Randel Young, Executive Director, Tulane Energy Law & Policy Center, and Distinguished Research Fellow, Tulane Law School
Frederic Sourgens, Faculty Director, Tulane Energy Law & Policy Center and James McCulloch Chair in Energy Law, Tulane Law School
This post starts a series focused on Dispute Prevention and Mitigation (DPM) in energy and natural resource investments, transactions and other projects, a research and development program led at the Tulane Energy Law & Policy Center by Senior Fellows Chloe Baldwin and Mark Appel.
You will be hearing more about the exciting work of this new group, as Chloe and Mark and their leadership team address the challenges and opportunities at the cross-roads of global energy projects and disputes, particularly in the emerging markets investor-state arena.
Posted: May 11, 2026
Chloe Baldwin, Partner, International Disputes & Public International Law, Steptoe LLP, Washington D.C. and Senior Fellow, Tulane Energy Law & Policy Center
Mark Appel, International Conflict Management Consultant, Mediator and Arbitrator, ArbDB Chambers, London, formerly, Senior Vice President at the American Arbitration Association and the International Centre for Dispute Resolution, and Senior Fellow, Tulane Energy Law & Policy Center
This post marks the beginning of a new series focused on Dispute Prevention and Mitigation (DPM) in energy and natural resource investments, transactions and other projects. Major energy and natural resource projects today, particularly large-scale cross-border projects, are larger, more complex, and more consequential than ever before. Sitting at the intersection of public policy, private investment, and community impact, they span jurisdictions, regulatory systems, and decades of operational life. In this environment, disputes are not just legal events – they are an accumulation and allocation between stakeholders and related actors of critical project risks that can, if not actively and effectively managed, wreak havoc on investor and government finances and cause lasting economic, social and environmental damage to stakeholders and stakeholder communities.
DPM is emerging as a central pillar of modern energy and natural resources law and commercial negotiation. Building on Tulane Energy Law & Policy Center, DPM Group Vision Statement, this series moves from principle to practice to advance this approach in practical, collaborative ways.
DPM: Beyond Dispute Resolution
Energy and natural resource projects – whether renewable installations, oil and gas developments, large-scale infrastructure or projects for technology development, extraction of critical minerals or production, storage, transportation and delivery of water and water resources, or the handling and transportation of nuclear or industrial waste products – are uniquely prone to disputes. They often involve multiple stakeholders across jurisdictions, multi-year (sometimes decades-long) project lifecycles, rapidly evolving regulatory regimes, high capital investment and financing dependencies, technical complexity, operational and political uncertainty.
Traditionally, the legal response to conflict in energy and natural resources projects has been reactive: focusing at the latest stages on arbitration, litigation, or negotiated settlement long after positions have hardened and damages have become difficult or impossible to mitigate or avoid.
DPM takes a much more pragmatic and proactive approach. It recognizes that:
- Most disputes arise from known, recurring inflection points.
- Once formal proceedings begin, value – financial, operational, and relational – has already been lost.
- Prolonged disputes can undermine not just individual projects, but investor confidence and public trust across the sector.
By focusing on early issue identification, clear governance, and structured intervention, DPM helps preserve relationships, reduce costs, and create more predictable project outcomes. In short, it strengthens the foundations on which successful energy projects are built.
Our Goals: Turning Ideas Into Implementation
As a research group, our principal objective is not simply to promote DPM as a concept, but to translate it into toolkits, best practices, and management systems that can be developed in common industry practice and used in real global energy and resource projects.
- Our work is guided by three core goals:
Build an evidence-based understanding of disputes. We are mapping when and why disputes arise in energy and natural resource projects, identifying common inflection points, and developing a cross-jurisdictional understanding of what preventive interventions actually work.
- Develop practical frameworks and toolkits, including:
- model approaches to contract design and risk allocation that anticipate common points of friction;
- governance structures and capitalization and financing structures that support early issue resolution over long project lifecycles;
- protocols for structured community engagement and consultation, designed to occur early and continue throughout project development and operations (setting up channels for information-sharing, feedback, escalation, and course-correction when community impacts or expectations evolve);
- guidance on evidence-based due diligence in project operations, drawing on well‑established approaches in human rights and international environmental law (identifying material risks, planning mitigation and realization strategies, monitoring performance over time, and adjusting in light of monitoring results); and
mechanisms for ongoing risk monitoring and intervention (ensuring that emerging issues are properly monitored, concerns are effectively communicated among stakeholders, and/or governance frameworks contain flexibility to address changing conditions).
Build capacity and awareness. DPM only succeeds when people and institutions know how to use it. We aim to support that through training for practitioners and policymakers, workshops that bring stakeholders together, and integration of DPM into the broader conversation around energy and natural resource law and policy.
- DPM cannot succeed in isolation and must reflect the fact that energy and natural resource projects involve a wide range of actors, each with their own particular priorities, constraints, and perspectives. A central pillar of our approach is therefore the creation of strong but flexible strategic partnerships that can withstand the test of time over the course over multi-year or multi-decade project life cycle. We are working to engage:
- Governments, who shape regulatory frameworks and bear public responsibility for project outcomes;
- Investors and financial institutions, whose confidence rises or falls depending on the quality of risk management;
- Industry participants, who operate projects and experience inevitable problems firsthand;
- Legal and dispute resolution professionals and institutions, who bring expertise in managing conflict; and
Communities and civil society, whose interests are increasingly central to project success.
Collaboration through strategic partnerships helps create forums, to share knowledge and lessons learned, and to develop common standards and best practices.
Looking Ahead
The energy transition has introduced new technologies, critical supply chains, regulatory models, financing structures, market dynamics and stakeholder expectations, all of which increase the potential for friction in a project. DPM seeks to provide structured, practical ways to manage that complexity before it ripens into conflict or a major dispute.
The Tulane Energy Law & Policy Center provides a uniquely interdisciplinary platform for this work, combining deep expertise in energy and natural resource law, dispute resolution, policy design, and international project development and finance with longstanding relationships spanning the entirety of the global energy and natural sectors and the manufacturing, supply and service sectors that serve them. Through the Center, we will explore how DPM translates into concrete policies and practices, from project finance, contract design and procurement to site-based monitoring, problem identification, communication and resolution. In coming posts, we will also be introducing our DPM Advisory Committee, which brings together senior leaders from across the energy ecosystem, including industry executives, in-house counsel, arbitration and energy security experts. Through targeted discussions and short issue-focused vignettes, we are capturing how disputes emerge in real life, and how they might have been or still can be prevented or mitigated.
- By focusing on practical implementation, clear goals, and strong strategic partnerships – and by learning directly from experienced industry leaders – we aim to build a more stable, predictable and, ultimately, successful energy sector. Because, in energy and natural resource projects, success is not just measured by what gets built, but by what endures.
