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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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