Many mediators have been taught, explicitly or implicitly, that part of our ethical role is to “balance power”. At the same time, we are told that we must remain impartial. Both are framed as professional virtues. Rarely do we pause to ask whether they can comfortably coexist.
What do we actually mean by “power”?
Before critiquing the idea of power balancing, it helps to slow down and unpack what we mean by power in the first place.
In mediation, power is rarely singular or stable. It shows up in multiple, overlapping ways, including:
- Structural power (status, authority, resources, organisational role)
- Relational power (confidence, emotional fluency, communication style)
- Procedural power (familiarity with mediation, legal knowledge, language)
- Narrative power (whose story sounds credible, coherent, reasonable)
Power shifts moment to moment. It gathers, dissipates, changes direction. And mediators are always standing inside it, not outside it.
Once we see power this way, the idea that a mediator can objectively identify it, measure it, and then rebalance it starts to look far less certain.
A question for reflection:
- When you say a party is “less powerful”, which kind of power are you actually referring to?
The ethical contradiction
Impartiality asks mediators to:
- avoid favouring one party over another
- avoid aligning with outcomes
- avoid substituting our judgement for the parties’ judgement
Power-balancing interventions often require us to:
- interrupt one party more than another
- provide additional support, explanation, or reality-checking to one party
- reshape how a party’s story is heard or taken seriously
Put plainly:
If impartiality means treating parties even-handedly, power balancing often requires treating them differently.
This is the moment where many students and practitioners feel cognitive dissonance. We sense that something does not quite add up, but we are rarely invited to sit with that discomfort for long.
Questions for reflection:
- When does ethical responsiveness become partiality?
- Who decides what “enough” balancing looks like?
The hidden risks of trying to balance power
Most mediators who attempt to balance power do so with care and good intent. That deserves acknowledgment. But good intentions do not insulate us from risk.
Some of the less examined risks include:
1. Misdiagnosis
We may simply get power wrong. Confidence can mask vulnerability. Quietness can be strategic. Cultural communication styles can be misread as weakness. Once we act on a misdiagnosis, our intervention compounds the problem.
2. Paternalism
In trying to protect a party perceived as “weaker”, we risk undermining their agency or credibility. This risk is particularly acute for women, neurodivergent parties, and people from marginalised groups, who are already over-positioned as fragile or in need of management.
3. Loss of legitimacy
Even when ethically motivated, power-balancing interventions may be experienced as bias. Perceived impartiality matters. Once parties sense alignment, the relational fabric of mediation begins to fray.
4. Moral leakage
Our own values, justice instincts, discomfort, and cultural assumptions quietly shape who we intervene for, how often, and in what ways. Wanting to balance power does not make us neutral. It makes us ethical actors with preferences, judgements, and blind spots.
Impartiality is not neutrality, and it is not fairness as outcome
Under AMDRAS, impartiality is about freedom from bias, preference, or favouritism. It is not about ensuring equal outcomes, equal confidence, or equal rhetorical skill.
Impartiality is an orientation rather than a mechanical rule. It is reflected in how mediators relate to parties, offer process choices, and exercise influence.
When mediators attempt to balance power, they inevitably make judgements about:
- who has “too much” power
- who has “too little”
- what an acceptable balance looks like
- when intervention is justified
These judgements are not neutral. They are value-laden, culturally shaped, and deeply personal.
In other words, power balancing requires the mediator to take sides, even if subtly and unconsciously.
The paradox: correcting power by using power
There is an uncomfortable paradox at the heart of power balancing.
To balance power, the mediator must use their own power.
That power is substantial. Mediators control:
- the structure of the conversation
- who speaks and when
- what gets reframed, summarised, or ignored
- which options are explored and which are parked
When we use that power to correct perceived imbalances, we shift from facilitator to quiet arbiter. We become managers of whose voice matters more.
This is not impartiality. It is a form of paternalism, even when motivated by care.
As Baruch Bush and Folger remind us, empowerment cannot be delivered by someone else. When mediators attempt to create empowerment by compensating for weakness, they often replace self-determination with benevolent control.
Whose definition of power are we using?
Power is rarely located in just one place.
A party who appears disempowered in one moment may hold significant power elsewhere:
- emotional leverage
- moral authority
- narrative credibility
- long-term relational influence
Mediator interventions often rely on surface indicators such as confidence, fluency, professional status, or emotional expression. These indicators are culturally loaded. They privilege certain communication styles and disadvantage others.
