What is Mediation?

Nov 23, 2008 News

Before we were civilised, we resolved conflict by force. The person with the greater ability to use force (the person with power) was the winner and the weaker person was the loser clearly.

However, force was not always the best way to resolve conflict and a fair result was not always achieved when people took matters into their own hands. So, society devised another approach to resolving conflict – litigation.

Throughout the last couple centuries, people who could not resolve disputes on their own went to court to ask a judge to impose a solution. Judges who were seen as the best people in society to come up with solutions to complex problems made decisions as best they could, applying the law to the facts and trying to balance the interests of the individual with the interest of society.

Litigation was perceived to be superior to self-help in resolving disputes because it had procedural safeguards and rules that increased the likelihood that the result would be just. That being said, until relatively recently, it was generally used only as a last resort.

Before going to court, people would usually try to resolve conflict themselves, or go to a respected person in society to get advice or guidance.

Recently, however, litigation has become the automatic first step for people in dispute. Litigation has also been gradually losing its claim as being the best way to resolve conflict, in part because the procedural safeguards that are so important have made it necessary to create cumbersome processes that do not always produce the best and most efficient outcome.

So, society is looking for new and innovative methods to deal with people in dispute or, a return to less litigious ways to resolve conflicts. We want results that are fair, but we do not want cumbersome and time consuming processes. We therefore look back to a time when we turned to respected and creative people who had the skills to help us resolve conflict, and that look back is leading us to mediation.

While mediation in various forms has been around for many years, it is now being reborn as a more effective stage in the evolution of how we, as a society, resolve conflict.

Mediation is a process in which a third party neutrally assists in resolving a dispute between two or more other parties. It is a process of conflict management. It is a non-adversarial approach to conflict resolution.

The role of the mediator is to facilitate communications between the parties, assist them in focusing on the real issues of the dispute, and generate options that meet the interest or needs of all relevant parties in an effort to resolve the conflict and to do so without resorting to physical force or invoking the authority of law.

This facilitates the interaction between the opposite parties in such a way that solutions or some convergence automatically emerges.

Meditation is at present done through a court-connected process and mediators have been accredited as mediators of the Supreme Court of Guyana.

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What is Mediation?

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