The Politics of Environmental Mediation

The main purpose of this article is to discuss the downfalls of mediation with environmental issues. The main roadblocks are the friendly atmosphere of mediation, the power imbalance between environmentalists and development companies, and the fact that the mediation process supports development issues naturally.

The first section of the paper discusses how when mediators set a friendly atmosphere the environmentalists tend to start liking their opponents and in addition want to seem like peaceful people, so they end up conceding more than intended. I felt like this section of the article was negatively stereotyping environmentalists as people with no backbone. Perhaps this has been a phenomena in environmental mediations, but I don't think the answer is to fundamentally change the mediation process by taking away the social aspect; rather the answer seems to be to get the environmental party more training. It just seemed generalized and seemed to imply that environmentalists just fall over in front of corporate people. Overall, I agree with the statement on the 4th page that the responsibility for correcting this lies with the participants, not the mediators.

The second main point deals with the imbalance of power between the two main parties. The development groups have a greater access to economic and political resources. This affects the neutrality of mediation three ways: who is participating, superior technical analysis, and involuntary participation. The environmental groups can view their participation as non-voluntary because they do not have the resources to sustain a long court battle. Environmental groups also can have less political power, and their interest groups are wide spread, so often there is not a representative to the mediation process from all of the interest groups in a conflict. Since the environmental groups have less power, they are bound to agree to solutions that do not fulfill their needs because some concessions from the powerful group are better than none. There is also a section within this part of the paper that argues that some mediators see themselves as just a mirror that reflects the imbalances of society and that they focus on their process and not take responsibility for perpetuating imbalances. Laue would disagree with them because he argues that no mediators can truly be neutral and in order to be a good mediator you need to try and balance the power between the two parties.

The mediation process itself can be bias towards the pro-development party. The mediators consider that both parties have equal and negotiable interests. What can rarely come to the table is the core issue itself: whether or not the land should be developed. One mediation focused on how the mall should be environment friendly, but the fact that mall was being built was never discussed. Mediators rarely see the environmental issues as part of the larger structural and value choices from our society. There is also debate about whether environmentalists should even go to the table about certain issues. Some issues are fundamental beliefs that cannot be negotiated, like being opposed to nuclear power. Those are non-negotiable issues to some people and thus should not be brought to mediation.

In conclusion, it appears as though in order for environmental mediations to be successful, the environmental party needs more training and/or more power.

The Ethics of Intervention in Community Disputes

This article by Laue and Cormick help define what the different types of intervention roles there are. The main ones are activist, advocate, mediator, researcher, and enforcer. An activist can help the party they are sided with organize, devise a strategy, rally a following, and communicate with the public. An advocate is an advisor or consultant to one of the parties; an advocate can usually envision what it would take to terminate the conflict with a positive outcome for their party. A mediator must be acceptable to both parties, so they cannot have a clear side; they help the parties reach a win-win solution. A researcher is independent of the conflict, but they report their findings to the public, and often they do not stay uninvolved. The enforcer has the power to implement solutions.

There were several interesting points that Laue and Cormick made in this article. The one that I found most interesting was that in order to be an ethical intervener, one should not remain neutral. It is important to try and help minimize the power imbalance between the parties. Important values to consider while intervening are freedom, justice, and empowerment. They all seem to revolve around making sure the disadvantaged party is able to entirely make their own decisions, and to feel the consequences of their decisions. Power should be diffused among many individuals/parties.

The idea of decisions is also important to interveners. Several important decisions include: deciding to intervene, deciding when to intervene, how to intervene, and deciding what a good settlement is. Laue and Cormick argue that ethics and the above values should help an intervener with all of these decisions. The article uses several examples that helped explain the ideas of this article.

Changing Group Norms

This was a very interesting article about group norms. Group norms can actions/gestures/procedures that are followed in a group. An example of a norm here at Juniata is that when we go into Baker, we leave all our books/coats/everything out in the hallway. This reflects our open and trusting culture here at Juniata. It is normal for us to do this action, thus it can be classified as a norm. This article focuses on how to change norms. Often times norms need to be changed because they are outdated, they are not effective, or they are negatively affecting the group. Here are some examples of norms that need to be changed. Technology is rapidly expanding and often times groups settle on norms of past technologies. The material culture changes a lot faster than the non-material culture. If a group is constantly communicating via post-letter, their business will be a lot slower than if they used the telephone or e-mail. This is an example of an outdated and ineffective norm. An example of a negative norm would be if in a company it was the norm to always arrive 10 minutes late; this cuts down on work time, and thus negatively affects the groups productivity.

The article shows several examples of how/when norms need to be changed. It is very difficult to change norms. One way to induce a change is if a very confident, or high status person initiates the new norm. These types of people have more allowance for deviance, and thus makes it easier for them to try out new norms. Crisis can also help induce a change in norms. If a company is failing, it is a crisis, and members will be able to analyze their actions and see where improvements can be made. Unfortunately, often in crisis times, people don't want to change; they want to stick to what makes them comfortable. Sometimes an outsider needs to come in and help a group change their norms to improve their goal completions. Another main point of this article is that it is easier for an individual to change than an organization.

This article applies to conflict intervention because often times you might be walking into a group conflict or negotiation, where the group has norms that are contributing to the conflict. You need to be able to identify them and know how to help them see how their norms affect them. You also need to have the foresight to know what norms might work best for the group.

C&K: Reaching and Carrying Out Agreements (Chapter 7)

This chapter focuses on the many different ways to reach and carry out agreements. The focus is on how to reach consensus with a large group of people. You must make sure that everybody agrees on the process of reaching an agreement, and that everybody okays every part of the solution. If not, there can be committees which decide upon the agreement; when they redraft it to incorporate the concerns, everybody present has to re-approve the agreement.

