The United Nations’ Mediation Support Unit has recently released Guidance for Effective Mediation. The guide covers 8 areas:
- •Preparedness
- •Consent
- •Impartiality
- •Inclusivity
- •National ownership
- •International law and normative frameworks
- •Coherence, coordination and complementarity of the mediation effort
- •Quality peace agreements
In this post I will focus on consent.
“Cultivating Consent”
The guide talks about “cultivating” the consent of the parties. This strikes me as an apt analogy when looking at setting up mediation processes generally or setting up a particular mediation. A mediator cannot take consent as a given and must sometimes “grow” that consent from a small seed.
The guide sets out some of the influences on gaining consent:
- •integrity of the mediation process
- •security
- •confidentiality
- •acceptability of the mediator and the mediating entity
- •the dynamics of the conflict
- •a lack of understanding of mediation
- •perception of mediation as a threat to sovereignty or outside interference
It also notes that even where consent is given, it may not always translate into full commitment to the mediation process.
The guide provides the following guidance on consent:
- •Cultivate consent, in order to create the space for, and a good understanding of, mediation. Informal contacts allow parties to test the waters without committing to a fully fledged mediation process; this can help address possible fears or insecurities.
- •Engage with local and community-based actors or organizations, including women’s groups, as well as external actors with access to and relationships with conflict parties to encourage the use of mediation.
- •Use confidence-building measures at different stages to build trust between the conflict parties and between the mediator and the parties, as well as confidence in the mediation process.
- •Be consistent, transparent and even-handed in managing the mediation process, and respect confidentiality.
- •Periodically assess whether the process has sufficient consent and be prepared for fluxes in consent throughout the mediation, working to bring the conflict parties back into the process and drawing on the influence of their backers or other third parties as appropriate.
Although the guide is thin on the particulars of conducting complex multi-party mediations, it does provide some useful principles to apply.