Promoting Effective Arbitration through Legal Assistance Programmes

Abstract

SINCE 1990, international donors have devoted billions of dollars to funding legal assistance projects and increasingly these projects have focused on commercial law development.1 More recently, the development community has begun to include arbitration and other forms of dispute resolution as significant components in such development assistance initiatives. Development projects are generally designed to either boost a country's economic growth or to encourage its development of democratic processes and institutions, and in some cases to do both.2 Promoting arbitration as a tool to achieve these goals raises many questions, some of which will be considered in this brief article. How can arbitration – usually a privately-controlled and privately-funded process focused on resolving a specific dispute between business partners – contribute to achieving the inherently public and broad goals of an aid project? Why should donors use limited aid funds to support a process designed to help a business entity recover compensation from another business entity? If dispute resolution is a strategic aid objective, wouldn't the aid money be better spent to improve the national courts? How can a legal assistance programme effectively promote the development of arbitration and other forms of alternative dispute resolution? What should be the priorities of a programme designed to support the development of arbitration? How can the results of such a project be measured and importantly, how can they be sustained long after the project has ended? This article will first consider how promoting arbitration may contribute to general aid objectives of promoting economic development and the rule of law. Promoting arbitration in the context of an aid project will be viewed primarily from the perspective of aid projects in Europe and Eurasia. This article will then propose some factors which may have universal significance in designing a project to promote arbitration in …