CDA Perspectives
The CDA Perspectives Blog is maintained by CDA colleagues, with guest authors welcome to share reflections, present information, and invite conversation on themes relevant to CDA’s areas of focus. On the blog, we share personal experiences of working towards improving impacts of interventions in contexts of conflict and fragility, and findings from collaborative learning projects. In most cases, we discuss issues related to CDA’s key practice areas. In addition to our staff contributors, we invite colleagues and partners to share their experiences and host blog series.
Download our guest post submission guidelines and email Hasangani Edema to contribute.
Check out CDA’s other blog series, From Where I Stand, a virtual collaborative learning project prioritizing the lens of local leaders as experts in the global movement to shift power in aid policy and NGO practice.
Focus on ‘the who’: a new organizational model for Majority World leadership with Minority World solidarity
As a sector, international humanitarian, development, and peacebuilding is undergoing a period of profound disruption. In February 2026, Local Capacities for Peace International (LCPI), a Kenyan international nongovernmental organization (INGO), and CDA Collaborative Learning, a U.S.-based research INGO, established a strategic affiliation that challenges conventional assumptions about international partnership. Rather than pursuing a traditional merger, acquisition, or donor-recipient relationship, the organizations co-designed an integrated model. The partnership asks a different question: What if the way organizations are structured became part of the shifting power agenda itself? While not a new question, not many have answered.
The Conversation on Climate Adaptation and Conflict is Reaching New Audiences. Can it Unlock Real Change?
In this post, we aim to introduce US American practitioners and funders to key tools for program strategy and design in bridgebuilding. Within the US pro-democracy space, bridgebuilding has become an important approach to addressing polarization across lines of identity difference. The most common form is light-touch bridgebuilding, which aims to reduce ill-feeling without directly seeking specific changes in action.
Bridgebuilding Effectiveness: Tools for Program Strategy and Design
In this post, we aim to introduce US American practitioners and funders to key tools for program strategy and design in bridgebuilding. Within the US pro-democracy space, bridgebuilding has become an important approach to addressing polarization across lines of identity difference. The most common form is light-touch bridgebuilding, which aims to reduce ill-feeling without directly seeking specific changes in action.
Navigating Uncertainty and Change
Navigating uncertainty and change can be overwhelming, but it also provides an opportunity to build resilience and reimagine possibilities. Michelle Helman offers three practical tips—breathwork, taking a pause before making decisions, and embracing an improvisation mindset—to help individuals strengthen their "uncertainty muscles" and turn challenges into opportunities.
Embracing Responsible Transition: Insights from Vassiliki Lembesis on DRC’s Localization Journey with Local Partners
In the ever-changing environment of humanitarian response, the Danish Refugee Council (DRC) is experiencing an organization-wide movement towards an increased commitment to localization. Vassiliki Lembesis, Global Civil Society Partnership Advisor at DRC, shares insights into this transformative journey and the organization's broader localization efforts to empower local civil society actors and foster sustainable development.
From Uncertainty to Opportunity: Navigating Responsible Transitions in Times of Polycrisis
Hasangani Edema-Reynolds discusses the challenges the aid sector is currently facing and emphasizes the need for transformative change in how aid is delivered, focusing on power redistribution, community wisdom, and flexible, healing-centered strategies. She offers recommendations for navigating organizational transitions, managing risks, and building a more resilient and collaborative system that centers solidarity and collective learning.
The Radical Survival of DEI Work & Leadership in the Aid Sector
CDA Board Member Princess Bazley-Bethea highlights the importance of robust data, storytelling, and community engagement for successful DEI initiatives, underscoring the importance of collective action in fostering inclusive workplaces across the HDP nexus.
The Paradox of Inaction: Why the International Aid System Fails to Utilize Resources Effectively
Despite possessing an abundance of tools, resources, knowledge, and well-intentioned recommendations, large aid organizations often fail to implement what they know works best. In this analysis, dive deeper into why this cycle continues and explore unconventional approaches to finally break it.
Trauma-Informed Transitions: A Key to Transitions in the Peacebuilding Sector
Stopping as Success summer fellow Kate Caisley shares why and how responsible transitions in the peacebuilding sector should take a trauma-informed and trust-based approach.
Children as Stakeholders in the Conflict Transformation Process
Recognizing children as stakeholders means recognizing they have a role to play in conflict transformation processes. Rachel Ansley argues that the long-term trajectory of conflict transformation processes connects the underlying factors that enable violent conflict to children’s potential to influence these dynamics in the future, leading to more opportunities for sustainable peace.
Considerations in peacebuilding when organized crime and corruption collide
In Cabo Delgado, Mozambique, laundering of conflict timber is made possible due to systemic corruption and illicit financial flows in the timber sector. As Mozambique moves to curb the illicit wildlife trade and the accompanying illicit financial flows that drain the country of much needed funds to support peacebuilding, CDA Senior Associate Maureen Moriarty describes how CDA's Conflict Sensitivity in Land Governance tool offers practical and hands-on guidance.
Research for advocacy and systemic change
Forced migration and protection expert Mara Tissera Luna discusses her new guide on decolonial and intersectional research in international development and humanitarian response, and reflects on what these two 'buzzwords' really mean in practice.
It takes all of us: Shifting power and decolonizing development
Stopping as Success (SAS+) team members Grace Boone and Jasmine Kato-Naughton share three lessons from the Shift the Power Summit in Bogotá, Colombia that they're carrying as individuals, organizations, and for the wider system.
Listening to, learning with, and being led by: Shifting power across the humanitarian, development, and peacebuilding sectors
What would it take to shift systems of power? And what is CDA’s role – with our partners, in our learning, and in our organizational structure – to actualize this power shift? Explore what shifting power and systems change mean to CDA through our three flagship learning projects on environmental peacebuilding, responsible transitions, and humanitarian risk.
From Do No Harm to Today: Reflections on 25 years of impact
In celebration of the 25th anniversary of the publication of Do No Harm by CDA founder Mary B. Anderson and the recent special issue of the journal “Development in Practice” marking that milestone, CDA Board Chair Neil Levine and Advisory Council member Irene Santiago reflect on where we have been over the last three decades, and what needs to happen next to continue building sustainable peace.
