Client: The European Parliament

Background:

The client identified a pressing need for addressing unprecedented global challenges, including climate change, biodiversity loss, water depletion, and overpopulation, amidst socio-political uncertainty. These challenges call for unprecedented global cooperation due to their multidimensional and cross-border nature. The client aims to measure the level of threats to peace, security and democracy around the world with the help of some framework or tool to be used for policymakers and civil society.

Normandy Peace Index (NI): Funded by the European Parliament, the NPI is a measure of future threat facing 140 regions and nations. It was launched by the EU to commemorate 75 years since the Normandy landings.

The solution:

IEP’s experience in building peace and conflict indices includes maintaining our own database of over 5000 socio-economic and development indicators. IEP proposed creating the Normandy Peace Index, and first worked with the European Parliament to define the Index in 2019.

This involved data scoping, Index construction, dashboard, report writing, data collection, and case study analysis. There is an ongoing contract with the European Parliament for annual updates of the Normandy Peace Index, which is currently in its fourth year. 

Outcomes:

The Normandy Index (NI) focuses on two main aspects: 

• The perception of threats in the EU’s external action (and hence the type of phenomena that EU action aims to tackle to prevent, address or resolve conflict and insecurity) 
• The monitoring of probability (or existence) of conflict on the basis of the status or level of these threats in a given country. 

The NI can be used as early-warning system designed to give policy makers insights about potential risks and developments in economic, social, environmental, security and political factors.