Stakeholder Response Mechanism

Introduction

UNDP has established the Stakeholder Response Mechanism (SRM) to enhance social and environmental governance within its projects. This mechanism serves as an essential addition to proactive stakeholder engagement throughout the project lifecycle, aiming to resolve issues pre-emptively to avoid potential conflicts that could escalate costs, delay, or even halt projects.

The SRM provides a formal avenue for stakeholders to voice concerns regarding adverse social or environmental impacts from UNDP projects, particularly when their issues have not been adequately addressed through regular consultation channels with Implementing Partners or UNDP. It facilitates a systematic, predictable, and transparent process to address these issues, involving collaboration across UNDP Country Offices, Regional Bureaux, Hubs, and Headquarters to ensure a thorough resolution process that satisfies all parties involved and promotes accountability and organizational learning.

The SRM aims to:

• Improve environmental and social outcomes for communities affected by UNDP projects.
• Enhance UNDP’s ability to manage risks associated with its Social and Environmental Standards.
• Ensure responsive measures to stakeholders' concerns about social and environmental risks, with special attention to vulnerable groups.
• Integrate feedback and operational learning from the SRM into UNDP's results-based management and quality assurance processes.
• Reflect and advance best practices in social and environmental grievance resolution expected by various development stakeholders, including governments, civil society, indigenous peoples, and international agencies.

This development is in line with broader trends across international and bilateral financial institutions to incorporate compliance and grievance mechanisms, viewed as critical for achieving effective development outcomes.

Helping Parties Resolve Disputes

SRM helps project-affected stakeholders, governments and others partners jointly resolve concerns and disputes. It is available when Implementing Partner and UNDP project-level stakeholder engagement processes have not successfully resolved issues of concern. UNDP Namibia management will lead in Stakeholder Response; a headquarters function will also support the SRM.   

SRM can help affected people, government agencies, and other project and programme stakeholders, start or restart dialogue, facilitate discussions, mediate disputes, enhance understanding of the facts, and undertake other activities that might help resolve concerns and disputes.

Who May Request the Stakeholder Response Mechanism?

Any person or community potentially affected by a UNDP-supported project may file a request for a response from the SRM, if they have raised their concerns with Implementing Partners and/or with UNDP through standard channels for stakeholder consultation and engagement and have not been satisfied with the response. The request must relate to a UNDP-supported project and a possible environmental or social impact, and identify how the Requestors have been, or may be, adversely affected by the UNDP project or programme. 

What Happens After the Request is Submitted?

Normally, a Country Office Designee will review requests for use of the SRM and share them with the Headquarters staff supporting the SRM for additional input. When SRM are filed through the Headquarters, the Headquarters SRM Staff will review any concerns raised about the involvement of the Country Office and decide how best to proceed with the process.

The Country Office Designee (and/or Headquarters SRM staff) will first determine, by asking the following questions, if the request is appropriate for the Stakeholder Response Mechanism:

• Does the request relate to a UNDP-supported project?

• Have the requestors provided enough information to establish the possibility that they may be, or may have been, adversely affected by the project?

• Have the requesters attempted to resolve issues through Implementing Partner or UNDP project stakeholder engagement processes?

If the request appears to be eligible, the appropriate UNDP Stakeholder Response Mechanism staff will then assess the potential for a response process to succeed. The UNDP staff may:

• Contact the requestor directly to learn more about the situation and issues that have led to the request.

• Contact other stakeholders within UNDP and among programme and project partners, to ask about issues raised in the request and ways to resolve those issues (maintaining confidentiality of the requestor’s identity if so requested)

• Suggest specific actions to UNDP and other stakeholders, if it appears that the complaint or dispute may be relatively easy for the stakeholders to resolve.

If the assessment suggests the need for a process of dialogue and negotiation among the requestor and other stakeholders through the SRM, the UNDP lead staff will propose such a process, and seek agreement among the primary stakeholders - including the requestors, affected people, project sponsors, the host government, and UNDP – on how to proceed. The process will be tailored to the needs of the requestors and stakeholders.

The involvement of the Stakeholder Response Mechanism will continue as long as the stakeholders believe it is beneficial, or until agreement is reached. One or more stakeholders may decide not to proceed while the process continues. If stakeholders leave, UNDP will decide if and when the process will end.

When agreement is reached among all participating stakeholders, the SRM will submit a report describing this agreement to UNDP staff, the UNDP Administrator, and all participating stakeholders.

Where appropriate, a plan for monitoring the implementation of the agreement will be part of an agreement, and UNDP will issue a monitoring report at least annually.

To learn more about the SRM and its procedures, please see our SRM Guidance Note.

If a person or community has a concern about the ability of the UNDP Namibia to respond fairly and effectively to the request, they have the option to file the request directly with the Stakeholder Response Mechanism at UNDP Headquarters in New York to: project.concerns@undp.org and secuhotline@undp.org (in any language).