Community mediation as social intervention

Practice Note: Community Mediation as Social Intervention Tiago Neves

Rather than understanding mediation solely as an attempt at problem solving between two individuals, this article examines the possibility of mediation as a social intervention designed to bring systemic change. If the mediation process is to have broader societal impact, one must address the questions this raises related to the mediator’s role and neutrality. This article uses the case study of mediation in Brazil as a basis to launch the discussion.

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an mediation be conceived of as a social intervention device aimed at promotion of social justice? A positive answer to this question requires that at least two issues be satisfactorily dealt with. One is the combination of the mediator’s principles of neutrality and impartiality with the goal of bringing about social change oriented to increased social justice. The other is articulation of individual and collective change. This refers to the problem of knowing how mediation of (mostly) individual conflicts can generate collective change, and also knowing how to approach conflict not only in its individuality but also in its structural features.

This article addresses both issues. It does so from a particular perspective: that of an ongoing community mediation project in a country with little tradition of mediation. As such, it does not aim to furnish any kind of definitive answers. It does aim, however, at discussing some of the classic tenets of mediation in their relationship with social justice and social change.

NOTE: This article is presented within the framework of the project Mediação na Comunidade, sponsored by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia.

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Social justice is understood here mostly in terms of participation. This means ensuring that all citizens, despite their differences, have an equal chance, that is, “unlimited access to civil freedom resources and institutions” (Bloemers, 2003, p. 21). However, this notion is complemented by concerns with distributive justice. First, while material inequality based on performance is considered legitimate, excessive inequality is deemed objectionable both on moral and economic grounds. Second, and in accordance with a justice of need, this understanding of social justice suggests that “all members of a society are equally entitled to demand a politically approved minimum to cover their needs,” such as housing, food, health and education (p. 21).

The Background: Mediation in Portugal It is not unusual to find that in Latin European countries (Portugal, Spain, Italy, and France) literal translation of the word mediation is for the most part related to the insurance and real estate fields. Typically, however, in Latin countries real estate or insurance mediators are commercial intermediaries between trading parties and not conflict resolution professionals. In these countries, the word may also simply refer to general relationships and exchanges between people. Thus it can be quite void of any specific content or meaning.

In Portugal, for example, even though laws from as early as 1519 make reference to people who had the role of acting more or less as present-day mediators (Ferreira, 2005), only very recently did alternative dispute resolution mechanisms begin to enter the judicial system, and to a much lesser extent the common language. In fact, only from 2001 onward, with the gradual introduction in some parts of the country of Julgados de Paz—a kind of small claims courts aimed at solving disputes through mediation— were alternative dispute resolution strategies being talked about. Also within the judicial system, labor mediation procedures have been established at the national level, and since early 2008 a victim-offender mediation program has been up and running.

The judicial system has certainly been the major driving force in implementation of alternative dispute resolution mechanisms in Portugal. In a country that lived under an authoritarian regime for more than forty years (from 1926 to 1974), state initiatives still play a major role in defining the possibilities of action. More often than not, however, use of mediation in the judicial system has faced strong opposition from the Portuguese Bar CONFLICT RESOLUTION QUARTERLY • DOI: 10.1002/crq

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Association. The Bar claims that mediation suffers from limitations with regard to the capability of ensuring that all parties are treated equally, namely when parties have very different economic and power status. In short, the association tends to regard mediation as a sort of second-class justice (cf. Hedeen, 2004).

Nonetheless, since the landmark year of 2001, and given the increased visibility of alternative dispute resolution mechanisms—particularly mediation—there have been attempts at introducing them into other areas of social life. Apart from family mediation (which also has some linkages with the judicial system), school mediation, intercultural mediation, and community mediation have been clearly located away from the judicial system. On the one hand, this grants them distance from the attacks on mediation by the Bar Association. On the other hand they are—with the exception of family mediation, which actually began development a little earlier, around 1995—operating in a largely unregulated, underresearched gray area. Perhaps it can be said that school mediation, intercultural mediation, and community mediation are still in their experimental, exploratory stage. A few school mediation programs have been set up at the local level, but usually this is done in a discontinuous and unsystematic fashion.

