SEDR was a five-year initiative (2020–2025) funded by the European Union and implemented by the British Council in partnership with The Asia Foundation. The project aimed to strengthen dialogue between citizens and the state and to improve access to fair, inclusive and effective dispute resolution services in Sri Lanka’s Northern, Eastern and Uva Provinces. Through institutional strengthening, community engagement and youth-led initiatives, SEDR promoted peaceful problem-solving, social cohesion and trust-building at both individual and community levels.
In this interview, Jacques Carstens, SEDR Team Leader, reflects on this unique programme, the challenges it faced, its highlights and what the future holds for this innovative approach to conflict resolution.
Can you describe the programme and what it was aiming to do?
The Supporting Effective Dispute Resolution (SEDR) project was a multi-year initiative implemented by British Council (BC) from 2020 to 2025 and funded by the European Union (EU) to the value of € 7 million. SEDR’s Overall Objective was to strengthen dialogue between the people and the state, thereby contributing to the resolution of critical underlying causes of conflict and preventing the escalation of local disputes. Its Specific Objective was to improve dispute resolution services for both individual and community level grievances in Sri Lanka.
What was some of the important opportunities you were facing?
Probably the single biggest opportunity for SEDR was the fact that Sri Lanka already had in place a well-designed National Mediation Programme (NMP), which has been running for more than 30 years. The NMP is a globally unique hybrid-model, funded by the government but implemented by more than 8,500 well trained volunteer mediators. They use an interest-based mediation approach to conduct sessions to help ordinary Sri Lankans resolve a wide range of lower-level civil and criminal issues between individual disputants. Annually, over 330 mediation boards, situated island-wide, deal with about 250,000 disputes without going through the formal justice system, saving time, money and providing a hyper-local pathway to people-centred justice. Having such a well-stablished structure in place facilitated effective participatory planning processes in partnership with the Ministry of Justice and the Mediation Boards Commission.
Secondly, Sri Lanka has a strong history of civil society-led peacebuilding and community development. This meant there was a pool of experienced civil society partners and well-established local structures to anchor our community-level alternative dispute resolution (ADR) initiatives in the Northern, Eastern and Uva provinces.
What were the real-world challenges the programme responded to?
The first major shock SEDR had to respond to was the onset of the global Covid-19 pandemic. This not only caused major setbacks for the project’s inception phase, but it also severely disrupted the ability of the mediation boards to meet, which, in turn, created a growing backlog of disputes and delayed mediator training. In addition, the pandemic also adversely affected the wider delivery wider of planned activities and required SEDR and our civil society partners to adapt implementation strategies to remain responsive to the evolving context.
The second external shock took the form of Sri Lanka’s economic collapse in 2022, requiring an International Monetary Fund bailout. The resultant political turmoil, coupled with the dire financial situation challenged and tested SEDR and its stakeholders in new and unexpected ways. Government austerity measures between 2022 and 2024 resulted in a significant cut in funding for the National Mediation Programme, monthly sittings of mediation boards were reduced from four to two sittings and training for mediators was also reduced. As a mitigation measure, SEDR temporarily extended crisis support for mediation sittings and mediator training activities during a critical six-month period in 2023.
The project’s work focusing on broader community level dispute resolution was also negatively affected by socio-economic hardships, due to cost increases, persistent delays in activities caused by lack of public transport and in some cases unwillingness of beneficiaries to attend initiatives associated with the government. Working closely with local civil society grant-partners, SEDR was able to implement mitigation measures through revising budgets and rescheduling activities.
Has the programme helped us get a better understanding of the challenge of disputes and how to resolve them?
Yes, SEDR did indeed confirm some of the assumptions and change pathways set out during the initial project conceptualisation. In terms of the National Mediation Programme, the evidence confirm that SEDR’s capacity building efforts institutionalised improvements that ensured both standardisation and sustainability of mediator training well beyond the completion of the project. Through innovative approaches like mentoring, peer-to-peer exchanges and reflective learning, volunteer mediators demonstrated greater effectiveness in resolving disputes, thereby extending the social and relational benefits of alternative dispute resolution to their communities.
Evidence from SEDR’s Civil Society Organisations grant projects emphasise the importance of building alternative dispute resolution capacity at the local level in a manner that is participatory and inclusive. Women and youth have shown a remarkable interest and capacity in not only becoming involved in community level dispute resolution, but also to lead from the front, as evidenced by the success of the various SEDR Active Citizens Social Action Projects. Community Centres have emerged as important forums to lead dispute resolution efforts beyond mediation boards, if supported and well capacitated.
What are the major achievements that stand out most to you or that you are most proud of?
I’d like to highlight three specific components from SEDR which I thought made a significant contribution to the overall success of the project.
