Asking questions

You can understand your working environment better simply by asking the right questions about it. This is a useful tool for generating discussions in a small group, but it will only work if the questions are formulated in a way that will make it easy to find a solution.

Suppose, for example, that harassment by local authorities has become a problem. If you phrase the question as: “What should be done to reduce the harassment?”, you may find yourselves simply looking for a remedy to a symptom, i.e. the harassment.

But if you phrase the question to point toward a solution, you may be on your way to finding a real solution. For example, if you ask: “Is our socio-political environment safe enough for doing our work?”, there can be only two answers – yes or no.

If the answer is yes, you will need to formulate another question that can help you pin-point and properly understand the critical issues at stake for maintaining your safety. If, after proper consideration of all available activities, plans and resources, as well as legislation, negotiations, comparisons with other defenders in the area, etc, the answer should turn out to be no, this in itself will amount to a solution to your security problem.

Using the asking questions method:

• Look for questions that will help you pin-point and properly understand the critical issues at stake for maintaining your safety
• Formulate the questions in a solution-oriented way
• Repeat this process as many times as necessary (as a discussion)

Some useful questions to be asked:

• Which are the key issues at stake in the socio-political and economy arena?
• Who are the key stakeholders in relation to these key issues?
• How might our work affect negatively or positively the interests of these key stakeholders?
• How might we react if we became targeted by any of these actors due to our work?
• Is our socio-political environment safe enough for doing our work?
• How have local/national authorities responded to previous work of rights defenders related to this issue?
• How have the key stakeholders responded to previous or similar work of rights defenders or others related to these issues?
• How have the media and the community responded in similar circumstances?
• Etc.

Force Field Analysis

Force field analysis is a technique which can help you visually identify how different forces are helping or hindering the achievement of your work objectives. It shows both supporting and resisting forces, and works on the assumption that security problems might arise from resisting forces, and that you could take advantage of some of the supporting forces. This technique can be completed by just one person, but is most effective when used by a diverse group with a clearly defined work objective and a method for accomplishing it.

Begin by drawing a horizontal arrow pointing to a box. Write a short summary of your work objective in this box. This will provide a focus for identifying supporting and resisting forces. Draw another box above the central arrow. List all potential forces which could be preventing you from achieving your work objective here. Draw a similar box, containing all potential supportive forces, underneath the arrow. Draw a final box for forces whose direction is unknown or unsure.

After completing your chart it is time to evaluate the results. Force field analysis helps you to clearly visualise the forces you are dealing with. The goal is to find ways to reduce or eliminate risk generated by resisting forces, partly through potential help from supporting forces. In terms of the forces of unknown direction, you will need to decide whether to look at them as supporting, or to monitor them continuously in order to detect signs of them becoming either resisting or supporting.

For example

Imagine that you belong to an organisation dealing with indigenous people’s rights to natural resources on their own land. There are ongoing conflicts between a number of stakeholders about the exploitation of those resources. You now want to extend your work to a neighbouring area with similar problems.

Actors ( or stakeholders) analysis

Actors or stakeholder analysis is an important way of increasing the information you have available when making decisions about protection. It involves identifying and describing the different actors or stakeholders involved and their relationships, on the basis of their characteristics and interests – all in relation to a given protection issue.

A stakeholder in protection is any person, group or

institution with an interest in, or involvement in,

a policy outcome in the area of protection.

A stakeholder analysis is key to understanding:

• Who is a stakeholder and under what circumstances their “stake” counts;

• The relationships between stakeholders in protection, their characteristics and interests;

• How these will be affected by protection activities;

• Each stakeholder’s willingness to become involved in those protection activities.

Stakeholders in protection can be categorised in the following way:

Primary stakeholders. In a protection context, these are the defenders themselves, and those they work with and for, because they all have a primary stake in their own protection.

Duty-bearer stakeholders, who are responsible for protecting defenders, i.e.:

• Government and state institutions (including security forces, judges, legislators, etc)

• International bodies with a mandate that includes protection, such as some UN bodies, regional IGOs, peacekeeping forces, etc;

• In the case of opposition armed actors, they can be held accountable for not attacking the defenders (as the civilian population they are), specially when these actors control the territory.