Intercultural mediation has been promoted mostly by public agencies and immigrant associations in order to facilitate communication between immigrants and public services. Community mediation, in turn, is at an embryonic stage: there are fewer than a handful of community-oriented mediation projects in Portugal. One of them is the Mediação na Comunidade (Mediation in the Community) project, which I coordinate.

Also, only with Julgados de Paz came the need for making available specific training in mediation. Such training is not usually provided by universities, where mediation is still rarely considered an academic discipline in its own right.

This state of affairs results in generalized lack of knowledge about mediation and mediators. It is clear, then, that the situation in Portugal is quite different from those in countries such as the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, where the term mediation is more easily and immediately regarded as a specific line of work and research in conflict resolution.

The Mediação na Comunidade Project The Mediação na Comunidade project was set up in Lordelo do Ouro, a neighborhood of about twenty-five thousand people in the city of Porto, CONFLICT RESOLUTION QUARTERLY • DOI: 10.1002/crq

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in Portugal. Lordelo do Ouro is an ethnically homogeneous but economically extremely diverse area. About half its inhabitants live in social housing, while a relevant proportion of the other half belongs to the upper and middle-upper classes. This makes Lordelo an area of strong social disparities, sharpened by the visual contrast between luxury condominiums and drug-ridden housing estates.

This is a project developed jointly by the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences of the University of Porto and a local development agency (Agência de Desenvolvimento Integrado de Lordelo do Ouro). The project involves professionals from differing academic backgrounds (educational sciences, psychology, law, and social work) and with different professional trajectories (university teachers, lawyers, community workers, and of course mediators).

The project has two main axes. First, it has a conflict mediation office providing free services to the community. This office was set up with the goals of granting citizens easier access to a proximity justice model and enabling them to take active part in creating solutions for the problems affecting them. It focuses mostly on neighborhood, family, and housing conflicts (penal matters were defined from the start as being beyond the scope of this office). Second, it carries out action-research intervention with youngsters from the area, aimed at training and development of conflict resolution skills.

The first axis has been in development since October 2007 and is now running at cruise speed. Most of the cases deal with housing problems, renegotiation of debts, and family conflicts. People are usually referred to our office by the local social services or by friends who have been at the office. To broaden the office’s catchment area, we have established a protocol with the National Centre for Immigrant Support (Centro Nacional de Apoio ao Imigrante) for referral of cases and are now trying to do the same with the Municipal Police. The second axis is in its preparatory stage.

Community Mediation as a Form of Social Intervention

This section—indeed, the rest of this article—aims at discussing the possibilities of conceptualizing community mediation as a form of social intervention oriented to increasing social justice. The purpose is not therefore to state assertively that community mediation is indeed a type of social intervention but rather to debate the hypothesis.

To begin with, to envisage mediation as a form of social intervention requires not losing sight of its fundamental origin: conflict. Mediation CONFLICT RESOLUTION QUARTERLY • DOI: 10.1002/crq

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requires that a given situation be regarded as conflictual by the parties involved, and that they attempt to solve it through the intervention of a neutral, independent third party (which is neither a judge nor an arbitrator). Mediation also demands an explicit manifestation of the will of the parties who will be, so to speak, intervened upon; they will either have called the mediator or at least have accepted the mediator’s presence (Moore, 2003).

This is quite different from most other forms of social intervention, which are either developed top-down or require the presence of the intervener from the early stages of the definition of the problem to be tackled.

It is important not to forget that, contrary to mediation, social intervention efforts1 often have clearly defined targets in terms of the results to be achieved in a given situation, and social workers are usually not impartial in the sense that mediators are. In mediation, however, it is the people involved in the conflict who identify it, define it, and search for their own solution with the assistance of a third party.

Mediation, Social Regulation, and Social Change

It is also important to stress that, in the European context at least, production of social cohesion has become a critical issue over the past few years (Capucha, 2005; Castel, 2003; Dubet, 2004). This is due, for the most part, to fragmentation of macrostructural, nation-state devices of social, juridical, and economic regulation. Certainly, it could be argued that such devices are now being subsumed by grander macrostructures. Political and institutional globalization at the European Union level, however, has not (yet?) produced effective replacements for those devices. It could also be argued that, from the point of view of economic globalization, production of social cohesion is an instrumental problem rather than a social development challenge.2 So, as the macrostructural devices that are used to ensure a relatively stable social integration begin to show signs of increasing frailty, it is possible to witness a drift toward proximate management of social tensions (Castel, 2003). One consequence of these changes is the reconfiguration of social work (Hamzaoui, 2005) within what a number of authors have called the risk society (Beck, 1997; Giddens, 1991). Such a risk society—which follows the decadence of the welfare state and its promises—calls on reflexivity and individual responsibility in order to keep control over life processes.

