Financing Justice

Key tasks for these sessions will be to articulate the narrative regarding justice and its relationship to other outcomes to support future advocacy, developing strategies for promoting key messages and themes in important venues and communities, articulating metrics for measuring progress, and defining what success will look like. 

Working Sessions are concurrent workshops, interactive dialogues and facilitated discussions hosted by a variety of Hague-based institutions around pressing issues and opportunities related to the Forum’s theme of “Realizing Justice for All.” 

Working Sessions are concurrent workshops, interactive dialogues and facilitated discussions hosted by a wide variety of global and local institutions around pressing issues and opportunities related to the Forum’s theme of “Realizing Justice for All.” 

Participants will learn from justice sector case studies, movements in other sectors, and communications experts how to better understand, practice, and deploy the wide range of communications tools and techniques available to achieve their messaging goals.

Working Sessions are concurrent workshops, interactive dialogues and facilitated discussions hosted by a wide variety of global and local institutions around pressing issues and opportunities related to the Forum’s theme of “Realizing Justice for All.” 

Working Sessions are concurrent workshops, interactive dialogues and facilitated discussions hosted by a wide variety of global and local institutions around pressing issues and opportunities related to the Forum’s theme of “Realizing Justice for All.”

Sustainable funding for justice remains a critical challenge. In OECD countries public spending on justice
makes up just 5% of national budgets, and in most countries it is far lower. Donors spend little more than
1% of aid on justice. Social enterprise models are emerging to help fill the funding gap with creative
strategies to garner earned revenue to support access to justice initiatives. In this session, participants
learned from grassroots nonprofit and for-profit organizations on the frontlines of these innovations and
shared successful approaches, challenges, and opportunities. The session focused on both innovative
programming and social enterprise models. Innovative programming models include: client fees; pay-it
forward schemes; member dues; independent associations; crowdfunding; or charging for training or
consulting services. Social enterprise models can be entirely external to core work and mission (e.g. an
entirely separate business line, like a restaurant or equipment rental); integrated with core work (e.g.
services to higher income customers that use revenue to subsidize work with lower income clients); or
directly embedded (e.g. a membership model where clients directly pay for or help to subsidize services).

Read the full summary for this working session. 

While pilots projects innovating justice abound, few countries in the world have models that deliver legal services at the national scale. This session explored recent efforts by governments and civil society in a range of countries to bring innovative community-based models to a sustainable, national level. It examined how public financing is being diversified across social sectors and levels of government to enhance access, effectiveness, and sustainability of basic justice services, and the emerging evidence to strengthen policy arguments for institutionalization of these collaborations. Discussants from Ukraine, North Macedonia, Argentina, and Indonesia shared experiences of what is working, including networks of legal aid centers, improvements in cross-sector and local level support, comprehensive legal frameworks for efficient legal aid systems, and advocacy for justice as a social problem.

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Social impact bonds have emerged as a promising vehicle for mobilizing public and private financing for social progress. Growing in popularity in areas such as health, education, and workforce development, they have not yet been deployed in the justice sector. During this session, participants shared findings from a recent feasibility assessment of outcomes-based financing for civil legal aid and discussed how justice sector actors might pursue social impact investing to scale-up access to justice interventions. Session presenters highlighted the Pay for Success model, which focuses on long-term outcomes that go beyond specific program outputs and social impact bonds that provide upfront working capital that allows service providers to scale-up their services. To further take advantage of these resources, speakers encouraged legal aid providers to be willing to rigorously test their services, accept contradictory results, and be flexible enough to iterate their programs based on findings. Identified examples of outcomes-based financing models in practice included: the Medical-Legal Partnership in Washington, D.C., the International Committee of the Red Cross Humanitarian Impact Bond, and PeaceNexus’s Peace Investment Fund.  

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This roundtable discussion among pro bono providers and recipients highlighted best practices and lessons learned. Leveraging research conducted by the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the session highlighted several factors that contribute to increased pro bono participation within law firms, including the existence of a pro bono committee, a pro bono policy, and factoring pro bono into compensation. In creating a strong pro bono program, it was advised that firms create standards and expectations around pro bono, learn from other firms’ experiences, and be willing to refer cases to outside firms if the initial firm does not have the capacity or experience to take a particular case. Speakers also encouraged firms to use online tools, like iProbono, to match pro bono capacity with need, and they noted that to support SDG Goal 16 and Agenda 2030, an evaluative framework and criteria would be helpful in determining pro bono’s overall use, effectiveness, and impact. The session also highlighted that the world would not achieve justice for all through pro bono alone. Other methods of providing access to justice, such as the use of paralegals, play an important role in fulfilling the promise of SDG Goal 16.

Read the full summary for this working session.