Mapping Grievance Mechanisms in the Business and Human Rights Arena

This document forms part of the research background to a project of the Corporate Social Responsibility Initiative at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. The project is focused on mechanisms for resolving grievances in the business and human rights arena. It aims to examine the strengths and weaknesses of existing grievance mechanisms in order to highlight lessons to be drawn from their experience, consider how they might be improved and explore what model mechanisms might look like for the field of business and human rights. This mapping sets out in summary form a range of existing grievance mechanisms from a variety of different contexts, whether industry or multi-industry, national, regional or international, private or public, based on law or voluntary standards. The aim here is to describe the mechanisms as factually as possible in order to provide a platform for further analysis as to how effective these mechanisms are and how well they are implemented in practice, but such judgments are not the purpose of this work.