ADR in Pakistan: Why has court-annexed mediation not reached its potential?

Abstract

In Pakistan, court-annexed mediation has been advocated as an intervention to minimize court overload, time loss, and legal expenses, but its empirical effect is less evident. This paper seeks to discuss the reasons why court-annexed mediation has failed to reach its desired potential and the legal, institutional, and socio-cultural obstacles that inhibit its efficacy. It serves as a convergent mixed-method study combining doctrinal legal study with data collected based on interviews with judges, lawyers, mediators, court employees, surveys and existing court statistics. The results show that uncertainty about the regulation is the major cause of low uptake, lack of institutional capacity, mismatch of professional incentives and views on mediation as informal and subject to power imbalance especially in family disputes. The paper finds that court-annexed mediation in Pakistan needs implementation-oriented reforms, such as better regulatory frameworks, mediator accreditation and systematic referral processes to improve legitimacy and access to justice.