When Time Becomes Part of the Solution: Accountability in Focus
The CAO Policy and earlier Operational Guidelines deliberately avoided fixed mediation timelines, recognizing that genuine dialogue between communities and companies cannot be forced into a predetermined schedule. Disputes years in the making rarely resolve in months. Complex issues, political and local volatility rarely conform to a calendar. Yet without a shared pace, cases can drift and communities may feel that time is working against them.
An External Perspective from the Concentric Alliance on Timelines of a CAO Dispute Resolution Process
Some CAO cases, particularly those that predate the 2021 CAO Policy, have taken years to resolve. In response to these concerns, CAO engaged the Concentric Alliance, an independent organization with deep mediation expertise, to review its approach. Concentric Alliance recommended among others, mutually agreed timelines co-created by the parties and revisited as circumstances evolved.
Putting the Recommendations into Practice
CAO has now put these recommendations into practice. Since implementation began in 2024, parties have been able to set mutually agreed timelines at the start of the dispute resolution process and assess whether to continue, close, or transition the case when the agreed period ends. In FY26, the Dispute Resolution team applied mutually agreed timelines to 7 new cases, bringing the total to 18 since 2024. Agreed timelines ranged from one month to one year. Cases spent an average of five months in negotiations, while their overall average duration, including monitoring, was nine months. These averages reflect experience, not a universal benchmark: a mutually agreed timeline is neither a fixed deadline nor an expectation that every case follows the same schedule. Each timeframe is agreed by the parties and tailored to the dispute’s context, complexity, the availability of the parties, and their readiness for resolution. Of the 7 cases in FY26, all but 1 reached full agreement within the agreed timeline. Across the 18 cases, 12 were resolved within their mutually agreed timelines, 5 were extended because of external factors or to support successful closure, and 1 was transferred to Compliance.
Lessons from Experience
The experience has yielded four broader lessons:
- First, timelines matter. Even nonbinding timeframes give parties a sense of direction, an initial shared agreement, and ownership. They replace the uncertainty of an open-ended process with shared direction.
- Second, who sets the timelines matters profoundly. A schedule set by the CAO, either through policy or directive facilitation, carries a different weight than one that parties have negotiated together. The latter creates accountability that is internally generated, grounded in parties’ expectations and availability.
- Third, flexibility in dispute resolution processes is not optional. Circumstances change. A timeline that cannot bend can undermine the mediation process or deliver partial or unsustainable solutions. The capacity to revisit timelines without stigma allows parties to reach agreements that better reflect their needs and interests.
- Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, there is no universal template. The pace for a case involving a single individual differs from the pace of a complex multiparty dispute.
Context matters and mediation should be responsive to it. The real value of a mutually agreed timeline is not the timeline itself, but that parties control it. When parties agree on the timeline, they create a shared commitment grounded in their own realities, responsive to change, and jointly owned. In this way, time is no longer an external constraint on mediation; it becomes a tool the parties use to shape the path to resolution.
