Toward High‐Quality Divorce Agreements: The Influence of Facilitative Professionals

Studies have reported that mediation has higher settlement rates than litigation. The quality of these agreements as experienced by the parties as well as the processes that contribute to this subjective experience remains underexamined, however. In a large, representative, and multidisciplinary study of divorcing couples, we studied the relationship between the practices of lawyers and mediators and the quality of agreements experienced by their clients. We used multiple regression analysis to reveal that divorce mediation is significantly more likely than litigation to produce high‐quality divorce settlements. Furthermore, we found that high‐quality divorce agreements were more likely to occur when mediators and lawyers were perceived to have worked facilitatively. In addition, we found that pre‐divorce conflict levels were inversely correlated with the quality of agreements. Which party initiated the divorce, the parties' gender, and the type of legal divorce did not explain variances in the quality of the agreements. In this article, we also discuss the training and practice implications of our findings.     

Practice-Relevant Research in Mediation: Toward a Reflective Research Paradigm

Donald Schön has advanced the notion that a systematic understanding of professional practice can be built on the reflective insights of skilled practitioners. The reflective practitioner paradigm is well suited to mediation research. A study of divorce mediation illustrates how Schön's seminal ideas can be translated into research procedures with broad applicability to a variety of mediation settings.     

Defining Mediator Knowledge and Skills

A two-year collaboration among researchers, practitioners, and advisers from the major national organizations of mediators produced a job analysis relevant to mediators involved in interpersonal disputes (i.e., divorce, community, formal parent-child mediation, etc.). One byproduct of the job analysis is an extensive list of the knowledge areas and skills important to effective job performance. This essay defines the knowledge and skill areas that emerged from the analysis.     

Creativity in Court‐Connected Mediation: Myth or Reality?

In this study, we examined creativity in court‐connected mediation. We analyzed 129 mediated agreements from civil cases in Norway and Denmark and compared the outcomes with the parties' original claims to determine whether the agreement addressed only the disputants' demands or contained other elements. If the mediated agreements contained elements in addition to the original claims, we considered them to be “creative.” We devised a creativity scale and found that approximately two thirds of the cases contained creative elements and one quarter of them contained more than five creative elements. We then sought to determine which aspects of the mediation promoted creativity by looking at a variety of mediation characteristics (length of mediation, characteristics of the parties, etc.). We found that lengthier mediations tended to feature more creativity as did cases that involved two private individuals rather than businesses. Cases whose issues involved inheritance as well as the division of property following divorce seemed to foster the highest levels of creativity. Finally, we found that the amount of money at issue also seemed to be relevant: the highest levels of creativity were found in cases in which more money was at stake. In this article, we also discuss the implications of our findings for future research, practice, and training.     

Orchestrating peace in South Sudan: exploring the effectiveness of the European Union’s mediation support

ABSTRACT

Previous research has primarily focused on the EU’s high-profile involvement as direct mediator in peace negotiations. Conversely, less attention has been devoted to the EU’s support to third parties’ mediation efforts, which is a significant component of its mediation activities. Addressing this research gap, this article develops a conceptual framework for the systematic analysis of EU mediation support, identifying key mediation support techniques and the conditions for their success. In terms of mediation support techniques, the EU may rely on “endorsement”, “coordination”, “assistance”, and “lending leverage” to empower and steer third party mediators in line with its mediation objectives and values. We illustrate the utility of the conceptual framework for the EU’s support to IGAD in mediating in South Sudan’s civil war. We find that the EU has contributed significantly to IGAD’s empowerment in terms of endorsement, coordination, assistance, and lending leverage. Simultaneously, our analysis also points to important challenges in the EU-IGAD relationship, which relate to challenges concerning strategic engagement with IGAD’s internal politics that are marked by diverging interests and ties of its member states to the conflict parties.     

Democracy assistance and women's political empowerment in post-conflict countries

Democracy promoters around the world cling to the hope that assistance given to civil society organizations decreases the risk of civil war and will lead to democracy in post-conflict societies. A particularly promising segment of civil society in peacebuilding is women. Inspired by Welzel and Inglehart's “human empowerment: path to democracy” this study places democracy assistance to women in a broader mechanism which forms a theoretical foundation of this study. The case of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the author's insights from the fieldwork demonstrate that in order to assess the impact of democracy assistance on women's political empowerment the comprehensive women's political empowerment mechanism should be employed. The statistical examination, however, reveals that women's political activism is largely the function of legal empowerment and a country's political and socio-economic characteristics. The study also shows the limitations of current impact evaluation methodologies, and suggests better evaluation tools.     

Empowerment boom or bust? Assessing women's post-conflict empowerment initiatives

Over the past decade, the term ‘empowerment’ has been generously employed and woefully ill-defined. In particular, women's empowerment has been embraced by such a vast number of development actors that it appears to be a unifying mission within development. Despite the boom in women's empowerment initiatives, there remains little critical analysis of the use of empowerment in general, and the perceived success or failures of specific empowerment initiatives. Using the disarmament, demobilization and reintegration process in Sierra Leone as a case study, this paper examines how reintegration was described as a source of empowerment for women. Drawing from interviews and analysis of related policy discourses, it is argued that, rather than representing a radical shift in development approaches towards more inclusive and representative policies, empowerment projects are shaped by neoliberal ideas such as individualism, responsibility and economic order and carry implicit, gendered and disciplining messages about appropriate social behaviour.     

