Global Development & Peacebuilding

The Challenge

Success in development now demands unprecedented forms of integration, collaboration, and partnership—whether the goal is crafting a regional development strategy; launching and sustaining sector initiatives for energy transformation, resilient food systems, or social protection; or resolving local conflicts over development projects. Governments, multilateral organizations, NGOs, businesses, and communities are testing each other’s capacity to work together in new ways. But even as they seek to leverage each other’s resources and define common goals, they often struggle to reconcile different views. These differences are particularly pronounced in fragile and post-conflict countries, where peacebuilding actors must not only come together on specific objectives, but also address each other’s perceptions and experiences of the underlying conflict.

Our Approach

CBI leads the way in building development partnerships, preventing and resolving conflicts, and strengthening collaboration capability within and across development organizations. Our mediators draw from broad and deep understanding of global development and peacebuilding issues, as well as extensive expertise in cross-cultural facilitation and training. Our approach includes:

• Interaction with stakeholders to assess contexts, interests, values, and relationships, and to begin to build trust
• Framing and testing potential shared goals and concerns, in order to build alignment with all stakeholders
• Designing advisory and agreement-seeking processes that effectively engage local, national, and international stakeholders and address power and capacity imbalances, while recognizing differences in decision authority and intensity of concern
• Building effective grievance mechanisms, including organizational capacity for well coordinated responses
• Facilitating and training with culturally appropriate teams, drawing on CBI’s Global Network for skills and insights
• Ensuring that our training, coaching, and advising is well integrated with ongoing programs so that people can immediately apply what they learn

Whether working with multinational companies and communities affected by their operations, national agencies and non-government stakeholders, or multilateral partnerships at the global level, CBI's work supports effective collaboration to meet complex development challenges.

Areas of Expertise

• Development and peacebuilding plans, partnerships, and initiatives
• Development project disputes
• Grievance and accountability mechanisms for projects and organizations
• Capacity-building for stakeholder engagement, negotiation, and dispute resolution