca Nadin