Ironically, attempts to correct power imbalances can reproduce new ones, shaped by the mediator’s own worldview.
The mediator’s assessment of power is not objective truth. It is an interpretation.
Once we accept that, the ethical footing becomes much shakier.
What parties experience when power is “balanced”
From the party on the receiving end of mediator correction, power balancing can feel like:
- being managed
- being subtly judged
- having agency constrained
From the party being “helped”, it can feel like:
- being patronised
- being positioned as fragile
- having their voice filtered through the mediator
Neither experience supports trust. Neither supports genuine self-determination.
Impartiality is not just an ethical obligation. It is something parties feel.
So what should mediators do instead?
Rejecting power balancing does not mean ignoring power.
It means shifting our focus from redistributing power to designing fair process conditions.
Impartial mediators:
- offer transparent process choices to all parties
- name dynamics without assigning blame
- invite reflection rather than impose correction
- support capacity without substituting agency
In practice, this might look like:
- asking parties how they want the conversation structured
- checking consent around interventions
- slowing the process rather than steering content
- using private sessions ethically and sparingly
- being explicit about role boundaries
The ethical task is not to eliminate power. It is to work with it consciously and reflexively.
The uncomfortable truth
Balancing power often feels like doing something. Impartiality can feel passive by comparison.
But impartiality is not inaction. It is disciplined restraint.
It requires mediators to tolerate discomfort, resist rescue, and trust the very principles we claim to stand for.
If mediation is grounded in self-determination, our role is not to correct the world inside the room. It is to create conditions where people can engage with it honestly, even unevenly, and make their own choices.
That is harder. And ethically cleaner.
A brief detour: multi-partiality as a proposed solution
In response to long-standing discomfort with neutrality, some more recent writing has offered multi-partiality as an alternative ethical framing.
Multi-partiality is often described as being actively and even-handedly supportive of all parties’ participation. Rather than standing back in the name of neutrality, the mediator is encouraged to lean in, particularly where one party appears less able to participate effectively.
On the surface, this seems to resolve the contradiction. If the mediator is not required to be neutral, then intervening to support a “weaker” party no longer looks like a breach of ethics. It looks like ethical engagement.
This framing has particular appeal in contexts where power differences are stark, and where strict neutrality can feel cold, detached, or complicit. It acknowledges something mediators already know: we are not invisible, and our choices shape the process whether we admit it or not.
And yet, multi-partiality does not dissolve the problem of power balancing so much as relocate it.
The central questions remain:
- Who decides what support looks like?
- Who decides when participation is “uneven”?
- Who decides which interventions are necessary, and which go too far?
Multi-partiality still requires the mediator to assess power, capacity, and participation. It still involves judgments about who needs more support, and when. In practice, it often authorises the very same interventions associated with power balancing, just under a different ethical label.
In that sense, multi-partiality can legitimise intervention, but it does not eliminate the risks of misdiagnosis, paternalism, or moral leakage. It may even obscure them by framing intervention as inherently virtuous.
This raises a further, uncomfortable question:
If multi-partiality justifies differential treatment in the name of participation, how is it meaningfully different from balancing power, other than in how we explain it to ourselves?
Where this leaves impartiality
For some practitioners, multi-partiality feels like a more honest description of what mediators actually do. For others, it risks loosening ethical boundaries precisely where restraint matters most.
What is striking is that both neutrality and multi-partiality can be used to justify intervention, and both can be used to justify non-intervention. Neither, on its own, resolves the ethical tension.
This suggests that the problem may not lie in choosing the “right” label, but in assuming that any label can remove the need for ongoing ethical judgement and reflexivity.
Reframing the dilemma
Rather than asking whether we should be neutral, impartial, or multi-partial, a more useful question may be:
How do we exercise influence without disguising it, and how do we support participation without substituting our judgement for the parties’ own?
From this perspective, the ethical task is not to balance power, nor to abandon impartiality, but to:
- design processes that maximise informed participation
- be transparent about the nature and purpose of interventions
- check consent rather than assume need
- remain alert to how our values shape our actions
- accept that ethical mediation involves risk, not certainty
Power does not disappear under multi-partiality. It simply becomes more visible. And visibility, while uncomfortable, may be ethically preferable to the illusion of neutrality.