[Full Interview]

Question:
So how do you deal with the notion that -- again, this is another thing taken out of the literature -- that in order to be successful in mediation, the parties have to be of relatively equal power. So what’s commonly done is mediators will work to empower the low-power group, and I’m hearing you say that you do that to a degree, but that can then cause problems with the other side.

Answer:
Well, it happens in the very beginning. Typically the way that happens in CRS and most other kinds of mediation where there’s this huge dis-equilibrium of power – and the same thing can happen in organizations, for example – is that you do your power-balancing in the beginning of the process. Let’s sort of walk through a typical process: you come into a community, you meet with the leadership in the community, then you meet with the so-called establishment side, the local officials, the business people, and the first thing they say to you is, "So who have you met with on the community side?” and so you say, "Well, I’ve met with so and so." They say, "Ah. A, B, and C is fine, but D and E.....those guys or those people -- known troublemakers, can’t have them involved in the process.” So right from the very beginning, there’s an attempt, even before you’ve gotten into the formal sessions, to discredit people who, in fact, could be the people who could redress the balance of power in a setting, because they know they don’t want those people there. They don’t want the balance of power. So I think the job of the conciliator or the intervener, just to think of a more neutral term, speaking of neutrality, is to convince the powers-that-be that if they really want this to be a successful outcome, without defining what success is at this point -- because you don’t want to do that -- then they need to be here. "You need to allow us to do our work, to make sure that the discussions stay on an even keel. We can’t promise you that there won’t be some explosions from time to time, but you know, you’re going to have to be prepared to deal with some of this if it happens." So, there was that aspect of it, right from the very beginning. And then, running throughout most interventions, you could say that at the beginning, but there would be these kinds of recidivist fall-backs to the same kind of attempt to slowly disempower people that they didn’t want to be at the table. Either in this particular forum, or others. Something that we don’t give enough credit to in general, is that parties in disputes or conflicts are pretty sophisticated. We think they look only at these particular issues, but in many cases, people in communities are thinking about, "What are the implications of this as an outcome for future relationships?” And read into that, "future power relationships.” So if they’re successful in this issue, we know that coming up next year there’ll be a bond issue about such-and-such. So they’re looking way down the line, in some cases much further than the mediator is. They’re looking at externalities that the mediator is not even seeing. So I think that the mediator then has to be able to constantly work to be able to do that. There are several techniques that the mediator, or the intervener, has with which to empower the low-power party. I think that the idea that CRS came in – if not explicitly, then certainly implicitly – to redress the power was certainly known by everyone. But the very fact that parties were being brought to the table, metaphorically and literally, was in fact a kind of equalizing of the power.