Reinforcing local government for dispute resolution

Bangladesh offers an interesting case in which informal rural dispute resolution has been institutionalized as an alternative route to justice: the 2006 Village Courts Act sought to combine features of traditional tribunals — Shalish — with the more formal judicial approach offered by the adversarial system inherited from colonialism.

But how successful have the village courts been? The fieldwork I carried out in Bangladesh as part of my visiting research fellowship at the University of Oxford, UK in 2018 to survey popular perceptions of the new village courts suggests they have their own flaws and require further reform.