I found the diagrams of the different ways to reach the agreement to be the most helpful part of the chapter. It really helped me visualize what the different ways of approaching conflict resolution can look like. One general question I have from the reading is how to you decide who is on the resolution 'committee'? Would it be better to just have the negotiators? This part did not seem clear to me. Another thought that I had throughout the chapter had to do with the honesty of the participants. The chapter gives several scenarios about how people would respond to the solutions and how they would voice their opinions. I am not convinced that people are going to be that honest or clear. This is especially apparant on page 143 (3rd paragraph under section "applying criteria to existing options."

I like how the authors focused in the latter half of the chapter on the idea of open communication. You can lose all of the work you put into an agreement by not fully communicating how the solution(s) were reached with the parties. This can make parties feel slighted or cheated. This reminds me of how we often talk in class about how people will settle for less if they view the process of fair, and conversely, people may reject an agreement that has many components that suit them because they felt the process was unfair. It is all about perception, and this puts a lot of responsibility on the interveners to make sure the process is going smoothly.

Conflict: Institutions

The main purpose of this chapter was to talk about how conflict is dealt with at an institutional level. By institutional level, the author means a court system, a group of elders, etc; it just means whatever the tradition in your society is to handle conflicts. There are many things that can affect the legitimacy and therefore the power of the institution. In accordance with Weber, there are three main types of authority: traditional (i.e. royalty being authority, following norms, clear guidelines of who to go to), charismatic, and rational-legal. Charismatic leaders come into play usually when there is discontent with the current social institution; if somebody is able to unify and motivate groups of people, people can look to them as having more authority than the traditional source of authority. This can only last as long as that charisma leader, so it is necessary to routinize the charisma into law. Most modern systems are rational-legal where there is a clear authority (president/prime minister/etc) and a clear path that conflicts get resolved in (the law/courts/etc). There are many factors that unite legal authorities across societies dealing with the fact that there are positive and negative sanctions, specialized people enact and interpret the laws, and there are alternative routes if the courts do not work. This is where the conflict interveners would come in, through these ADRs.

Legal systems need to be viewed as legitimate in order to be effective in enforcing rules/norms/laws. Legal systems can lose its legitimacy in several different ways. Two examples would be if legal systems are not perceived as providing procedural and substantive justice, or if they escalate conflict because they are not equipped to deal with deep-rooted dissension conflicts. Conflict within a legal system is substantially harder if there is not a normative consensus; this would mean that people were not satisfied with the current legal institution, and part of the negotiation would involve how to create legitimate authority again.

I thought this chapter was pretty interesting because it showed how legal institutions can help escalate and de-escalate conflict. It is important that the social institution that enforces the norms be consistent with the actual norms of the society (i.e. some laws people don’t necessarily follow anymore because they are antiquated).

Conflict: Situations

This chapter presents an interesting argument that the situational context has a much larger affect on negotiations than personality traits. The situational context can include the social/ political system that you are working in, time constraints, external events, how the issues are framed, where the negotiation occurs (public? media?), and the negotiators’ positions within their group. The author goes on to provide a lot of evidence about this idea that the situation is more important than the psychodynamics. A lot of the criticism of the personality theory involves the inadequacy of personality tests/assessments; these tests do not allow for flexibility of location (i.e. perhaps you are more outgoing at a party than at work, or maybe deciding whether or not you want to go to a party depends on a lot of other factors, not just are you outgoing or not). There needs to be a way to assess behavior within and between situations.


Another major point the author makes is about attribution theory; he says that people over attribute behavior to personality traits rather than taking a step back and thinking about situational influences; this may lead to a conflict spiral by misinterpreting an action and reciprocating in a negative way. Behaviors need to be considered in terms of what role the person is playing, what the organization is like, and how they are defining the situation.


I had a few different thoughts about this chapter. The first was, I felt like some of the situational factors they listed could highly be affected by a personality. For example, if there is a strict time constraint, different people will react differently; some people are more productive working under pressure, and others might feel so pressured to make an agreement that they do not come to the best solution possible. I think that the general size of a negotiation can play a big role in the situation vs. personality debate. If the negotiation is big and people are representing large groups, chances are that the negotiators have been trained in how the organization wants the issues framed, what they will settle for, etc. If it is a negotiation on a smaller scale, for example a community conflict or even mediation, I think that personality will come into play a lot more. If people are not specifically representing a large group, I would imagine that it is harder to separate the conflict from your personal self, and thus personalities would affect the path of the negotiations. All in all, I think that there is an overlap between the situational vs. personality factors, and I think that the size of the negotiation and how distanced the negotiators are from the central conflict can draw out personality factors more than the author acknowledged.

Conflict: Dynamics

This chapter mainly talks about how conflicts can evolve and change over time. The authors introduce several conflict models that include stages like escalation. There are also many models that talk about the tactics of a party, such as how if one party perceives the other as aggressive or deceptive, they might defend themselves by being equally deceptive. The conflict spiral notes that it is not just one party that causes the conflict to go downwards into deception/mistrust; both sides can cause this. I found Jervis' piece about how you need to consider psychological limitations when coming up with models of how the parties interact. By this he means that a party only knows there intentions and motives; they can only infer the other parties' intentions. If they have a negative view of the other party, they will most likely interpret their actions as aggressive. This goes hand-in-hand with the idea of schema and how your mind will remember certain people, events, and procedures; they can influence your perception of a situation and perhaps distort your memory. The outcome and your feelings about an outcome can distort your memory of the event. It is good for an intervener to have this in mind because it can help them move a party away from worst-case thinking, and challenging schema.