Thus, whereas social policies in the welfare state had an essentially redistributive, solitary, universal, deterritorialized nature, in the so-called risk CONFLICT RESOLUTION QUARTERLY • DOI: 10.1002/crq

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society they tend to be grounded in the principles of risk management and individual responsibility. This individual responsibility, however, refers more to fulfilling obligations as defined by the state than to development of moral and social agency. It is no surprise, then, that the beneficiaries of social policies are increasingly forced to sign contracts with the state. In such contracts they commit themselves to taking part in social inclusion programs. This means, for example, that they need to design their life projects together with a social worker,3 take part in training activities if they cannot get a job, make sure their children go to school, and agree to home visits by social workers. In my view, the trouble with this approach is that it rests on an atomistic view of society. Here, social policies seem to be more oriented to managing individual life trajectories and minimizing risk than maximizing social justice or introducing structural social changes.

Fostering individual responsibility, as these new social policies claim, is indeed quite feeble: without being framed by collective goals and collective hopes, individual responsibility is quite sterile and powerless. Also, contractual obligations can be fulfilled without any significant development of moral and social agency. This is why, instead of changing the social condition of the beneficiaries, such policies actually tend to generate the individual’s great dependence on state programs. Social policies then run the risk of becoming more oriented to keeping things as they are than to introducing change, and the welfare state (the social state, état sociale, Sozialstaat) runs the risk of being replaced by a “securitarian state” (Castel, 2003).

In this framework, one can suggest that mediation configures a specific type of social intervention: that of service delivery (cf. Merry and Milner, 1995). Service delivery is a notion that points, first and foremost, to the field of commercial transactions. However, this field is something from which social intervention tends to be estranged, given that it does not seem to fit its mainstream rhetoric of personal and social emancipation and empowerment. By contrast, social intervention as service delivery does present an advantage over the traditional, and narrower, definition of social intervention: it grants individuals and groups the power to choose, the power to decide whether or not they want to use the service, and for how long. Furthermore, mediation not being the most common form of conflict resolution, the decision on whether or not to embark in a mediation process most definitely requires some reflection about who we are, what we want from a given situation, and what kind of relationships we want to build. This is, in itself, potentially transformative.

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Thus, to reframe—or at least to widen—the traditional notion of social intervention enables avoiding the mechanisms and strategies of social orthopaedics mentioned by Foucault (1997). Indeed, in this reframing it is the voice of social actors in general, and not only those of politicians and social work professionals, that gives rise to the processes of social transformation. Hence, more than a top-down orthopaedic work of correcting and normalizing behavior, this reconfiguration of social intervention points to the possibility of opening up new behavioral and relational patterns.

It should be recognized, however, that this is not the only possible approach to this issue. Jean-François Six, for example, argues that the mediator’s role is fortunately not circumscribed to intervention in conflict (Six, 2003). Why fortunately? Because, in Six’s perspective, to restrict the mediator’s role to intervention in conflict is quite limitative. Indeed, Six claims that the mediator is above all someone who brings individuals and groups together, through creation of new relationships between them and prevention of conflict (cf. Guillaume-Hofnung, 2000). Six also argues that a restricted understanding of the mediator’s role turns conflict into something that is always regarded as negative, needing to be curbed and controlled. This is not necessarily, though, the understanding of conflict shared by many researchers and mediation professionals. Neither is it the understanding of conflict underlying the idea that mediation as service delivery can be an innovative type of social intervention. Here, conflict can, and indeed should be, regarded as a source of development and personal and social change (Donohue and Kolt, 1992; Mayer, 2000; Moore, 2003; Bayada, Bisot, Boubault, and Gagnaire, 2004).

