Research
SAF: Stability Assessment Framework
International donor organizations increasingly struggle with ways to give due attention to problems of instability, insecurity, governance, and underdevelopment in their policy design. If the international community wants to engage in unstable environments (including fragile and/or post-conflict states) in order to assist in the creation of sustainable peace, it must develop well-suited and well-coordinated policy interventions for achieving good governance, security, and socioeconomic development.
Policymakers need adequate assessments of countries in which interventions are to take place. The Stability Assessment Framework (SAF) was developed for this aim. The SAF is an analytical tool for stability analysis and strategic planning that helps develop the institutional capacities needed for an integrated policy response towards a particular country.
Important to note is that the SAF aims to cut across policy-fields and forces policymakers to expand their vision beyond their own specialized field. It is a tool that helps the user understand the most relevant causes and linkages of conflict factors and builds confidence that the proposed policy will be effective. Given its modus operandi, the SAF is primarily a process-management tool: it incorporates information and analysis, policy documentation, and prioritization into the development of an overall strategy for stability promotion for a particular country or region.
The SAF was initially developed by CRU for the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs. SAF exercises have been executed in countries like Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Bolivia and Colombia. In addition, CRU researchers have developed and been giving workshops to familiarize a wide range of practitioners who work in conflict-prone countries with the SAF methodology.