Grievance, Ground, and Grace Open Access
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Published:May 2025
Activists first drew attention to CKDnt through a quasi-legal transnational corporate grievance mechanism underwritten by the World Bank’s Compliance Advisor Ombudsman (CAO). The CAO grievance mechanism encourages mediation over litigation. It invites companies to meet community members in a dialogue about specific, tangible demands and to seek trade-offs between the needs of both parties, as if they were equals. This chapter shows how Nicaraguan sugarcane zone residents creatively blended the equalizing, universalizing logic of the legal grievance with place-based knowledge. Along the way, the chapter identifies a nonsecular approach to collective organizing and accountability, one that offers a counterpoint to the dominant liberal, technocratic approach to climate justice emblemized by the CAO.