By Rosie Chadwick
A silver lining of COVID has been the chance to link online with people round the world working restoratively. This week’s destination was New Zealand for a webinar hosted by Mediators Beyond Borders International looking at Using Restorative Practices for Environmental Disputes.
For the last 10 years, cases brought to the country’s specialist Environment Court have been able to access restorative meetings – though with no guarantee that judges will respect the outcomes when it comes to sentencing.
Presenters Penny Prescott and Wayne Marriott shared learning from a recent case where a sub-contractor had extracted gravel from a river illegally, causing fish to die. Participants in the restorative meeting included the main contractor, three Government agencies responsible for different aspects of the environment (each of whom came with prepared ‘scopes of work’ that could be part of contractor reparations) and the local indigenous people, or ‘people of the land.’
The gulf in perceptions of the parties at the meeting came through strongly in Penny and Wayne’s account. The contractor came keen to reassure that the damage could be fixed. For the people of the land the issue was not just with this incident but why such incidents kept happening and the ignorance it showed of the river course and its role in their food gathering.
The facilitators hoped that the harm caused and options for repair could be looked at in a single meeting. The people of the land were clear that redress shouldn’t be discussed in some remote meeting room but should take place on site, where people could see the damage that had happened and be helped to understand its significance.
The contractor was keen to reach agreement on redress before the case went to court for sentencing. The people of the land had a different time horizon and were eager that redress should not be rushed.
Another striking feature from the case study was the effort that went in to addressing the power imbalance between meeting participants. In this case, steps included paying the people of the land for their time, avoiding a situation where they were the only people in the room not being paid for taking part.
‘Do corporations do anything different as a result?’ asked a person on the call. The answer was that by and large they do, often because they think it will affect sentencing, but that lasting change depends on the voices of the people attending the restorative meeting being involved in decisions at every level in an equitable way.