This case example examines how a Local Coordination Team (Equipo Local de CoordinaciĆ³n, ELC) in Colombia used a Results-Based Protection approach to prioritize a community-level protection risk under severe resource constraints. InterAction supported participating organizations to identify key risks through consultations with field teams, community leaders, and local contacts, then develop risk canvases to analyze the threats, vulnerabilities, capacities, and potential response pathways associated with each. Three risks were considered: confinement linked to landmines, threats and extortion against community leaders, and the forced recruitment and use of children in illicit crop cultivation. Participants assessed each against three agreed criteria: severity, feasibility of response, and opportunities for multisectoral and multidisciplinary collaboration.
The ELC ultimately prioritized the third risk, judging that it offered the strongest balance between urgency and the practical possibility of achieving risk reduction. The community was accessible, one organization had established relationships and secured funding, and schools provided a strong entry point for collective action. The process illustrates how RBP can make difficult prioritization choices more transparent and strategic, while also showing the extent to which funding, access, and operational feasibility can shape humanitarian decision-making.
RBP Recommendations
1. Prioritization is a strategic exercise: Participants found our approach useful because it went beyond abstract severity rankings to bring questions of feasibility and impact squarely
into the discussion, allowing humanitarians from different organizations to collectively engage with the challenging questions of where they believed they could generate the strongest reductions in risk.2. Criteria should be explicit, but not overly rigid: this process identified severity, feasibility, and opportunities for collaboration as the most relevant criteria, based on discussions with local leadership. In other contexts, different criteria may be more appropriate. What matters most is that the criteria and decisionmaking process are mutually agreed upon, transparent, and able to support honest discussion.
3. Prioritization must involve communities and non-protection actors: Protection actors alone cannot fully understand the dimensions of protection risks or address them on their own. Bringing in community perspectives, other sectors, and relevant non-humanitarian actors can deepen collective analysis of the risks, assess the viability of potential responses, and build broader ownership around the actions needed to reduce them.
4. Priorities should remain dynamic: Protection risks shift quickly, especially in conflict-affected contexts. Prioritization processes should therefore create space for periodic review, adaptation, and learning.