Multi-Party Practice
Multi-party work is what happens when nobody at the table can tell anyone else what to do. Authority is split across governments, organizations, rights holders and communities, each holding a piece of the decision, and nothing moves unless they move together. Four service areas make that possible:
01Process Design & Engagement
This is the architecture of a multi-party process. It sets out who sits at the table and who does not, what the table can and cannot decide, the sequence of meetings and what each one has to produce, how a decision gets tested and written down, and what happens when consensus fails, because sometimes it will. It then extends into the engagement and consultation programme that carries the process out to communities and regions.
Where a table has already stalled, I start with a situation assessment. That means confidential interviews with the parties at the table and the people around it, followed by a written read of what is actually in dispute underneath the stated positions, who has to agree for a decision to hold, and whether a facilitated process can work here at all. Sometimes the honest answer is that it cannot, and it is better to know that before anyone spends a budget on it.
02Social Impact & Wellbeing Assessment
This work asks what a project, policy or agreement actually does to the people who have to live with it. It produces the social baseline, the socio-economic and community effects, the well-being indicators, and a monitoring design that lets someone check the result years later. The indicators get built with the community rather than lifted from a template, because a measure the community did not choose is a measure the community will not trust, and an assessment nobody trusts is an expensive way of changing nothing.
This typically operates under a long list of names: social impact assessment, socio-economic effects, community effects, social baseline, well-being outcomes, socio-economic monitoring. They all land here. The difference here is that the well-being of those impacted is assessed before anything else.
02Facilitation & Multi-Party Dialogue
This is the work of holding the room. It covers multi-party committees and working tables, community engagement series, negotiation sessions, board retreats, and the single hard meeting that simply has to go well. I design the session, run it, and write the record that lets the next meeting pick up where the last one ended instead of starting the argument over.
It also covers consensus advising, where a standing committee needs someone to build and record agreement rather than just chair a meeting, and mediation between institutions, where the parties are governments and organizations rather than individuals.
04Strategy & Governance
This is the work that turns intent into something an organization can act on. It covers strategies and action plans, governance and implementation models, and the funding and regulatory submissions that move a position into a federal or territorial process.
Most strategies are perfectly sound documents with no governance model attached, so nobody can say who decides what, on what cycle, or with what money. Every plan I write comes with an implementation model or work plan built into it, because a plan nobody can act on just collects dust.
Where you need evidence before committing to a model, this also includes the facilitation work that builds a shared vision in the first place (see 03, Facilitation and Multi-Party Dialogue), and reviews of how peer institutions have structured the same work, so the choice gets made against what has already worked somewhere else rather than against a blank page.
Who this practice works for
The types of organizations that Earth Resolve Solutions typically serves:
Governments and public agencies
Indigenous governments and organizations
Developers, utilities and infrastructure owners
Employers, institutions, funders and boards