Community mediation

Abstract

This paper outlines the successful development of the traditional mediation template into a community‐based model. The history of community mediation is explored within the context of the United States in the 1960s, and in Australia and New Zealand during the mid‐1980s. Recent developments in New Zealand – with particular emphasis on the promising developments occurring in Christchurch, Waitakere and Dunedin – are evaluated, though this paper acknowledges that there are limited statistics available since these schemes have only been running for a few years at most. Finally this paper takes three foundation models first postulated by Harrington and Merry, and later by Bush and Folger, and applies these models to the existing New Zealand community mediation schemes to evaluate their success.