Saturday 12 April 2008

Training  Sessions  (ALL Sessions are fully booked)

Making Public Participation Work: Mediation in the Urban Planning Process
Ursula Caser (Portugal)
Imagine a complex decision making process with lots of stakeholders and a great variety of interests and needs involved.  Imagine that decision making power was transferred completely or partly from public authorities to a group of stakeholders, representatives of all institutionalised actors that will be affected by the decisions to be made.  

In this training you will learn:
* How to do a sound stakeholder analysis
* How to do a precise clarification of aims and objectives of the process
* How to structure an adequate process in a complex context of: uncertainty towards information, facts, methods and future; reduced agreement on how to define the situation/problem; multiplicity of values, interests and needs; diversity of participants with unequal power and competencies; feeling that in the end there will not be a satisfactory solution.
 

The training will be based on examples taken from processes conducted in Portugal within the last 10 years.

 
Training in Self-Awareness for Mediators & Conflict Practitioners
Macarena Mata (Spain) and Barry Winbolt (England)
This training session addresses the aim of: advancement of mediation and exploration of developments in the practice of mediation. The themes addressed are: development of mediation practice, research and evaluation.

Training for conflict resolvers needs to address three areas: skills, theory and research, and development of self-awareness. However, most mediation training is based almost exclusively on skills. On the one hand, this fact widens the already critical gap between theorists and practitioners in mediation. On the other hand, if mediation and conflict resolution in general is going to evolve, mediators need to be trained in the art of self-awareness and its application, by an openness to experiment with new forms of training and learning.

This training session will explore the link between those three areas of mediator’s development using interactive and group exercises, with a focus on tools and understandings for self-awareness and to think about “why we do what we do?” or about the effect of the mediator’s qualities in the mediation process – so that we can deliberately choose what the situation really needs.

 
Mediating Multi-Party Disputes
John Sturrock (Scotland)
This session will focus on the issues raised for mediators, advisers and clients in multi-party mediations. We will cover preparation, logistics, venue, team dynamics, organising meetings, time-scale and time management, co-mediation, common interests and issues of structure and design. There will be an opportunity to participate in a simulated multi-party mediation, with various stages being role-played throughout the session, supported by the session presenters acting as coaches.

 
Mediation & Inter-Community Conflict
Peter O'Reilly (Northern Ireland)
This training is based on over a decade’s experience in mediation in the context of protracted inter-community conflict in Northern Ireland.  It will presume a systemic understanding of conflict.  An underlying theme of the training is how mediation work was been shaped as theory met context. You will learn, through input, discussion and exercises;

• Foundation skills for responding to inter-community conflict creatively.
  Exercises will be used to explore the value of self-awareness and an ‘expansive’ understanding of mediation.

• How to effectively analyse a situation for intervention.
  A scenario will be used to practice situation analysis (e.g. environmental awareness, relational readiness).

• The skills for deciding how ‘macro’ should macro be.
  A second scenario will be used to explore and practice the skills of timing, resource use and integrating processes.

• How to use mediation to grow systems that are “good with conflict”.
  Exercises will be used to help explore and practice the skill of planning strategic change in systems through the development and use of mediation