Firstly, the reform and re-design of the mediation knowledge and skills framework of the National Mediation Programme. Based on extensive prior-research, the training needs of both mediation training officers (MTOs) as well as volunteer mediators were established. To this end SEDR made significant investments in strengthening MTOs’ expertise in advanced mediation techniques as well as their knowledge on thematic areas such as gender issues, domestic violence, diversity and to equip them with advanced skills and contemporary knowledge in line with globally accepted standards. These MTO’s played a key role in the re-design and modernisation of a five-day training programme to equip volunteer mediators with the skills to identify the underlying causes of disputes, empower parties to develop their own solutions, and foster constructive relationships that lead to durable settlements. By institutionalising these revisions through formally endorsed training materials, SEDR laid the groundwork for the long-term sustainability and standardisation of mediator training across Sri Lanka.
Secondly, the ground-breaking Arts-4-ADR initiative, implemented by one of our partners, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Sri Lanka (MMCA), aimed to use artistic expression to:
- facilitate dialogue regarding root causes of community-based conflict
- increase awareness and understanding of community-based ADR mechanisms and,
- encourage the use of ADR mechanisms as pathways to access justice.
The 8,600-plus exhibition visitors and 1,000 participants in public discussions demonstrated that art-based dialogue builds trust and mutual understanding and expands the constituency for social cohesion and conflict-transformation well beyond formal institutional actors.
Thirdly, working in partnership with the Ministry of Education, SEDR facilitated the successful national rollout of the School Mediation Programme. This included the establishment of 58 school mediation units at participating secondary schools across Sri Lanka, the training of more than 2,000 teachers and student peer-mediators in the principles of interest-based mediation. At the end of the project 92 per cent of students surveyed expressed a strong understanding and positive feedback regarding the training programme. The School Mediation Programme probably represents one of SEDR’s most forward-looking investments in sustainability as it institutionalised mediation values in the education system and in so doing nurtured a future cadre of volunteer mediators to serve their communities.
How will we use our learning from SEDR to inform our programmes moving forward?
The key lessons from the SEDR project have been captured and well documented. On several occasions over the past 18 months, some of those lessons have been shared with internal British Council audiences as well as with external audiences targeting peacebuilding and social cohesion practitioners and policymakers. We have placed a particular emphasis on the internal lesson sharing element, to ensure that those colleagues who may have an opportunity to do so, can consider and apply particular insights from SEDR. Some of these include:
- flexibility and adaptive management are essential for sustaining programmes in complex environments
- empowering women and youth delivers tangible value
- ownership and local partnership drive sustainability
- storytelling resonates and facilitates behaviour change.
What does the EU and our delivery partners think about the programme and the impact/success it has had?
The European Union, through its participation and representation in SEDR’s internal governance structures, regularly commented on the positive results of the project and the successful manner in which British Council has steered its implementation. Similarly, as part of an independent Results Oriented Monitoring review by the EU, findings highlight SEDR’s approach to empowering a broad range of stakeholders, especially youth, as fundamental for effective and inclusive community dispute resolution in a society fragmented by ethnicity, religion, caste, gender and age.
During the end-of-project symposium conducted last year, several of our key civil society partners were complimentary about our approach to grant-making, including the commitment to sustainability and the use of local insights and approaches to address the challenges faced by local communities. One such example was an innovative ADR Guidebook developed and used by Search for Common Ground as part of the delivery of the project. It is anticipated that ADR Guidebook will not only provide leadership and direction to community leaders and ADR-forum members in their daily dispute resolution practice but also support future capacity building for community level dispute resolution in Sri Lanka.
How confidant are you that Sri Lanka’s Northern, Eastern and Uva Provinces can continue to follow the dispute resolution solutions you have put in place? (legacy and sustainability of continued use of SEDR learnings by the communities you've engaged with)
SEDR’s work in the three target provinces was anchored on a commitment to sustainability, both through our partnership with the Ministry of Justice and the Mediation Boards Commission as well as with our civil society partners. I’m confident that the hard and soft capacity building training provided to the National Mediation Programme will benefit the tireless work of the 8,500 volunteer mediators and the services they provide to local communities. Similarly, the knowledge and skills imparted to women and youth through the social action of our Active Citizen’s projects, will be re-invested and shared as those people progress to other more prominent roles in their communities.
How important is dispute resolution in supporting peace and prosperity?
Building cross-sectoral capacity for alternative dispute resolution enhances the ability of national and local authorities, civil society, the private sector and local communities to engage constructively, resolve disputes peacefully and collaborate across ethnic and social divides. Projects like SEDR therefore links reconciliation, social cohesion and dispute resolution to tangible benefits for communities and businesses, in support of ambitions related to for instance the EU’s Global Gateway Strategy, creating the enabling environment and conditions that attract investment, promote inclusive growth and strengthen long-term peace and stability in Sri Lanka.
What are the prospects for future collaboration in this area?
Based on the positive results from the SEDR project, and in line with their commitment to strengthen social cohesion and disputes resolution in Sri Lanka going forward, the European Union has requested British Council to work on the co-creation of a potential follow-up initiative. This work is progressing well, and we anticipate continuing our collaboration with the EU and the Government of Sri Lanka in this space for the foreseeable future.