This project is aimed at drawing lessons out of the practice of consensus building in Asia and sharing them with public officials and practitioners for improved consensus building processes on environmental issues. While researchers with specific interests have studied consensus building within their own specialty, practitioners and scholars would benefit if they examine commonalities and differences across the fields of practice. Meanwhile, Asian practitioners sought to learn participatory approaches from the West without much reflecting on unique features of their own settings in Asia. Contextual factors--such as legal systems and institutional arrangements--limits the applicability of particular approach to consensus building. Our project will start by reflecting on the practice of consensus building in Asia and draw grounded lessons out of them. We will draw on theory of collaborative planning in which stakeholders seek mutual-gains as well as deliberative democracy in which members of the public engage in a dialogue. Toward that goal, we will organize a two-day workshop in Tokyo to bring practitioners from various fields of practice in Asia and extract implications out of these cases.

On June 19 and 20, 2014 at the University of Tokyo, we organized "CBAsia 2014 International workshop: Learning from the practice of consensus building and participatory planning in Asia" by inviting eighteen practitioners and researchers on environmental consensus building from nine countries in the Asia-Pacific region.  Our discussion at the workshop was summarized into a best practice report "Best Practices for Consensus Building and Other Participatory Processes in Asia: Lessons from the CBAsia 2014 Workshop in Tokyo. (available at http://cbasia.org/ )"  Through this project, we could trigger the development of professional network in the Asia-Pacific region for facilitating a multilateral dialogue on the theory and practice of consensus building.  We also enhanced our understanding of various approaches to consensus building processes grounded in the practice in Asia.