Peace Finance Standard
The Peace Finance Standard is a practical framework for integrating peace considerations into finance, enterprise activity, and enabling technologies.
Rather than assuming peace will emerge indirectly from resilience or inclusion, the Standard makes peace intentional, interpretable, and actionable in real-world decisions.
From principles to practice
The Standard provides a structured way to translate peace commitments into real-world decisions. Its core logic is to define the intended peace contribution, understand relevant peace and conflict dynamics, use these insights to inform design and decision-making, and monitor whether the intended peace and financial effects occur.
How this is applied depends on the type of activity or financial instrument. In an investment context, for example, peace considerations may influence investment eligibility and selection, investment design and structuring, implementation requirements, and performance measurement. The Standard is therefore intended to work through existing investment and decision-making processes rather than as a separate process alongside them.
Peace values
The Peace Values provide a practical entry point to the Standard. They help identify the peace considerations that may be material to a particular investment, enterprise or technology and what these could mean for design and implementation. The visual below explains how the Standard works in practice using the values.
Foundations and application
The Peace Finance Standard builds on the work undertaken through the Finance for Peace initiative by Interpeace, including the Peace Finance Impact Framework and the development of financial-instrument-specific approaches for applying peace-positive investment principles.
One of these was the Peace Bond Standard, which translated the framework into a capital-markets context. Modelled on established sustainable-finance approaches and aligned with the ICMA Social Bond Principles and Sustainability Bond Guidelines, it set out how peace considerations could inform the use of proceeds, evaluation and selection, management of proceeds, reporting and verification of a bond.
The Peace Bond Standard illustrates how the broader Peace Finance framework can be translated into the requirements and processes of a particular financial instrument. The current Peace Finance Standard takes this underlying logic beyond bonds, allowing it to be applied proportionately across different forms of finance, enterprise activity and enabling technologies.
Peace Bond Standard — Summary
An earlier instrument-specific application of the Peace Finance framework to bond issuance.