ID: 1938
Presenting Author: Shannon Martinez
Session: 709 - USAID’s ESIA Legacy and Looking Forward
Status: pending
In conflict settings, integrating ESIA with civic engagement counters misinformation and fosters stability. This approach elevates ESIA — into a catalyst for collaboration and community-led change.
In fragile and conflict-affected settings, USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI) demonstrated that effective programming required more than technical precision—it depended on deliberate synergy building and adaptive learning to reduce risks of misinformation common in conflict settings. OTI’s model integrated ESIA with iterative monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) systems to ensure each intervention informed and strengthened the next. Central to this approach was the principle of “building synergies.” Rather than treating grants as stand-alone interventions, programming interventions had to ensure each grant activity complemented all the others, collectively propelling programs toward systemic change.
ESIA which by design fosters a systematic cumulative impacts approach, e.g., at the watershed level, is well suited to be mutually supportive of such a synergistic model. Furthermore, by leveraging both online and offline civic spaces, programming strengthened strategies to counter misinformation and malign influence.
When aligning ESIA with adaptive monitoring and civic participation, there was an opportunity to create networks of citizens, vendors, civil society organizations, and media partners encouraged to participate in civic dialogue and activities that produce tangible results in their communities.. This approach transforms ESIA from a compliance requirement of the donor into a catalyst for nature-supporting outcomes rooted in community communication, partnership, and shared ownership to facilitate stabilization and political transitions.
Shannon Martinez is a senior leader with over 18 years directing post-conflict and political transitions with USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives in Bosnia, Burma, Iraq, Israel, and Ukraine.