Empowerment

Empowerment

	Empowerment means giving a person or group more power. The party alone, trough education, coalition building, community organizing, resource development, or advocacy assistance may do this. A mediator, who can work with the lower power person or group to help them represent themselves more effectively, can also do it. Although this approach causes ethical dilemmas (since helping one side more than another compromises a mediator’s impartiality), it is quite commonly done in the problem solving or “settlement – oriented” approach to mediation since this approach works best when the two parties are relatively equal in power. Baruch Bush and Joe Folger, however, advocate the empowerment of both parties simultaneously through transformative mediation, which seeks to restore disputants’ “sense of their own value and strength and their own capacity to handle life’s problems.” This approach avoids the ethical dilemmas of one-sided empowerment, though it sacrifices emphasis on achieving a settlement as primary.

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