Abstract

For new democracies and societies emerging from conflict, effective systems of dispute resolution are essential to maintaining a lasting peace and preventing violence. In Liberia, researchers examined the short and long-term impacts of introducing alternative dispute resolution (ADR) trainings on the rate at which community members resolved property disputes and the incidence of violence related to those disputes. In the long-run, dispute resolutions became less violent in communities that received the ADR workshops, despite no reduction in the overall incidence of property disputes.

Policy Issue

For new democracies and societies emerging from conflict, effective dispute resolution mechanisms are essential to maintaining lasting peace. Without these systems, every land boundary, business deal, will, or loan could lead to a dispute, some of which turn violent. However, in contexts of weakened state presence, formal structures for conflict resolution, such as courts, usually do not exist and, those that do, are often unable to meet the needs of the entire population. As a result, many disputes are settled through informal institutions—governed by shared, unwritten rules of appropriate behavior enforced through social sanction and praise. Informal institutions, on the other hand, may produce resolutions which are biased towards the powerful and bargains that are difficult to keep, leading to a greater risk of violence. 

In weak states, rebuilding and strengthening formal conflict resolution institutions can take decades. In the short term, what can states do to improve the quality of informal dispute resolution and reduce violence? Alternative dispute resolution (ADR) trainings offer a potential solution—by teaching a set of skills and practices that can help build community norms around how people should resolve disputes, ADR could help parties reach self-enforcing bargains faster than through formal court systems. However, there is little evidence of ADR’s effectiveness, or whether its impacts are sustained over time.

Context of the Evaluation

Between 1989 and 2003, Liberia’s civil wars killed hundreds of thousands and displaced the majority of the population. Well after the 2003 peace agreement, underlying tensions between tribes over land, especially in rural areas, continue to threaten the peace. As police and court systems remain inefficient and often corrupt, Liberians rely mostly on local informal institutions to settle disputes: among participants in this study, almost three quarters of those with land disputes had sought to resolve their dispute with an informal authority, such as local leaders, family members, and neighbors.  

Without a central authority to mediate disputes, resolutions can be biased towards those with political influence and connections in the community, leading to disagreements and conflict. Additionally, unclear property rights due to poorly marked boundaries can lead to multiple claims on the same property—a problem which is exacerbated by the large number of records destroyed during the war. As a result, 40 percent of land disputes and 16 percent of non-land disputes  nationwide in 2011 remained unresolved, with 20 percent of those eventually turning violent. In response to these challenges, in 2008 the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) and an NGO, the Justice and Peace Commission (JPC), proposed a mass education program that would promote ADR in Liberian communities.

Details of the Intervention

Researchers partnered with the Liberian Government, the UN’s High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), and the NGO Justice and Peace Commission (JPC) to test the impact of ADR training workshops on property dispute resolutions and violence. The “peace education” program targeted communities within three of Liberia’s 15 counties—Lofa, Nimba, and Grand Gedeh—where the risk of violence associated with disputes was believed to be especially high.

Pairs of facilitators ran the ADR training workshops through eight day-long sessions, over the course of two months. During the trainings, groups of 35 residents, both men and women, participated in lectures, group discussion, and role-playing exercises. The workshops focused on teaching tools, skills, and practices to strengthen community members’ dispute resolution abilities.  The trainings drew on a wide range of examples, but emphasized interpersonal disputes, especially land and neighbor disputes common to the area. Overall, the workshops aimed to strengthen informal methods of dispute resolution, such as decisions by customary leaders, and to train and encourage ordinary residents to negotiate their own disputes or mediate those of neighbors. Facilitators also encouraged participants to share and apply the lessons learned with other community members, as a way to influence norms and dispute resolution skills throughout the community. In total, the implementers trained more than 12,000 people in 2009–10.

To test the impact of the intervention, researchers randomly assigned the 246 communities included in the study to one of three groups:^[1]

• 90 communities received standard ADR workshops targeted to 15 percent of community members (described below);
• 26 communities received a more intensive version of the training which targeted 25 percent of community members; and 
• The remaining 130 communities served as a comparison group. 

For the analysis, researchers collected survey data from nearly 5,500 community members on their dispute outcomes, property security, and investments. The first endline survey was conducted roughly one year after the intervention took place, between November 2010 and January 2011, and a second endline survey was conducted three years later, between February and April 2013.

Results and Policy Lessons

Sources

¹ Because of funding restrictions, the implementation was cut short, and 30 communities that were planned to receive the treatment at a later date had to be reassigned into the comparison group. In the end, only 86 communities received the treatment, while 160 served as a comparison group.