Community Trust Building and Peer Mediation Practices for People-centred Justice: Students Are Here to Help.
* Published as part of the 2023 CoI Conference: 'Towards just institutional approaches to conflict prevention and resolution' *
Students are important agents of change in advancing people-centred justice from the bottom up. Specifically, by learning from students—including their understanding of trust through story-sharing and by practicing trust building through peer mediation practices--we can advance the third pillar of the OECD Framework and Good Practice Principles for People-Centred Justice. That is, the empowerment of people.
What is people-centred justice?
People-centred justice is a new practical approach to the rule of law. It places peoples’ needs, experiences, and wishes at the core of justice (e.g., the OECD Framework and Good Practice Principles for People-Centred Justice (the OECD Principles) and the American Bar Association’s Post on people-centred justice here). Instead of understanding and practicing law and justice from the perspective of legal systems (which the formal understanding of access to justice often entails), this approach places citizens and their experiences at the heart of analytical and practical justice lenses. In other words, people-centred justice focuses on what the disputants need and want in relation to their dispute and the justice system as a whole.
Although much has been said and done in the field of the rule of law, the “people-centred” approach to justice is still missing in the Netherlands and internationally. There are still some notable initiatives, however. In the Netherlands, for example, The Hague Institute for Innovation of Law has been a pioneer in promoting a people-centred approach to justice – see, for example, here and here. Internationally, the aforementioned OECD Principles and the work of the World Justice Project or the Pathfinders should be mentioned, among the work of other stakeholders. Yet I would argue that more initiatives should focus on the third pillar of the OECD Principles, namely the raising awareness and empowerment activities regarding the dispute resolution capabilities of citizens (regarding the term “dispute resolution capabilities” see here).
Why is people-centred justice important, and what are we missing in the public debates about trust?
The recent debates on people-centred justice uncover deeper legitimacy problems of today’s regulatory and governance processes. Those problems are manifested both in the academic literature on rulemaking and governance and in recent social and political crises shedding light on the work of public officials vis-à-vis citizens. Regarding the former, we see the calls for polycentricity and collective action in climate governance by Ostrom, discussions about the multistakeholder model of Internet governance by Jan Aart Scholte, and calls for more democratic (and meaningful) participation in global governance and multilevel regulation (by citizens or NGOs) (here, here, and here). Regarding the latter, take, for example, the tax benefit scandal (toeslagenaffaire) in the Netherlands, or the rule of law backsliding in Europe, including in Poland. The tax benefit scandal exposed loopholes in the formal (justice) systems, excluding citizens’ perspectives and needs in the regulatory processes, largely undermining citizens’ trust in formal (administrative) procedures. The cascading political pressures on the judicial system in Poland, fueled by the attacks on women’s reproductive rights by state-sanctioned institutions, brought many citizens to the streets to protest the authoritarian practices that disregard people’s perspectives, experiences, and needs.
All those debates focus predominantly on citizens’ trust (or distrust), often measured by different barometers (such as the one here). Yet, we rarely ask citizens the question of what trust actually means to them, especially in more social, relational contexts (that is, while interacting with family, peers, or neighbours) and how this understanding of trust, in principle, contributes to their understanding of trust vis-à-vis formal authorities (if at all). What is more, we rarely focus on students as the agents of change towards more trustworthy and inclusive societies. This can be done by learning from students about trust as a relational concept and also by practicing trust building through peer practices (such as peer mediation). In the long run, such an approach can contribute to advancing principles of people-centred justice from the bottom up (more on this point below).
The missing link: the role of students as agents of change. The case of the Trust MEdiators’ project
I argue that more participatory, equal, and just dispute resolution (that all together form the principles of people-centred justice) should incorporate both the bottom-up experiences of community trust building and transferable soft skills that originate in peer mediation practices, as evidenced by our Trust MEdiators’ Toolkit. The Toolkit was developed in the context of the educational project, the Comenius Senior Fellow Project, funded by the Netherlands Initiative for Education Research (NRO). In our project, we focused on students as agents of their local and international communities and hence the bottom-up (private) actors in the field of conflict prevention and conflict resolution (theme 1 of the 2023 Institutions for Conflict Resolution Conference). Students involved in the project participated in three interrelated activities: (a) the development of a citizen science platform through which we collected stories and anecdotes on trust building and dispute resolution (so-called “the wisdom of the crowd”), (b) writing their own peer mediation scenarios, (c) and participating and mediating in peer mediation sessions. Based on those activities, we developed a Toolkit on how to be(come) trustworthy mediators through several (raising awareness) exercises and practical tips.
How do students understand trust?*
We launched two sets of questions on our platform. We received 80 responses from volunteers around the world, which serve as important insights into the understanding of trust by students and occasionally also professionals who took part in our study. When asked the question: “What is trust to you?” volunteers answered that it is “faith in the good nature of a person”, the “(subconscious) knowledge [that the person(s) will not do anything to harm you”, “the main value you can find in a person”, a “bond”, a “feeling”, a “firm belief,” “confidence in a mutually positive relationship,” and “having respect” towards someone. Notably, a few volunteers pointed to the reciprocity of trust, stating that it is “mutual” and “something that requires time and/or proof to gain.” In a similar vein, another person reported that trust concerns “building a connection with someone”. All responses to the question at hand will be annexed to the final version of the Toolkit.
Can we practice trust building?*
In the training based on our Toolkit, we often conduct group discussions on students' individual understanding of trust. Afterwards, we present to students a two-tier trust model by Daniel McAllister from Georgetown University. McAllister distinguished between cognitive and affective trust, with the former called "trust of the head," meaning the confidence we have in other people through their skills, expertise, and achievements (for the interpretation of McAllister’s model, see here). The latter, called "trust of the heart," means connection with another person through a personal relationship involving some emotional investments (Ibidem). Cognitive trust is often task-oriented, while affective trust is often relationship-based (here). This distinction helps to raise awareness among students that trust does not only originate in emotions but can also be cognitive, hence based on a more scientific explanation of why we tend to trust someone. This, in turn, gives us useful hints that certain behaviors can be learnt or anticipated while building a relationship of trust. This constitutes the starting point for more in-depth exercises concerning trust building and peer mediation based on our Toolkit.
Student-science and people-centred justice
In sum, through our project, we wish to advance the role of students as the agents of their local and international communities in building trust in relational contexts and hence trustworthy societies more generally. We hope that this training can contribute to advancing people-centred justice, especially as defined in the third pillar of the OECD Principles, that is, by empowering individuals to increase their dispute resolution capabilities and ultimately to co-create the justice systems based on their experiences and needs. Our Toolkit is currently being finalised and we hope to share it will the public shortly.
*These sections of the blog post are largely reproduced from our Toolkit (yet unpublished)
Dr. Barbara Warwas, Professor/Lector Multilevel Regulation at The Hague University of Applied Sciences. She will speak at the 2023 CoI Conference 'Towards just institutional approaches to conflict prevention and resolution'
