Negotiation/Dispute Systems Design
ADR Center – ITA helps design effective systems of dispute management
Countries’ and individual officials’ experience with systems of dispute management builds social capital, improving the potential for the country to handle conflict and negotiation on a larger scale. This has important benefits for the formulation, negotiation and effective implementation of international agreements.
The launch of the Doha round of multilateral trade negotiations in 2001 stressed the importance of improving participation of developing countries in the negotiations, and in the design of new multilateral trading rules. While its implementation has been very difficult, the Doha declaration committed the developed countries, as members of the WTO, to increasing technical assistance to developing countries on WTO issues. Effective ADR diffusion helps to strengthen the developing countries' experience with and confidence in negotiation and mediation, improving their ability to participate effectively in the Doha Development Agenda negotiations and other international discussions. We frequently design trainings with particular emphasis on providing participants with practical negotiation tools as well as a deeper understanding of the issues under negotiation.
An example of such skill development is the one-text procedure, a systematic process for shifting negotiators away from thinking about “concessions” by using a neutral, third party facilitator to elicit underlying interests and to simplify the process of jointly inventing many options and ultimately deciding on one.
