In August, 17 individuals from around the world were brought together in Cape Town for a week of intensive training on Community-Company Mediation in Complex Environments. The training took a deep dive into how business and economic development can play a positive role in stabilizing complex environments, and also create and exacerbate conflict.
Hosted by the Graduate School of Business University of Cape Town, and sponsored by ACCESS facility and the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the training armed participants with mediation tools and skills to help conflicting parties find common ground and move forward.
Emmanuel M Conteh, an International Volunteer with Search for Common Ground (SFCG) Madagascar, participated in the training and workshop, and shared with DME for Peace what he learned and experienced during that week.
What was the goal of the training?
The goal of the workshop was to improve thinking and practices on rights compatible, interest based approaches to company and community relations in complex environments. Special training is necessary on this topic because a key feature of complex environments is that they often lack the social and political infrastructure commensurate with the challenges they face.
The collected wisdom of the participants was used to enhance the training, making it a participatory and interactive process.
How did the workshop organize the learning experience?
During the week, we (the participants) were immersed in the “alternative learning universe” of Equataina. Through the workshop and roleplaying, we saw the role of mediator filling many different capacities during a mediation process. These roles included,
Mediator as analyst: We looked at sources of fragility and complexity (‘’dividers”), sources of strength and resilience (“connectors”), and sought to understand both dividers and connectors in the context of conflict. As mediators, we need a way to capture our understanding of the context that is efficient, testable, and actionable. To do this, participants practiced – and I recommend others also practice! – identifying and summarizing key social, economic, and political dynamics. Then describe key ways in which a company’s presence and operations may impact those dynamics. Also describe key ways in which a potential intervention may impact those dynamics. These reflections taken together help one begin to understand and define the boundaries of one’s own intervention.
Mediator as listener: The role of mediator as listener requires a mediator to understand conflict dynamics. This can be accomplished through stakeholder mapping and issue assessment considering ways in which mediators develop an appropriate response. That means talking to the people that have a stake to the issues and tracking their various interests.
Mediator as process designer & manager: As mediators, we enter a complex system as a neutral, third party focusing on managing issues, designing and managing an appropriate intervention. It is the duty of the mediator in this role to develop a process proposal that incorporates stakeholders’ perspectives based on feedback from the assessment and the mediator’s analysis of issues to be resolved.
Mediator as facilitator: Working through interest-based negotiations within a rights framework; participants ran the process of how to facilitate a communication that helps parties clarify their interests on the issues, then develop options to address issues and criteria by which to assess those options. This role is completed by bringing together all parties and together weighing options to reach a mutually recognized and understood decision.
Mediator as systems designer: This final role has the goal of durable relationship management. Here we organize our thinking around the relationships of the parties into the future; including flexibility for participatory monitoring and collaborative analysis; resource management; Conflict management and dispute resolution, which must accounts for the defining features of a complex environment such as lower threshold for provocation, limits of skills, will or legitimacy, and limited resilience (the ability to bounce back from shock or conflict).
How did the training help your work?
For my own work and for my organization, I am better equipped to, manage relationships and develop strategies for making relationships durable through expectation collaboration, developing joint monitoring of agreements and operations with attentiveness to the “concentric circles” of substance, implementation processes, and third party support will increases agreement and relationship resilience.
The training helped me understand that company-community mediation can be a highly proactive tool for risk reduction and risk mitigation. It was a unique and fantastic experience for me to spend a week with a group of like-minded peers from around the world, gathered to learn from one another, held together by a common belief in people’s ability to understand each other. I ended the week far wiser than I began it!
To learn more about company-community dialogue, watch this video from ACCESS Facility: “Corporate-Community Dialogue: An Introduction”
ACCESS Facility is a global non-profit organization established to support effective problem solving between companies and communities.
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