In their turn, Correia and Caramelo, although influenced by Six, present a distinctive approach to mediation and its relationship to social change. For example, they see “the mediator as an artisan in the construction of cities” (2003, p. 181). This understanding of the mediator can be explained by their belief in the need to rebuild a “communitarian militancy” (p. 186) in which mediation “contributes to the creation of alternative ways of politically and cognitively defining the social world and social problems” (pp. 189–190). In this perspective, the mediator emerges as someone who reshapes the world and, as Six argues, is not limited to stricto sensu conflict resolution.

This is not be confused, however, with Bernard Mayer’s challenges to conflict resolution professionals in general, and mediators in particular, as put forward in his book Beyond Neutrality. Indeed, Mayer’s fundamental proposal is to broaden the roles played by conflict resolution professionals.

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Specifically, he argues that the neutrality stance we tend to regard as absolutely fundamental is in reality imposing huge, and often unhelpful, limitations on our activity. Therefore, he suggests that we embrace roles other than that of third-party neutral, and that we focus not only on conflict resolution but also on conflict engagement. Conflict specialists could then take on a multiplicity of roles: coach, trainer, advocate, evaluator, system adviser, process designer, and mediator (2004). It is almost as if Mayer were making the case for conflictology as a full-blown, independent area of work and research, rather than focusing more narrowly on conflict resolution.

What Correia and Caramelo are arguing for is somewhat different.

Like Mayer, they feel it is crucial to move beyond neutrality. Unlike Mayer, however, they want to leave neutrality definitely behind. In other words, their version presents the mediator as someone more akin to a community organizer, someone with a political agenda. This, of course, ends up confining the mediator to a rather narrow role.

In brief, then, what Correia and Caramelo are fundamentally arguing for is establishment and development of an emancipated community that, bringing together mediators and participants, sets new standards for citizen participation and contributes to strengthening social justice. However, it is not clear from their work how this can be achieved without confounding the role of mediator with already existing roles such as community organizer or, in some contexts, local development agent. A difficulty with this perhaps more romantic view of mediation is that of poor definition of the processes and limits of the intervention it puts forward.

In their turn, Schoeny and Warfield (2000) present an interesting account of mediation and its transformative power. They argue that in a complex world in which different actors—both individual and collective— are permanently negotiating, it is crucial to articulate a systems maintenance approach with a will to social justice and transformation, and therefore to stop seeing them as antagonistic perspectives. Such a proposal may indeed be regarded as an alternative to a “hydraulic model of conflict and change” (2000, p. 262). According to that model, the more pressure there is on the status quo, or on mainstream institutions, the more imminent is social change. For those who argue in favor of this hydraulic model, mediation would thus be counterproductive in the sense that it contributes to alleviating such pressure and ultimately prevents deep transformation from taking place. As Schwerin asks about mediation, Is it transformational or conservative? (1995).

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For Schoeny and Warfield, however, mediation emerges as a potential source of social justice if it is able to “integrate democratic potential inherent in systems maintenance into shared visions of just outcomes” (2000, p. 266). Again, this requires considering the role of neutrality and impartiality in mediation. Is the procedural cleanliness of mediation enough to achieve this goal? Or does mediation need to be complemented by other approaches to conflict engagement and conflict resolution, namely by those that engage the professional himself or herself in the conflict?

What We Have So Far Collective Impact Requires Collective Targets

Among other things, Schoeny and Warfield’s statement means that, to be an agent of social justice, mediation must find ways of articulating the individual and the collective. When it is used as a strategy to solve a given conflict between two individuals, mediation can contribute to their appeasement and maybe even, to a small extent, to reconfiguration of citizen participation and communication. However, on the individual scale, mediation seems clearly insufficient to bring about social justice and transformation. To do so, mediation must be able to bring not only individual but also collective actors to the negotiation table, or somehow involve (or at least influence) the greatest number of social actors—including those in power—through the mediation object itself as well as through the mediation process. Surely, this does not mean that all mediations should be first and foremost oriented toward social justice and transformation; interpersonal conflict mediations have their own place and relevance. What it means is that focusing only on mediating conflict between individuals seems to have limited, and hazy, consequences for social change and collective empowerment. It also means the mediator can only deepen and extend the outcomes of his or her work when he or she identifies recurring conflict between similar types of social actors, and then tries to approach them in their structure and not just in their individuality (for example, recurring, similar conflict between municipal authorities and tenants living in housing estates; cf. Thompson and DuBow, 1995). In brief, the main question here could be stated this way: Is it possible that mediation of (mostly) individual conflicts generates collective change? How can the gap between individual and collective transformation be bridged?

