During the past 15 years, the interweaving of economic globalization, sustainable development commitments, and rising expectations for stakeholder participation have made international development planning and decision-making more challenging than ever. From communities to the governing bodies of international organizations, complexity and controversy have 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. Case Study: International Finance Corporation Global Policy Review [1]

• 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. Case Study: Training the United Nations Development Program [2]

• We help national leaders in government and civil society resolve development conflicts and create new initiatives. Case Study: Allain Duhangan Hydropower Project: Addressing Corporate and Community Conflict in India [3]

We have strong capacity building partnerships with the UN system, the World Bank Group, and bilateral aid agencies. Together, we have developed distinctive CBI, MIT- and Harvard-branded training programs that address key development challenges.

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, contact CBI Managing Director David Fairman [4].