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Causal modelling identifies how one thing causes another to occur. In the realm of humanitarian assessments, such modelling is necessary to understand the effects of one possible cause in the context of other possible causes of changes in humanitarian conditions, namely, impoverishment, disease, death or other worsened conditions of life. To be useful, a model — which specifies key variables and the relations between them — should specify steps by which actions lead to outcomes through intervening variables. Such a model helps focus attention on what information to collect, the nature of the relationship between variables, and how and in what way each contributes to the humanitarian outcomes examined. For the task of developing a sanctions assessment methodology, causal modelling represents the core technique that will assist in elucidating the unique effects of sanctions apart from those due to other causes.
The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has employed causal modelling in a number of areas, including exploration of the multiple causes of child malnutrition (see figure 3).13 In addition, the UN’s Common Country Assessment (CCA) process also suggests causal analysis as a means of analysing the root causes of development challenges. However, it is an even more important tool when examining the impacts of sanctions, because the causal pathways are more diverse and complicated.
This chapter describes how to employ causal modelling techniques for humanitarian assessments in general, and can therefore provide useful guidance to practitioners using other assessment processes (such as the UNICEF and CCA approaches mentioned here). The general principles described in this chapter will be applied to the specific task of identifying the unique humanitarian implications of sanctions in chapter 5. The sections that follow explore types of causes and causation; criteria for determining what is or is not a cause; the process of inferring cause; and how to construct a causal model.
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