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So far, in the Mediação na Comunidade project, we have a quite clear understanding that we are not actually doing community mediation, but rather mediation for the community. In fact, even if the project fits most of the characteristics that Merry ascribes to popular justice and as a consequence to community mediation (1995)—the major exceptions being the fact that mediators are paid, have higher education qualifications, and undergo a reasonable amount of training in mediation—there is nonetheless a relevant difference. Indeed, in our cultural perspective the very notion of community (just like that of popular) usually involves some sort of collective relevance and impact. This is what enables a distinction between community initiatives and local initiatives. That is, although all community initiatives have a local origin, not all local initiatives have impact in the community. Also, when preceding another word, as in the phrase community mediation, the word community seems to acquire the nature of an active qualifier reinforcing the idea of collective involvement.

Therefore, this means we are providing services (we hope good and useful) to individuals in the community but have not yet managed to achieve relevant collective impact. At this stage, we do not know if this will be possible at all, even if that was our initial goal. Indeed, at this stage, to refer to what we are doing as community mediation would be pretty much an overstatement. So far, what we have is a service delivery project that has been working but that we do not consider to be community mediation.

Thus, we are developing this clear notion that collective impact requires collective targets and not just accumulation of individual effects (cf. Baron, 2004). For example, we must target schools, local agencies, and the municipal police not only as institutions that may refer cases to our office but also as institutions in which we ought to develop training in alternative conflict resolution. Achieving collective impact clearly requires more than sitting at the office waiting for people to come through the door.

It requires an organized and proactive approach aimed both at qualitative and quantitative elements. On the qualitative side, we need to train people in order to familiarize them with mediation, and eventually change their mind-set. On the quantitative side, we need more people coming through our doors, and people coming in from a wider range of referral points.

Mediating Cases or Defending Community Causes?

At a more theoretical level, if we wish to discuss the differences between community mediation and mediation for the community then it is necessary CONFLICT RESOLUTION QUARTERLY • DOI: 10.1002/crq

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to ask ourselves what exactly we mean by community. Toennies, a classical sociological reference, talks about community based on the notions of social and moral cohesion and unity of the will (Saunders, 1995). More recently, Benedict Anderson (1991) argued that communities are imagined, and it is such imagination that binds people together. More generally, though, community can be understood either as a locality (a network of relationships) or a specific, usually positive, kind of relationship and a sense of belonging to a collective. It seems that, placed next to the word mediation, community is usually regarded in a commonsensical and idealistic perspective; it refers both to a locality and an imagined or desired, shared, positive, pleasant feeling or sense of collective belonging.

Then too, it is necessary to look at the peculiar status of mediation as a social intervention strategy. First, it seems that although mediation is probably incompatible with direct defense of specific social causes, it can indirectly contribute to social justice through enhancing communication between the parties. Indeed, mediation’s classic tenets of neutrality and impartiality make it hard for the mediator to take sides on social issues.

However, the fact that mediation focuses less on the content of conflict than on the form by which to approach it opens up room for communicative action as a source of social justice (cf. Habermas, 1985).

Second, mediation is on the other side both of care work aimed at supporting the basic needs of people and social policy programs that require establishment of contracts between individuals and state agencies. Mediation requires people voluntarily summoning the mediator involved, and as such it is clearly a bottom-up approach.4 Third, for individuals and groups to call on mediators, mediation needs to be strongly promoted and advertised so that it becomes a part of their cultural framework and thus an imaginable possibility. This ties in with what was mentioned earlier regarding the need for widespread training in mediation. Promoting and advertising mediation may make the word more familiar to many people in a relatively short space of time, but it is training— and, of course, the experience of mediation, either as a mediator or as a mediated party—that can change mind-sets. Mediation therefore emerges as a peculiar social intervention instrument: it promotes social change and justice from within, on the basis of voluntary adherence to a given approach to conflict and relationships in general. To be sure, however, not all social intervention can be framed within such an approach.

