New Paper explores community Mediation Research in Nepal for poor and rural Nepalese. The formal judicial system is largely inaccessible and of little value. Owing to the different ethnic and linguistic population, Nepal’s different regions and groups have had their own exclusive and indigenously evolved customs for resolving disputes.
Community mediation has emerged and evolved as an alternative for dispute resolution for local communities for whom the formal legal system could be costly as well as unmanageable. However, community mediation is quite distinct from the older, traditional “councils of elders,” it also appears to be different in real-life applications from the descriptions first offered by professional mediators and NGOs.
The 10th in The Asia Foundation’s “Occasional Paper” series “Staying True in Nepal: Understanding Community Mediation through Action Research” explore the use of participatory action research as a method to intensify the practice of mediation at the village level in rural Nepal. The names synonymous with this series are John Paul Lederach, Professor of International Peace building, University of Notre Dame and Asia Foundation Senior Program Officer Preeti Thapa. The paper analyzes as how mediation has evolved using practice and also as a response to daily conflict during and after the nation’s civil war which includes discussion of how participatory action research has affected the practice of community mediation.
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