This project seeks to look for similar concepts and common frameworks in a variety of past consensuses on environmental issues that have been achieved by various actors in Aceh. It aims to offer a recommendation policy to relevant key stakeholders so as to prepare them to work for keeping the consensus sustainable. The project has three main activities: (1) It would organize a number of meetings at different times and in different places for two purposes. The first is to gather all relevant actors to present and discuss their respective case studies. The second is to draft the recommendation policy based on selected case studies presented. (2) It would formulate and publish a manual of making sustainable consensus on environmental issues in Aceh. The manual will be up to 12,000 words in length including references and appendices. (3) It would disseminate the manual to all relevant key stakeholders, especially officials and informal customary leaders, in a half-day seminar program to be held in Banda Aceh.

Findings presented in this report are derived from certain locations in Aceh and from cases of disputes whose grounds and actors involved are specific. The cases discussed here may differ in some contexts to dispute settlement processes in other parts of Aceh, and thus cannot be overgeneralized. Nevertheless, this report should be of benefit to be applied in other locations or countries in the world by those who are keen on seeking commonalities from one case to another and gaining lessons learned from there.  
Environmental problems and resolutions demand many efforts from multiple actors or parties. Conflicts of natural resources are difficult to resolve especially because of the trade-offs between economic growth, social justice, health risks, and environmental integrity. While become more intricate and difficult to resolve than other social conflicts, environmental disputes remain possibly settled in certain particular ways. One possible approach to the entire set of this issue is to push for consensual methods of environmental dispute resolution. Although they may have different names and means, the consensual approaches to environmental dispute resolution aim at managing conflicts and fostering voluntary agreements through non-court litigation and by way of bargaining rather than via confrontational formal legal procedures. Successful consensual methods of environmental dispute resolution depend on twofold: (1) the forces and conditions that have given rise to a search for negotiated solutions, and (2) the unique qualities of environmental disputes that make their resolution difficult or otherwise. Consensual approaches to environmental dispute resolution in many cases take place in the form of informal negotiation and mediation. Both mechanisms have ushered in a chance to blend dispute settlement with a specific context of each particular case. This blended settlement at the end turns out to be a satisfactory agreement for most cases reported. While some dispute settlements would last long, the extent to which consensus-building is (un)sustainable has much to do with a number of internal as well as external factors.
In this report, we classify some kinds of sustainable consensus (most likely, fairly likely, quite likely, rather likely, less likely, and slightly likely based on a number of environmental dispute settlements that took place in different parts of Aceh in the past decade. Brief descriptions of these cases are presented in the following sections of this report.
1. A couple of general features that led to the likely sustainable consensus include The inclusion of multiple actors representing diverse interests and conflicting perspectives.
2. The utilization of public participation mechanism
Apart from the general features above, there are certain particular situations that may support and help create the most likely sustainable consensus. On the contrary, there are some factors that hinder and thus result in less likely sustainable.