The question here is then how to find and sustain that difficult balance between mediation of cases and defense of causes. Could it be that the only CONFLICT RESOLUTION QUARTERLY • DOI: 10.1002/crq

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cause a mediator can defend without jeopardizing the most fundamental tenets of mediation is mediation itself? At first glance, this does sound limitative. On the other hand, though, mediation does include plenty of values and procedures lacking in how our societies are organized, and to promote them can be seen as relevant social intervention in itself.

I have also argued previously that a mediator needs to identify recurring conflict between similar types of social actors, and then try to approach them in their structure and not just in their individuality in order to expand the outcomes of his or her work. I am well aware, however, that doing this is anything but neutral. In fact, doing it requires not only theoretical analysis but also establishment of political priorities. So, when they do it, are mediators walking the thin line between mediation of cases and defense of causes, or have they actually crossed it?

Final Remarks To conceive of mediation as a social intervention device has both advantages and limitations. The advantages lay mainly in the fact that it can promote a specific type of social change: transformation of mentality. This is achieved through emphasis on procedural values and communication, and reliance on voluntary adherence to the process. The limitations are on the other side of this. There are difficulties in adopting a more structural approach and in taking on political stances in substantive issues, which is a common feature of social intervention initiatives.

Together with limitations come a few dangers. Mediation can be instrumental in the current neoliberal5 trend that sees social problems as individual problems and global troubles as local troubles (cf. Hamzaoui, 2005). In fact, conflict mediation as a work and research area probably owes more to law and psychology than to sociology, anthropology, or social work. Both psychology and law—meaning, legal reasoning applied to conflict resolution—put more emphasis on the individual than on the collective. Such focus on individuals per se may, however, run the risk of neglecting structural (social, cultural, and economic) elements. In a most extreme case, a mediation session could amount to nothing but a bubble in a suspended reality, a communicative fiction between strangers with an insuperable distance between them. It is in this way that mediation could be instrumental to the neoliberal trend that demands individual—but often impossible or sterile—responsibility.

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The theory and practice of mediation do not escape the paradoxes and ambiguities this current situation generates. In fact, some approaches to mediation are close to a kind of community policing. Here, the mediator becomes a sort of vigilant, a civilian law-and-order agent, a neighborhood and public transport watchman (cf. Milburn, 2002; Wieviorka, 2002; DIV and CNFPT, 2004). Other approaches, by contrast, seem to fall in the category of romantic; it is as if the mediator’s goodwill were enough to change the world.

None of these approaches seems particularly interesting. The first conflates the mediator’s role with some of the soft roles of police officers. The second resolves methodological problems by neglecting them, shoving them under the rug of idealism. Certainly, we at the Mediação na Comunidade project are not interested in pursuing any of them. This does not mean, however, that we know very well where we are headed.

Notes

1. By this I am referring to actions for the most part framed within implementation of social policies as defined by the state. Such actions can be carried out by local state agencies, religious organizations, or other private entities.

They include, for example, management of Rendimento Social de Inserção (a guaranteed minimum income, like the French Revenu Minimum d’Insertion), support to the elderly and the disabled, fighting drug addiction and alcoholism, and so on.

2. A thorough discussion of this demanding topic would certainly take me well beyond the scope of this article.

3. This is due to the notion that the person at risk is the one who has problems in organizing his or her own life project.

4. To be sure, here I am considering that voluntary participation of the parties—another classic tenet of mediation—is upheld.

5. I am using the Continental European, not the American, sense of liberal.

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Six, J.-F. Les Médiateurs. Paris: Le Cavalier Bleu, 2003.

Thompson, D. R., and DuBow, F. L. “Organizing for Community Mediation: the Legacy of Community Boards of San Francisco as a Social-Movement Organization.” In S. E. Merry and N. Milner (eds.), The Possibility of Popular Justice: A Case of Community Mediation in the United States. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995.

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Tiago Neves is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Psychology and Education Sciences of the University of Porto, Portugal, a researcher at CIIE (Centro de Investigação e Intervenção Educativas), and coordinator of the Conflict Mediation Office of Lordelo do Ouro, in Porto.

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