Accountability Counsel supports communities around the world to defend their human rights and environment, specializing in community-driven and policy-level strategies to achieve justice using non-judicial international accountability offices. 

Accountability Counsel has engaged HNMCP to develop an educational toolkit to help communities prepare for dialogue processes facilitated by international accountability mechanisms (IAMs). Communities entering IAM-facilitated dispute resolution face massive imbalances of power. This toolkit will support Accountability Counsel’s efforts to level the playing field, by ensuring that communities feel more comfortable in the dialogue space, understand foundational concepts, are familiar with effective negotiation techniques, and generally feel empowered to use dispute resolution to secure their best interests. The toolkit will: 

• Directly support Accountability Counsel’s existing dispute resolution practice supporting communities in Assam, Haiti, Mongolia, and Ukraine; and 

• Allow Accountability Counsel to scale our knowledge-sharing work by providing a detailed, practical, and shareable resource that can reach more communities and local organizations than our existing practice of training workshops, which are limited by staff capacity constraints, the pandemic, and other restrictions on travel. The toolkit will also help us to “train the trainers”: training local civil society organizations to provide dispute resolution training and support to affected communities in their area. 

Preliminary approaches and deliverables:  

• HNMCP will: familiarize themselves with IAM-facilitated dispute resolution procedures and practices, as well as interview staff;
• Create a toolkit with written, graphic, and video modules to support different styles of learning and literacy levels; 
• Advise on virtual dialogue processes.