The Promise of Mediation: Responding to Conflict Through Empowerment and Recognition

Over the past three decades mediation has been increasingly used as an alternative process for resolving disputes. But as the field has grown and become institutionalized, mediators have come under increasing pressure to take a directive approach to practice in order to generate agreements and solve problems. The "problem-solving" approach - where reaching agreement is paramount - now characterizes the contemporary mediation movement. This approach, say authors Robert A. Baruch Bush and Joseph P. Folger, neglects the most important dimension of the process: its potential to change the people themselves who are in the very midst of conflict - giving them both a greater sense of their own efficacy and a greater openness to others. The Promise of Mediation explores the transformative potential of mediation, showing what that potential is, why it is important, and how it can be realized in practice. The authors present an alternative theoretical framework for understanding conflict and mediation, based on valuing both personal strength and compassion for others. They offer a highly concrete, case-illustrated introduction to the actual practice of transformative mediation, using a range of examples and two detailed case studies. Drawing on their own experience and on a wide body of research, the authors offer those at all levels in the mediation field - practitioners, administrators, policy makers, and researchers - a new and useful perspective to help take stock of how mediation is currently practiced, assess what it can accomplish, and make choices about how to develop the process in the future. They present a powerful case that realizing the full promise of mediation means giving thetransformative approach to mediation a central place in theory, policy, and practice.