What the UN’s New Anti-Corruption Guide Tells Dispute System Designers

A sailor eight months into an aircraft carrier deployment cannot go home at the end of a difficult shift. Neither can a cabin steward on a cruise ship who shares quarters with the colleague she is in conflict with. 

In both settings, a grievance does not fade overnight. It accumulates, and the person carrying it may not yet know whether the problem is interpersonal conflict, poor management, misconduct, or something that should be formally reported.

The settings are extreme, but the classification problem is not. It exists in every workplace, and it sits at the center of a document that few of us in dispute resolution are likely to have on our reading list: the new United Nations guide on anti-corruption ethics and compliance programs. I would suggest that it belongs there.

Read closely, the guide points toward an important extension of dispute prevention: designing for the period before a person has even decided what kind of dispute, if any, exists.

It is a compliance guide that talks about conflict: The U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime and the U.N. Global Compact have released the first full revision since 2013 of An Anti-Corruption Ethics and Compliance Programme for Business: A Practical Guide.

Much of it covers familiar compliance territory: risk assessment, due diligence, internal controls, and reporting channels. One passage, however, caught my attention, and it deserves the attention of anyone who designs or operates dispute resolution systems.

The guide observes that reports of discrimination or harassment may be intertwined with conflicts inside teams or between managers and staff. In such cases, it can be difficult to determine whether misconduct occurred or whether poor communication and an underlying conflict produced the report.

It then notes that companies with a proactive approach to conflict resolution, supported by ombuds, conflict resolution teams, and conflict management training, tend to handle these situations more effectively. Elsewhere, ombuds services appear among the channels through which wrongdoing may come to light.

For a document concerned principally with bribery, fraud, and corporate compliance, this is significant. Conflict resolution capacity is not treated as an employee benefit or a human resources amenity. It becomes part of the architecture of an effective prevention system. Put in our own language, the guide is doing dispute system design, whether or not it uses the term.

The CPR Institute has long championed the idea that organizations should identify and address conflict before it develops into a full-scale dispute. (See www.cpradr.org/dispute-prevention.) The guide points to an earlier design problem still: What happens when the person experiencing the problem does not yet know whether it is conflict, misconduct, poor management, or a misunderstanding?

Before resolution comes classification

More than four decades ago, William Felstiner, Richard Abel and Austin Sarat described the emergence of disputes as a process of “naming, blaming and claiming.” William L.F. Felstiner, Richard L. Abel and Austin Sarat, “The Emergence and Transformation of Disputes: Naming, Blaming, Claiming . . .,” 15 Law & Society Review 631 (1980-1981) (available at https://bit.ly/4jPVvI7).

An injurious experience must first be perceived and named. Someone is then blamed. Only after that does a claim emerge.

Most institutional dispute processes are built for the later stages. Arbitration clauses, grievance procedures, investigation protocols, and many mediation programs assume that a claim already exists and that the person involved has reached some conclusion about what happened, who may be responsible and where to take the problem.

The passage in the UN guide describes the moment before that. During my years as Ombudsman for United Nations Funds and Programmes, this was the moment I saw most often.

People rarely came to us with a claim. They came with a question. Is this harassment? A clash of styles? An unreasonable manager? Retaliation? A misunderstanding? Something I should simply tolerate?

That uncertainty matters because misclassification can work in both directions. A workplace conflict sent prematurely into a formal investigation can harden positions, damage relationships, and produce an outcome that satisfies no one.

Misconduct treated as a personality clash, on the other hand, can be minimized, managed informally, and allowed to recur.

The late Harvard University Prof. Frank E.A. Sander famously taught us to fit the forum to the fuss. Before an organization can select the right forum, however, someone must first understand the fuss. That sorting function is often the missing piece.

A channel that exists is not necessarily a channel that is used.

Many organizations will say that employees already have somewhere to go: an open-door policy, an HR business partner, an ethics hotline, perhaps an ombuds office. On paper, the resources exist. Whether they are realistically accessible at the moment somebody needs them is a different question.

Raising a concern may require making an appointment, being seen entering an office, fitting a conversation around a demanding schedule, or approaching someone connected, directly or indirectly, to one’s performance or next assignment. On a ship at sea, those barriers are obvious. In a dispersed or international workforce, they may be less visible but no less real.

Confidential digital ombuds tools are one way to reduce those barriers. The example I know best is YPPO, or Your Portable Personal Ombuds, developed by the Dialogue Through Conflict Foundation, which I lead, and now in use at two multilateral financial institutions. At one of them, during a single month, an established professional ombuds office recorded about 20 direct contacts, while the digital channel registered 484 interactions. Most of the digital use occurred outside normal working hours.

