Community Mediation in Sri Lanka: An Effective and Scalable Low-Cost Justice Solution

The report is written for two principal audiences, domestic and international. Domestically, it offers Sri Lanka recommendations to continue to improve and develop the system. Internationally, governments are searching for low-cost justice systems which center the needs of people, reduce pressure on courts, and deliver meaningful justice outcomes for the wider population. For this audience, the report offers an overview of Sri Lanka’s Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) system, highlights its core strengths, and situates the development of the system in its national context, while being cognizant of areas needing improvement. This provides a basis for other governments to start to develop their own ADR systems rooted in their own contexts.

The report was drafted drawing on both extensive extant literature and key informant interviews with practitioners, donors, researchers, and members of the Community Mediation Boards. It has been structured to meet the needs of multiple possible readers and written in eight sections designed to be read sequentially, but readers may also choose to focus on those parts most relevant to their interests.

• Sociopolitical Context explains the broader political, economic, and social landscape in which the mediation system operates, including governance changes, economic crisis and recovery, ethnoreligious dynamics, human rights, and corruption.
• Access to Justice in Sri Lanka provides an overview of the formal legal system and its hybrid structure, while exploring the background and evolution of historical ADR systems and why mechanisms like community mediation matter.
• Community Mediation Boards explains Sri Lanka’s mediation system. This covers: the legislative framework; organizational setup; annual caseload; jurisdiction; guiding principles; processes, costs, and role of mediators; and the rationale, legal foundation, types, history, operations, and challenges of the Special Mediation Boards created for particular categories of disputes.
• Public Perceptions of Community Mediation provides a detailed review of how users and the wider public view the system, including survey data, awareness levels, satisfaction, perceived value for money, timeliness, and comparisons with the formal justice system.
• Successes of the Mediation System covers its foundational strengths, outcomes, and quality-enhancing features.
• Challenges and Gaps identifies limitations in governance, inclusivity, digitalization, resources, enforcement, and public awareness.
• Recommendations sets out proposals to improve the system. These are clustered around six domains: capacity, governance, digitalization, outreach, legal gaps, and sustainability. This section also includes actions for government, donors, and stakeholders.
• Finally, the Conclusion and Call to Action draws the analyses together to emphasize the mediation system’s success, its replicability, and its relevance as a global model for access to justice.

This report has been written as part of a series of national case studies on successful people-centered justice policies. As outlined in the Hague Declaration on Equal Access to Justice for All by 2030, a people-centered approach to justice is one that puts people and their needs at the center of justice systems, solves justice problems, improves the quality of people’s justice journeys, utilizes justice as a tool for prevention, and gives people means to access services and opportunities. The case studies included in this series explore what people-centered justice means in practice, offering concrete policy examples from different countries around the world that can help to close the global gap in access to justice.