It is curious that, as formal training in private negotiation increases, the quality of public negotiation has fallen into such disrepair. Business people negotiating a private deal are trained to listen attentively, in order to discover their counterparty's interests, and to devise beneficial options that accomodate them. Yet listening is something one seldom...
Tag Archives: Culture
At the recent meeting of the ABA Dispute Resolution Section in Denver, Dai Kato of the University of Colorado and Jay Folberg of the JAMS Foundation offered stimulating -- even inspirational -- examples of modern-day practices of dispute resolution in Japan and Bali. These insights test our assumptions of how...
Continuing with the series on models of conflict resolution that are not based on the parties' interests, below is reproduced another chapter in a proposed book on alternatives to Western mediation methods. This one -- the Arab practice of sulha -- is centuries old, pre-dating even the Prophet, and its motivating considerations are an...
As the next installment in a series of essays on alternatives to interest-based negotiation, the Hawaiian practice of ho'oponopono is discussed. In this spiritually-influenced ritual, secular conflicts are identified, brought to the table, admitted, and forgiven, and the family group achieves reconciliation and forgiveness....
Over the transom from our good friends at the International Mediation Institute comes this announcement: The Inter-Cultural Taskforce of the IMI Independent Standards Commission (ISC), after a year of meetings and consultation, is publishing for comment Draft Criteria for the planned IMI Inter-Cultural Competency Certification of Mediators. Organisations approved by the ISC as an...
This post comes from the island of Luzon, in the Philippines, where a team from the Corporate Social Responsibility Project of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government has worked on a film documenting the tensions between operators of two hydroelectric dams and the communities that were inundated, destroyed and displaced during the...
Over the past years, many of us have been impressed by the limitations of both institutional dispute resolution systems (i.e., courts) and their alternatives (i.e., arbitration and mediation). At the same time, I've been increasingly drawn to examples found in certain societies whose shared spiritual beliefs have produced systems of dispute resolution that...