Women’s empowerment in rural Honduras and its determinants: insights from coffee communities in Ocotepeque and Copan

This article quantifies the level of women’s empowerment in western Honduran coffee-producing households through the construction of the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index, and highlights the determinants of each empowerment indicator and their interactions. Women in the study region suffer from a lack of control over use of income and access to productive resources. Since control and ownership of assets are positively correlated with input in productive decisions and control over the use of income in this study region, it is suggested that “low-hanging fruit” to improve empowerment would be to invest in interventions that strengthen asset control and distribution.     

Context and Content toward Consensus in Public Mediation

The mediation of public conflicts is a complex interactive, social‐psychological, and often politicized process. Because of their complexity, the literature on how to effectively mediate these conflicts remains imprecise. In this study, I have focused on the sequencing of the overall mediation process and the interplay between initial conditions, mediation styles, and process dynamics to explore predictable patterns from early stage to deadline negotiations. By undertaking a two‐step qualitative comparison of twenty‐three public mediation cases, I have attempted to identify “equifinal” pathways — that is, a variety of different ways in which the same outcome can be achieved — that can lead to mediation success (or failure). My analysis reveals that both inclusivity (i.e., including all relevant participants in the process) and mediation institutionalization (i.e., the mediation process is sufficiently embedded in the political and administrative system) correlate to greater mediation effectiveness. Furthermore, this study also suggests that such key elements of deliberative negotiations as recognition and argumentation are essential for reaching a consensual agreement.     

Escape from the Laboratory: Ethnographic Methods in the Study of Elder and Family Court Mediation

The randomized control trial and pre/post research designs are commonly used in applied research and provide common standards for mediation evaluation research. These approaches have many benefits, particularly for evaluating whether mediation as an experimental intervention works or not. Scholars and practitioners, however, want to know not only whether mediation can work as expected but also how it works in a range of real‐world contexts over time. In these contexts, ideal experimental conditions are less likely to occur. Challenges include such circumstances as the following: the number of cases suitable for statistical comparison is insufficient; researchers lack control over how mediation is implemented; researchers lack clear, objective variables to measure; and the variability of mediation outcomes when studied over time makes it difficult to draw conclusions about them. My research has involved each of these challenges, and I have used ethnographic research as a way to evaluate mediation in these contexts. In this article, I explain ethnographic methods and present two studies as examples of mediation evaluation research that began with a standard program evaluation design, and then incorporated ethnography to allow more complete data collection and analysis. My purpose here is not to argue that experimental methods in mediation evaluation research should be displaced but rather to demonstrate how ethnographic methods can be used when the conditions necessary for standard evaluation cannot be met. The two studies used as examples are from an elder mediation study in Ghana and a family court mediation study in the United States.     

Women's empowerment revisited: a case study from Bangladesh

This article explores the changing dimensions of women's empowerment over time in three Bangladesh villages where one of the authors has been conducting research since 1991. The article discusses theoretical issues related to the measurement of women's empowerment, and describes findings from a recent study in the villages exploring the current salience of indicators developed for a 1992 survey. In the article we discuss the types of social, economic, and political change that affect the measurement of women's empowerment; propose and explain a new set of indicators for the rural Bangladesh setting; and discuss implications for measuring women's empowerment in other settings.     

A Conceptual Typology of Kin‐State Mediation

In this article, I argue that kin states can play major roles in international mediation processes involving their kin communities. Although kin states may be naturally biased toward their kin, kin states are sometimes actively involved in mediation processes and such involvement is even encouraged by third‐party mediators. In this study, I divide the various roles assumed by kin states in mediation into four main conceptual categories: promoter, quasi‐mediator, powerbroker, and enforcer. My analysis presumes that a kin state can use its close ties with its kin community to make third‐party mediation more successful. I support and illustrate this model using cases of kin‐state involvement in peace processes and examine both the benefits and complications that kin‐state mediation can entail. This study contributes to scholarship examining the effectiveness of biased mediators. I conclude that the role a kin state assumes in a mediation is often context‐dependent, but that third‐party mediators and the international community can use their leverage over kin states to improve the peace process.     

US Aid and gender equality: social movement vs civil society models of funding

Despite the fact that the assumed link between women’s empowerment, peace, and democratization has taken a firm hold in both theory and practice, the effectiveness of funding empowerment remains highly contested in the literature on gender, war, and democratic transformations. Drawing upon over a decade of fieldwork, this article offers lessons from the Balkans for funding women’s empowerment, with a particular focus on postconflict political transitions. I argue that there are two fundamentally different approaches to funding women’s empowerment, what I call the civil society model and the social movement model, and I lay out theoretical reasons why the social movement model is more likely to achieve enduring political change. I then provide a case study of how the United States government promoted elements of the social movement model in Croatia and Serbia as part of its democratization assistance, focusing on the challenges and promise of this approach.     