I want to be careful with these numbers. An interaction with a digital tool is not an ombuds case, and this was not a controlled comparison. But the difference is large enough to raise a real design question: How much early conflict never reaches a human neutral because seeking help requires too much time, visibility, or personal exposure?

The point is not that technology should replace human ombuds. It should not. The point is that lowering the cost of access may change both when people seek help and whether they seek it at all.

Where Counsel Enters The System

For in-house counsel, early confidential channels raise legitimate questions:

• When does contact with an ombuds or a digital resource place the organization on notice?
• What records are retained, by whom and for how long?
• When must confidentiality yield to a legal or institutional duty to act?
• How can independence be protected well enough for employees to trust the channel?
• And how should serious allegations be escalated without turning every uncertain concern into a formal case?

These are not reasons to avoid early resolution mechanisms. They are design questions, and they should be answered deliberately.

The standards of practice of the International Ombuds Association, organized around independence, neutrality, confidentiality and informality, offer a tested starting point. Digital tools do not eliminate these questions. If anything, they make careful answers more important.

They can also provide something organizations frequently lack: anonymized information about patterns of concern that never become formal complaints. A formal case tells an organization where something has already gone wrong. Aggregated early-conflict data may show where pressure is building before any case exists.

Not Only the UN

The U.N. guide is not an isolated signal. The same issue appears with particular clarity in isolated and confined workplaces. A 2024 survey of 36,400 seafarers found that 16% had experienced bullying or harassment in the previous two years, while many did not feel psychologically safe enough to speak up after making a mistake.

Regulators are increasingly treating early response as part of prevention. Since Jan. 1, 2026, International Maritime Organization training requirements have included preventing and responding to violence and harassment at sea. Amendments to the Maritime Labour Convention adopted by the International Labour Organization in 2025 (available here) further strengthen protections and reporting mechanisms for shipboard harassment.

The broader lesson is straightforward: formal reporting alone is not enough. What happens before a report, and whether people have somewhere to take a concern that is not yet a complaint, is increasingly part of the prevention architecture.

Five Questions for

Dispute System Designers

For in-house counsel, neutrals and others who advise organizations on conflict, the UN guide suggests a short audit:

1. Where does an employee go with a concern that does not yet have a name?

2. Is that resource confidential, sufficiently independent of the management line, and accessible at night, on weekends or from another time zone?

3. Who helps distinguish ordinary conflict from potential misconduct, and according to what criteria?

4. Are managers trained to respond to early conflict without either ignoring it or escalating it unnecessarily?

5. What can the organization learn, in appropriately anonymized form, from concerns that never become formal cases?

Few organizations will have strong answers to all five. That is precisely why the questions are useful. A gap that remains invisible cannot be designed around.

Moving Upstream, Again

The history of dispute resolution is, in part, a history of moving upstream.

Litigation resolves disputes after they have hardened into legal claims. Mediation and other consensual processes created ways to intervene differently once a dispute existed.

Dispute prevention pushed the timeline further back, toward identifying and managing conflict before it ripens into a formal dispute. The UN guide points to an earlier moment still: when a person knows that something is wrong but does not yet know what to call it.

That stage has always existed in the life of a conflict. What has changed is our capacity to design for it. Organizations can now offer confidential, low-threshold pathways that help people understand what they are experiencing, identify their options and reach human professionals when needed, without forcing every workplace difficulty into either silence or a formal process.

That may well be the next frontier of dispute prevention. I would like to see our community help lead the way.

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Giuseppe De Palo is an international mediator and arbitrator with JAMS and served as Ombudsman for United Nations Funds and Programmes from 2015 to 2022. He is a longtime contributor to www.cpradr.org and produces the monthly Worldly Perspectives column in the CPR Institute’s newsletter, Alternatives to the High Cost of Litigation. He also discusses his U.N. work in next month’s column “From the Comic Stage to the 38th Floor: Aristophanes, Erasmus & the Next U.N. Secretary-General,” 44 Alternatives 226 (November 2026) (available Oct. 29 at www.cpradr.org/alternatives-newsletter). De Palo also is president of the Dialogue Through Conflict Foundation, a charitable organization separate from JAMS, which developed the digital ombuds platform YPPO. YPPO is mentioned here as one example of a digital ombuds tool, not as an endorsement. The views expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of the organizations with which he is affiliated.