Designing and Developing Mediation Systems
in a Bureaucracy

HOWARD BELLMAN
JANINE P.GESKE
EVA SOEKA

ABSTRACT

Country:
U.S.A.

Language:
English

Roundtable discussion and workshop format. The speakers in a round table format will describe how they have been involved in creating mediation systems in small claims court, in a statewide mediation system, a guardianship mediation program and in the criminal justice field through use of restorative justice. The participants will be shown how to develop a mediation system in an existing bureaucratic setting by getting all the stakeholders together and working towards a creative design that will address the particular conflicts faced by that bureaucracy.

The presenters will take the participants through the various steps needed including the training of mediators for the project. The participants will also be provided with written materials which describe these processes. The participants will have the opportunity to role-play teachers, parents, social workers and other interested parties as the presenters work to design a mediation model that will address the problems faced in a high school. The participants will able to experience, through this workshop, the importance of getting all the interested parties involved early and to get them to buy into the mediation model.

By role playing the stakeholders, they will better understand the perspective of someone who is involved in a bureaucracy and who has little hope for resolving the conflict that they experience in their work. Finally they will be able to actually see how a designed system gets put into place and monitored.

HOWARD BELLMAN
has served as Secretary to Wisconsin's Department of Industry, Labor and Human Relations. He has mediated complex multi-party disputes and he has guest lectured at Cornell, Minnesota, Oberlin, Harvard, Yale, and the University of Wisconsin.

EVA SOEKA
is the director of the Marquette University Center for Dispute Resolution and the University's Graduate Program in Dispute Resolution. She has participated in the design and development of special education and adult guardianship mediation systems in the State of Wisconsin as well as court-connected alternative dispute resolution systems

JANINE P.GESKE,
Distinguished Professor of Law, Marquette University Law School, Associate Adjunct Professor in Advanced Problems of Dispute Resolution, Marquette University Graduate Program in Dispute Resolution, Private ADR/Litigation Consulting Practice, 1998-, Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice 1993-1998.