Monitoring Dialogue in Conflict-Affected Contexts: Guide for Practitioners
Authors: Jill Baggerman, Esra Cuhadar, and Kristen Wall
Publisher: Alliance for Peacebuilding
Publication date: August 2025
Suggested Citation: Jill Baggerman, Esra Cuhadar, and Kristen Wall, Monitoring Dialogue in Conflict-Affected Contexts: A Guide for Practitioners, United States Institute of Peace (USIP), August 2025.
At a time of increasing conflict around the globe and uncertainty about resources for peace efforts, developing robust evidence of dialogue effectiveness is needed to demonstrate dialogue’s impact and value. This guide, developed over several years with the input of numerous colleagues and partners, merges theoretical insights with practical tools to present an innovative dialogue monitoring approach designed to help practitioners and monitoring and evaluation (M&E) professionals identify and track meaningful progress made by dialogue programs in conflict-affected contexts. It supports a shift toward more systematic, evidence-based monitoring practices necessary to document the complexities and impacts of a diverse range of dialogues.
This guide is designed for dialogue facilitators and organizers, peacebuilding practitioners, M&E experts, funders, donors, evaluators, and scholars. The Dialogue Monitoring Framework that lies at the heart of the guide will help implementing teams structure their strategic thinking about monitoring and measuring dialogue outcomes. It will also enable practitioners to apply existing evidence and research to the design of dialogue monitoring efforts. By enabling improved feedback, it can help facilitate adaptive management to support practitioners in making real-time adjustments needed in complex conflict contexts.
This guide can also be a resource for funders and implementing organizations as they strive to increase accountability for the design and implementation of effective dialogue programs. Learning at an organizational level requires a shared framework to analyze comparable data across diverse programming contexts and interventions. This guide will encourage the kind of comparable data collection needed to enable peacebuilders to better assess and document dialogue outcomes in more standardized ways. By helping funders and implementers gather and analyze data about dialogue outcomes across programs and types of interventions, the guide will facilitate the assessment of intervention effectiveness and identify areas for growth.
More systematized and standardized data will also help evaluators, researchers, and scholars deepen the evidence base for effective dialogue practice; evaluate dialogue contributions to peacemaking and peacebuilding; deepen understanding of dialogue theories of change; and identify mechanisms by which dialogue changes conflict systems. Documenting meaningful dialogue outcomes will aid the field in demonstrating the power of dialogue to prevent and resolve violent conflict.
The purpose of this guide is to:
Equip dialogue practitioners to monitor dialogue projects;
Facilitate project- and organizational-level adaptation and learning about dialogue program implementation; and
Contribute to evaluation and scholarly study of dialogue practice and effectiveness by developing the evidence base for tracking contributions of dialogue to peaceful conflict resolution.