Conflict and Change

A complex question

We are often asked this question by people who are thinking of using our services, either as clients (wanting help with a dispute that they are involved in) or as referrers (agencies referring other people to us for help).

The simple answer is "it works more often than not", but as always the full picture is much more complicated. And unfortunately there is very little empirical research on the effectiveness of community mediation in practice, though there is a helpful study of the implementation of community mediation in Scotland, and a much more limited review of its use in noise disputes between tenants in England.

Part of the reason for this lack of clear answers is that there are many different ideas about what is meant by community mediation. A few years ago we wrote an article on Valuing Diversity in Mediation Practice for the journal Mediation in Practice, in which we noted that the approaches practised by various community mediation services included:

• traditional mediation, where the focus is on helping the parties define the issues and reach agreement, normally in a face-to-face meeting but sometimes via indirect "shuttle" mediation.
• transformative mediation, where the work takes place entirely in a face-to-face meeting, and the mediators do not get involved in defining or resolving the issues, only in helping the parties to communicate.
• a standardised form of indirect mediation. where the mediators come with a range of standard template agreements, and often aim to resolve disputes in a single visit without any face-to-face contact between the parties.
• a "holistic" approach to conflict resolution (as practised here at Conflict and Change), which takes a broad view of the conflict and attempts to draw on a variety of approaches as appropriate.

A holistic approach

We noted that practitioners of all the different forms of community mediation seemed to find their own approach highly successful, and we have tried to recognise this in our own practice. We described the basis of our approach in a paper (Does Mediation Work?) that we wrote in 2004, and we often call it "holistic" because it attempts to include:

• the whole range of approaches to resolving conflict; not only "mediation", but many other approaches to facilitating positive change, some of which we listed in the paper mentioned above.
• the whole set of people and factors involved in maintaining or resolving the system of conflict; not just the two main parties, but their children and families, other neighbours, and many cultural and situational influences.
  
• the whole lifecycle of the conflict, recognising that a conflict may require a range of different interventions at different stages to (a) contain it, (b) resolve the issues, and (c) prevent further recurrence.
• the whole range of possible positive outcomes, depending on what the parties themselves want, whether this is a precise agreement about the location of a boundary, or the re-establishment of a broken relationship.

We have drawn some of our inspiration from the international peace-building work of the TRANSCEND Peace Institute in Norway. Like them we regard traditional mediation as only one possible approach to conflict, and we do not expect people to come together for a face-to-face meeting unless they wish to do so.

Some factual answers

Although the question is complex, it is still possible to provide some clear factual answers about own own casework. In the most recent financial year, 2007-08, we took on 96 new cases, and closed 92 old ones. In 32 of these cases one of the parties was unwilling to work with us to find solutions.

Of the remaining 60 cases, 80% (48 cases) had a positive outcome of some kind, ranging from full agreement to cases where one of the parties moved away. And we re-opened less than 5% of old cases. We believe these figures indicate that mediation (at least the kind we practice) does work.