Joint Environmental Mediation Service in the Middle East

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Published June, 2000
Keywords:
CBI Practitioners: 
Michele Ferenz
CBI Practitioners: 
Merrick Hoben
CBI Practitioners: 
Stacie Nicole Smith

 

Whatever political solutions are reached, Israelis and Palestinians will continue to share a region scarce in natural resources. The stability of the area is threatened by ongoing tensions over infrastructure development, management of water supplies and the need for waste management. Successful joint environmental problem solving is necessary not only to help improve the quality of life of all participating communities, but also to reduce the risk that larger conflicts are rekindled.

In the summer of 2000, the Joint Environmental Mediation Service (JEMS) was created as a partnership between the Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information (IPCRI), a think-tank devoted to developing practical solutions to the Middle East conflict, and CBI, which took a lead role in its development.

 

Training Goals
The overarching goal of JEMS is to introduce and institutionalize in Israel and the Palestinian Territories, alternative conflict resolution practices that will help produce innovative, comprehensive and durable solutions to shared environmental problems.

Specifically, JEMS aims to:

  • Create a corps of environmental mediation professionals in Israel and the Palestinian Territories through training in the consensus based dispute resolution approaches developed at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School;
  • Employ teams of these professional neutrals to intervene in ongoing, small- and large-scale environmental and resource management disputes; and
  • Develop an institution that can provide mediation services on an ongoing basis to Israelis and Palestinians engaged in environment-related disputes.

 

Initial funding for the organization’s activities was provided by the V. KannRasmussen foundation of Scandinavia and has since been subsidized by a number of smaller grants.

JEMS has its own Board of Advisors, management and administrative staff, who have devoted much of their professional lives to peace-building and/or environmental concerns, and who have deep roots in and extensive knowledge of the Israeli or Palestinian communities. The JEMS office is located in the Tantur Ecumenical Institute, a Vatican-owned facility on the border between Bethlehem and Jerusalem.

 

Accomplishments
Since its inception, JEMS has accomplished two major goals:

1. Negotiation and Mediation Training for environmental professionals.

To date, CBI has held ten major training workshops for a small group of twenty competitively selected, capable and dynamic Israeli and Palestinian environmental professionals. At each of these events, attendance rates have far exceeded expectations given insistent calls for boycotting joint activities issued from many quarters and the very real psychological and physical pressures on participants. The trainings cover all theoretical and practical aspects of the mediation process and include time for non-academic team-building activities. Professional backgrounds of the participants are mostly in areas of engineering, research and policy-making (including affiliations with government ministries), and the average age is approximately 35. The first group of trainees will complete the curriculum in fall 2003.

2. Application of Mediation Techniques to Active Disputes.

At the invitation of concerned parties, teams are also assembled and deployed to assist as impartial mediators in the resolution of active environmental disputes. In three cases, conflict assessments have been undertaken by trainees: a dispute over the refurbishment of the road leading from Jerusalem to Ramallah, Ramallah-El-Bireh solid waste disposal problems, and development of a management plan for the Tzalmon National Park in the Galilee.

In the case of the Tzalmon Park, following the assessment, three (two Jewish and one Arab Israeli) of the most advanced trainees were selected to become the principals, under CBI supervision, of the mediation team working on the conflicts related to the establishment of the park. The mediation has focused on complicated land ownership issues that have prevented detailed planning. Particularly contentious are the rights for the Bedouin, Muslim Arab and Christian communities living along the riverbank and the rights to the river’s water resources.

After a two-year of effort, the mediation resulted in a proposed settlement that was agreed to and signed by nearly all parties to the conflict on July 8, 2004. The agreement allows residents to remain on their land and includes incentives such as park employment to ensure that they help preserve the natural environment. Plans based on this agreement are currently undergoing the lengthy process of state ratification, though several implementation challenges have yet to be resolved.

A thorough case study of this project, written by CBI, points to the importance of using a mediation team that is knowledgeable about local cultural norms and to the difficulties of ensuring appropriate representation in the absence of strong civic culture and organized advocacy groups. The case study highlights the need for ensuring that all parties thoroughly understand the process of consensus building and how it fits with established bureaucratic procedures. It also describes the importance of securing strong support from implementing agencies at the outset.

 

For more information on this case, please contact CBI.