International Development

During the past 15 years, the interweaving of structural adjustment, sustainable development, and governance and democratization efforts has complicated the process of international development planning and decision-making. Increased stakeholder participation at every level has raised concerns about how to integrate and balance competing viewpoints and interests.

CBI helps international development leaders and organizations address participation, negotiation, and consensus building in three ways:

  • We support sustainable development efforts on a global level by designing and facilitating policy dialogues on challenging issues
  • We improve development decision making by designing and facilitating multi-stakeholder planning processes, and by training the staff of international development organizations to build consensus with internal and external stakeholders
  • We help national leaders in government and civil society resolve development conflicts and create new initiatives

At the global level, we have facilitated policy dialogue on a wide range of sustainable development issues, including the treatment of environmental issues in the WTO, climate change negotiations, and the evaluation of global development programs.

In Africa, Asia, Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East, we’ve helped leaders and stakeholders move forward on some of the most difficult consensus building challenges in the international arena. Recent and current projects include designing a process to resolve Bedouin land claims in Israel; redesigning and facilitating the strategic planning process for UN development agencies in 12 countries; and assessing stakeholder concerns on controversial private investment projects in South America and South Asia.

We maintain several partnerships with international development agencies, and have developed distinctive MIT- and Harvard-branded training programs that address key development challenges. CBI has provided global online training in advanced negotiation skills for senior UN agency staff, and has customized in-person training and coaching for the UN, World Bank, Asian Development Bank, and various bilateral agencies.

To strengthen institutions for participation and consensus building at the national level, we have helped civil society partners in Azerbaijan, Brazil, China, Israel, Palestine, the Philippines, and South Korea develop new organizations, training programs, and issue-specific interventions. We now support their work to break impasses on key development issues.

We also use our body of practice to make contributions to international development theory through teaching and research at MIT and Harvard.

 

For more information about CBI services and areas of expertise, please contact us online or call (617) 492-1414.

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