NMI: How the Netherlands Invented a Mediator Certification System Later Copied by the World

In the article about the International Mediation Institute (IMI), it was already mentioned that the Dutch Mediation Institute handed over its ready-made practical expertise to the newly created Hague foundation, and that the Dutch model was “virtually the only truly developed example of such a system in the world.” This phrase requires expanding upon, as behind it lies a twenty-year history that deserves separate attention.

Nederlands Mediation Instituut (NMI) — was not an organization that provided mediation services to disputing parties, nor was it a company that trained mediators for money. It was an independent nationwide quality infrastructure that solved one specific practical task: ensuring that a client looking for a mediator in the Netherlands could trust the claimed qualifications of a specific individual. What NMI built for one small country in the 1990s became the prototype upon which IMI built its global architecture in 2007. The Dutch institute is the “prequel” without which the global system would have had nowhere to start.

October 1993: Mediation Gets an Official Face

In October 1993, an event took place in the Netherlands that likely did not look particularly revolutionary at the time: a new organization was founded. However, it was then that mediation in the country received an official institutional face for the first time.

Prior to this, mediation in the Netherlands existed as an informal practice of enthusiasts—predominantly corporate lawyers from the construction and business sectors who knew about alternative dispute resolution methods from arbitration experience and wanted to apply similar logic to negotiation processes. Among the pioneers were Jan Goossens and Paul Wolters, both corporate lawyers from the construction sector who encountered mediation as a tool and decided that it required its own organizational infrastructure. Wolters became the board secretary in 1994, and from 1998, the first director of NMI, becoming one of the chief architects of what the organization built over the following decade.

The intention from the very beginning was not to provide services. The concept was to set quality standards for everyone who provides these services: to form a register of mediators, develop rules of conduct, launch a complaint system and disciplinary law, and accredit training programs. In other words, to build an infrastructure of trust for an entire profession—just as bar associations or medical boards had once done for their respective fields.

How the System Worked in Practice

The central product of NMI became the Register of Mediators—a public list of specialists whose qualifications were confirmed by the organization. However, the register itself means nothing without a system that decides who enters it and who does not.

NMI built this system through several tiers. The first tier was the accreditation of training programs: not every mediation course counted, but only those that received NMI recognition as meeting established standards of content and methodology. The second tier was individual mediator registration, which required proof of real practical experience, not just course completion. The third tier was the higher qualification category, “NMI Certified Mediator,” for which the bar was significantly higher and included a separate assessment of practical skills.

Separately, NMI developed its own Mediation Rules (NMI Mediation Rules), adopted in 1995 and updated in 2000, as well as a Code of Conduct for Mediators, a complaint handling system, and an independent disciplinary procedure. This meant that an NMI-registered mediator did not simply “complete training”—they assumed specific commitments regarding standards of work and agreed to an accountability mechanism in case of violations.

The key feature of the entire structure was independence. NMI consciously positioned itself not as an industry lobby for mediators, nor as a commercial service provider, but as an independent nationwide quality body, neutral regarding the interests of individual specialists and interested solely in protecting standards. By 2005, the NMI register listed around four thousand mediators, about one thousand of whom held full certified status.

Ministry of Justice, Courts, and Pilot Programs

That NMI managed to build an independent quality system is important in itself. But even more important is that this system gained recognition from the state—and this recognition fundamentally altered the role of the institute.

By the late 1990s, the Dutch Ministry of Justice began seriously exploring whether mediation could be integrated into the judicial system as an additional dispute resolution tool. In September 1999, the first pilot project for referring court cases to mediation began in two district courts. The Ministry of Justice decided to select and monitor the quality of mediators for this project jointly with NMI: the already established registration and accreditation system made the Dutch institute a natural partner for a state that needed a proven infrastructure rather than another pilot from scratch.

The pilots ran until 2005, covering various types of cases—civil, family, and administrative—and different referral methods, ranging from a judge’s proposal during a hearing to written notices to the parties. The findings of the Ministry of Justice research center, published in the report “Space for Mediation” (Ruimte voor Mediation), confirmed that the court referral system made sense and could be implemented at the national level. Starting in April 2005, a nationwide system for court-connected mediation referrals became operational across the country.

This integration had long-term consequences: the Council for the Judiciary and the Legal Aid Board of the Netherlands began to officially recognize only mediators registered in the NMI (and later MfN) register. This was not merely symbolic recognition: courts literally referred parties to specific specialists from the list, and gaining entry to this list was possible only through the NMI system. Thus, an independent quality system transformed into a de facto industry standard officially backed by the state.

Transformation into MfN and the System’s Legacy

In 2014, NMI reorganized and changed its name, becoming the Mediatorsfederatie Nederland (MfN)—the Netherlands Mediation Federation. This was neither a liquidation nor a replacement of one structure by another; it was a reformatting of functions. The task of maintaining the register and upholding the quality system passed to the Stichting Kwaliteit Mediators (SKM), the Mediator Quality Foundation, while MfN focused on representing the professional community’s interests before society and the state.

The MfN Register, successor to the NMI register, remains the primary qualification benchmark for mediators in the Netherlands today. The Council for the Judiciary and the Legal Aid Board continue to recognize only MfN-registered specialists for work within the court-connected referral system.

The key sign of continuity between NMI and MfN is the unchanged logic: not a single organization that trains and controls everything, but a system of accredited partners united by common standards and an independent register. It was precisely this logic that Annette van Riemsdijk brought to the negotiations regarding the founding of IMI in 2006–2007, and it became the foundation of IMI’s global architecture with its CMTP, QAP, and Feedback Digest.

Why the Dutch Model Proved Unique for Europe

To understand why NMI was so significant beyond the Netherlands, it is worth looking at the broader European context of the early 2000s. In most EU countries, mediation either lacked institutional infrastructure entirely or was regulated by individual commercial centers without nationwide standards. There was no single register, no unified criteria for accrediting training programs, and no independent disciplinary system.

By 2005, NMI had all of this—and had it in a form recognized by the state. This combination—independence from commercial interests, recognition from the judicial system and the Ministry of Justice, unified standards for mediators and training programs, and a public multi-tiered register—made the Dutch model the “model” that did not exist in the UK, France, or Germany at the time of IMI’s founding.

That is why, when three organizations from three different continents sat down in 2006 to plan a global mediator certification standard, the Dutch representative arrived not with theoretical concepts, but with a fully working system. And that is why the new Hague foundation was registered in the Netherlands—not only because of the neutral status of The Hague, but also because the Dutch mediation ecosystem already existed as a real infrastructure of trust that could be scaled globally.

NMI in the Chain of Institutions

Previous articles in this series have outlined the general architecture: CEDR, ICC, WIPO, and EUIPO provide mediation services directly to parties; IMI sets global mediator qualification standards; GEMME influences judges who refer cases to mediation. NMI—and today MfN—occupies a special place in this chain: it is a national model that demonstrated how all these functions can be combined into a single working ecosystem within one country.

Service providers, mediator quality standards, referring courts, and a recognizing state—in the Netherlands, all these elements found a way to interact within a single institutional field. This did not happen automatically, nor was it the result of a single top-down decision. It is the result of twenty years of gradual building: first a register, then rules, then court pilot projects, then state recognition, and finally reorganization to respond to new industry challenges.

This gradualness is perhaps the most important lesson of NMI for any country just starting to build its own mediation infrastructure—including Ukraine, which passed its Law on Mediation in 2021 and now faces the question: how to transform a legislative framework into a functioning system of trust in a new profession. The Dutch answer to this question has taken more than thirty years and continues to unfold today.