As the old adage goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. In land use disputes, where a wide range of stakeholders and interests with complex and ongoing relationships make coercive approaches more cumbersome and less attractive, ADR can

• give stakeholders access to decision-making processes to ensure that plans and regulations  are “owned” by the community at large.
• prevent disputes before they arise, or resolve or mitigate them before they deteriorate into litigation.
• resolve disputes without expensive and time-consuming administrative and court proceedings and reduce the caseloads of administrative bodies and courts.
• provide results that are more satisfactory to the disputants than those achieved through traditional adversarial and coercive methods.
• help the parties to understand their interests, identify common objectives, share information,  explore various options, and arrive at an agreement for resolving the conflict.
• achieve results without replacing a party’s legal rights, which can always be raised in court if the ADR result is unacceptable.