Measuring Credibility and Trust: The Key Elements in Humanitarian-Development Peace Nexus (HDPN) Operations

Abstract

Conflict and violence are major drivers of humanitarian needs, forced displacement, extreme poverty, and hunger. Protracted crises are not just about degraded natural resources. To move the center of interest from the natural resource (land, water etc.) to the actors operating in these contexts, we think there is the need to build on the concept of credibility. Credibility can be considered as the quality of a person or of a thing that makes it credible (in the eyes of the beholder). If stakeholders of international assistance must create and invest on credibility, it has to be somehow measured. This paper proposes a measure of credibility that can be adopted in field operation to assess the potential efficacy of assistance.