Key stakeholders, who can significantly influence the protection of defenders. They may have political clout or the capacity to put pressure on duty-bearer stakeholders who do not fulfil their responsibilities (such s other governments, UN bodies, ICRC, etc), and similarly some of them may be often directly or indirectly involved in attacks and pressure against defenders (such as private corporations or the mass media or other governments also). All depends on the context and interests and strategies of each of these key stakeholders. A non-exhaustive list could include:

• UN bodies (other than mandated ones);
• The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC);
• Other governments and multilateral institutions (both as donors and policy-makers);
• Other armed actors.
• NGOs (either national or international);
• Churches and religious institutions;
• Private corporations;
• The mass media.

A major difficulty with establishing which strategies and actions are being undertaken by stakeholders is that the relationships between them are not clear-cut, or may even be non-existent. Many duty-bearer stakeholders, particularly governments, security forces and opposition armed forces, cause or contribute to human rights violations and a lack of protection for defenders. Some stakeholders, who would otherwise share the same protection concerns, may also have competing interests, such as among other governments, UN bodies and NGOs. These factors, along with those inherent in conflict scenarios, project a complex picture of the working environment as a whole.

Analysing changing structures and processes

Stakeholders are not static actors. They relate to each other at multiple levels, creating a dense web of relationships. In terms of protection, it is important to highlight and pay attention to relationships which shape and transform people’s protection needs. We can talk about structures and processes.

Structures are interrelated parts of the public sector, civil society or private bodies. We will look at them from the point of view of protection. Within the public sector, we could look at a government as a set of actors with either one unified strategy or with confronting internal strategies. For example, we could find strong discrepancies between the Ministry of Defence and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs when discussing policies related to human rights defenders, or between the Ombudsman’s office and the military. Structures can have mixed components; for example, an inter-sectoral commission (members from the government, NGOs, the UN and diplomatic corps) could be created to follow up on the protection situation of a given human rights defenders organisation.

Processes are the chains of decisions and actions taken by one or more structures with the goal of improving the protection situation of a given group. There can be legislative processes, cultural processes and policy processes. Not all processes are successful in achieving improvements in protection: On many occasions protection processes are in conflict or render each other ineffective. For example, people allegedly being protected may not accept a policy protection process led by the government, because they see it as having an implicit aim of displacing people from an area. The UN and NGOs may support people in this process.

A stakeholder analysis

There are a number of ways to do a stakeholder analysis. The following uses a straight-forward methodology, which is key to getting good results in analyses and decision making processes.

When assessing protection processes it is important to look at them with an adequate time perspective and always take into account the interests and objectives of all stakeholders involved.

A stakeholder analysis in four steps:

1. Identify the wider protection issue (i.e. the security situation of human rights defenders in a given region within a country).

2. Who are the stakeholders? (Namely, which are the institutions and groups and individuals with a responsibility or an interest in protection?) Identify and list all stakeholders relevant to that protection issue, through brainstorms and discussions.

3. Investigate and analyse the stakeholders’ characteristics and particular attributes, such as responsibilities in protection, the power to influence the protection situation, aims, strategies, legitimacy and interests (including the will to contribute to protection).

4. Investigate and analyse relationships between stakeholders.

After undertaking this analysis, you may wish to use a matrix like the following.

Place the list with all stakeholders relevant to a well-defined protection issue in a matrix (see Chart 2): Repeat the same list in the first column and along the first row. After this, you can undertake two kind of analysis:

• To analyse the attributes of each stakeholder (aims and interests, strategies, legitimacy and power), fill in the boxes in the diagonal line where each stakeholder intersects with itself:

For example:

you can place the aims and interests and strategies of armed opposition groups in the box “A”.

• To analyse the relationships between stakeholders, fill in those boxes that define the most important relationships in relation to the protection issue, for example, the one which intersects between the army and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), in box “B”, and so on.

After filling the most relevant boxes, you will have a picture of the aims and strategies and interaction among main stakeholders in relation to a given protection issue.