Empowerment examined

Empowerment is a term often used in development work, but rarely defined. The author explores the notion of empowerment with particular focus upon the central element of power. Different understandings of what constitutes power lead to a variety of interpretations of empowerment, and thus to a range of implications for development policy and practice. Empowerment terminology is used in analyzing power, inequality, and oppression. With regard to development practice, however, the concept of empowerment demands precise and deliberate definition and use. Sections discuss power and empowerment, what empowerment is, empowerment in practice, empowerment in a development context, economic activities and the empowerment process, the role of outsiders in the development setting, individual empowerment, and collective empowerment.     

No more adoption rates! Looking for empowerment in agricultural development programmes

The debate on empowerment encompasses an older discourse about the intrinsic value of empowerment, and a newer discourse about the instrumental benefits of empowerment; the concept of agency is useful in understanding this distinction. In agricultural development, empowerment efforts are often instrumentalist, viewed as an advanced form of participation that will improve project effectiveness, with adoption rates that promote compliance rather than intrinsic empowerment. Nevertheless, it is possible for projects to enhance the means for – and facilitate the process of – intrinsic empowerment. With regard to process, research and extension can make use of a constructivist rather than the behaviourist approach to support changes in knowledge, behaviour, and social relationships. In assessing empowerment, both developers and ‘developees’ need to look for evidence that people are taking control of their lives. Case studies – such as those used by the Indonesian Integrated Pest Management (IPM) Programme – will help to capture context and chronology, with unplanned behaviours being particularly useful indicators.     

The Paradox of Accepting One's Share of Responsibility in Mediation

Mediators generally avoid the issue of whether parties accept their individual share of responsibility for a conflict. But the results of this study demonstrate the important role that taking responsibility for the conflict can play to encourage the emergence of cooperation within the mediation process. In this article, the author first explores the role of responsibility within the context of various mediation approaches and styles. Next, he reports the results of a quantitative study that examined the attitudes of disputants involved in workplace conflict mediations. His results indicate that acceptance of responsibility can play a parodixical role in the mediation process: it seems to be effective only when both parties jointly acknowledge responsibility. When responsibility is acknowledged unilaterally, it seems to have a negative effect on the emergence of cooperation. Finally, the author proposes an intervention strategy for mediators that is designed to encourage the joint acceptance of responsibility and thus facilitate the emergence of cooperation in mediation.     

Why Are Subordinates Less Satisfied with Mediation? The Role of Uncertainty

This study explores the influence of hierarchical position on both mediation satisfaction and uncertainty about the mediation. As parties involved in hierarchical conflict typically behave differently and have different perceptions and experiences, we think it is most likely that hierarchical position will affect the mediation process and its outcomes. In this article, we investigate the influence of hierarchical position on both uncertainty about the mediation and satisfaction with the mediation and its potential moderating role on the relationship between uncertainty and satisfaction. To test our hypotheses, we use data from fifty real mediation cases dealing with hierarchical labor conflicts in the Netherlands. As expected, uncertainty has a stronger negative effect on subordinates' satisfaction with the mediation than it does on the supervisors who were involved in mediation. Implications for mediation theory and practice are discussed.     

Developing indicators to assess women's empowerment in Vietnam

From mid‐1999 to mid‐2001, the authors carried out a qualitative study in rural Vietnam to explore relationships between gender equity and reproductive health. One of the study's objectives was to develop culturally appropriate indicators of women's empowerment, specific to the Vietnamese context. This paper describes the process of developing, testing, and refining the empowerment indicators, presents some of the findings, and discusses the methodological challenges that need to be addressed. The paper concludes by recommending a set of Vietnamspecific domains for assessing women's empowerment in the socio‐economic sphere as well as in reproductive health.     

The Conditional Effectiveness of Directive Mediation

ABSTRACT

This research re-examines the effectiveness of directive mediation in interstate rivalries. To do so, highlighting the importance of disputants’ willingness for successful directive mediation, this study identifies four conditions that affect the levels of disputants’ willingness to engage in mediation talks and proposes that the presence of such conditions improves or worsens the efficacy of directive strategies. We expect heavy-handed mediators will be less effective in a dispute involving highly interdependent or power-imbalanced rivalries while directive mediation performs poorly when it is led by unbiased mediators or when it is employed for long-running rivals. Our empirical findings, based on two existing rivalry datasets, suggest that directive mediation fares well when mediators are biased, when rivals are power-balanced, and when rivalries are protracted, and that the efficacy of directive mediation improves in disputes involving highly interdependent strategic rivals but decreases in the cases between highly interdependent general rivals.     

Empowerment and community salience in multi-party collaboration: empirical lessons for development planning

Despite the plethora of works on empowerment, questions remain regarding when and how empowerment impacts a community group’s salience in multi-party collaboration. This article uses an Australian context to examine the relationship between empowerment and salience in local development partnerships. In doing this, it uses bivariate, multinomial logistics and thematic analyses to build an empirical case that empowerment is one driver of change in salience status. Study findings show that stakeholder salience is significantly influenced by accountability and capacity building, which help to build meaningful development collaborations. The article concludes with critical development implications.