Development, Finance and Mediation

It is generally acknowledged that stakeholder engagement is central to the success of development projects. Environmental and social impact assessment is the most common procedure of such engagement, enabling decision makers to collect data through consultation with affected populations. Mediation is one potential mechanisms of such stakeholder engagement, particularly where a project is likely to be controversial or provoke opposition. However while mediation is used in other areas of development related programming such as peace building it is not widely used in development financing. Indeed it is more often invoked post facto when a project has resulted in conflict. It is rarely used as a consensus building mechanisms to create dialogue before conflict has arisen. This project seems to explore how, if at all, principles of mediation could be used in the early stages of development finance decision making to avoid conflict in the riskiest development interventions, such as those relating to land or within fragile and conflict affected states.

In May 2019 a workshop was held at Glasgow Law School that brought together academics and policy makers from the fields of development finance and peace and security to discuss these questions.

The outcome report from the event is available here.

This project is funded by

Project Partner

< Back >