Mediation Expertise

HD’s Mediation Support and Policy (MESU) programme provides operational support, advice on strategy and process design, as well as support for evaluation and learning to strengthen the effectiveness of HD’s activities. The MESU team ensures HD shares its expertise and experience with other mediators and organisations working in international peacemaking.

HD believes that opportunities to reflect critically among, and learn from, peers with relevant experience and expertise, will strengthen any initiative to prevent, mitigate or resolve conflict.

Providing support and strengthening mediation practice

MESU’s mission is to maintain HD’s effectiveness.  The team does so by strengthening the organisation’s reflective processes as well as reinforcing its cohesion and connectedness. The programme enables HD project teams and Senior Management to think and act strategically, maximize their impact, track and evaluate progress, design and adapt programming, and learn from each other along the way. MESU also provides guidance to HD’s operational teams on pragmatic approaches to inclusive peacemaking.

The MESU team has developed an innovative approach to Monitoring & Evaluation (M&E) in peacemaking which, linked with a peer-to-peer learning approach across HD’s operations, generates valuable insights. The framework that the MESU team implements for HD’s projects is primarily forward-looking and adaptive. It is focused on assuring the quality of operational teams’ analysis and professional judgment, providing real-time indications of progress towards objectives, and tracking not only results, but also the strategic adaptation of objectives. These insights are shared with project teams as well as the wider mediation community through practitioner-oriented publications, participation in professional mediation networks, and HD’s flagship policy event, the Oslo Forum, co-hosted annually with Norway.

Beyond in-house advice and knowledge-sharing, the MESU team works to strengthen professional collaboration across the mediation sector and provides advice and expertise to other individuals, institutions and organisations involved in mediating armed conflicts. This includes collaborative relationships with the United Nations, regional organisations, Governments as well as other peacemaking networks and actors.