Publications

In the last decade, unprecedented storm events—from Superstorm Sandy to hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria— have sent a clear message to coastal cities across the nation: We must do more to anticipate and manage severe flooding and other climate-related disruptions. Some cities have already begun this work by mapping their vulnerabilities and looking for ways to enhance their resilience. New York, San Francisco, and Boston are among those considering changes in land-use regulation, investments in conservation, and infrastructure modifications aimed at protecting high-value coastal areas and the people who live and work in them. Philanthropic initiatives such as the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities have helped in this regard.

Many water governance and management issues are complex. The complexity of these issues is related to crossing of multiple boundaries: political, social and jurisdictional, as well as physical, ecological and biogeochemical. Resolution of these issues usually requires interactions of many parties with conflicting values and interests operating across multiple boundaries and scales to make decisions. The interdependence and feedback among interacting variables, processes, actors and institutions are hard to model and difficult to forecast. Thus, decision-making related to complex water problems needs be contingent and adaptive. This paper draws on a number of ideas from complexity science and negotiation theory that may make it easier to cope with the complexities and difficulties of managing boundary crossing water disputes. It begins with the Water Diplomacy Framework that was developed and tested over the past several years. Then, it uses three key ideas from complexity science (interdependence and interconnectedness; uncertainty and feedback; emergence and adaptation) and three from negotiation theory (stakeholder identification and engagement; joint fact finding; and value creation through option generation) to show how application of these ideas can help enhance effectiveness of water management.

Full article.

Entrepreneurs, whose job is to transform ideas into new products or services for which there is a market, pride themselves on creating disruption and driving innovation. But they often fumble key interactions because they don't know how to handle the negotiation challenges that almost always arise.

Entrepreneurship typically entails a series of interactions between founders, partners, potential partners, investors, and others at various stages of the entrepreneurial process – from the “seed” stage when the business is just an idea to the “exit” stage when the entrepreneur sells or departs. We have scrutinized the full range of entrepreneurial negotiations seeking to identify the most common negotiation mistakes that entrepreneurs make, and in this article we describe eight of them. We discuss how they can learn to prevent these mistakes – especially through proper preparation – and which strategies they can deploy to overcome the mistakes they do make.

The MIT-UTM 'Malaysia Sustainable Cities Program' (MSCP) is a five-year collaboration between MIT and Universiti Teknologi Malaysia. It brings eight to ten scholars a year from universities in the developing world to Malaysia for four months to document efforts in one of five Malaysian cities to reduce their carbon intensity and promote sustainable city development. The scholars then spend four months at MIT organizing their findings in working papers and educational videos for global distribution. The 27 scholars who have participated thus far have focused on disaster preparedness, flood protection, sustainable tourism, ecosystem conservation, water management, community engagement, socially responsible real estate development, the status of migrant workers, sustainable transportation, protecting cultural heritage, promoting renewable energy, greening the building process and urban regeneration. Since our primary objective is south-south learning, that’s what we will focus on in this short paper.

Roland Scholz and his team have done a fine job of drawing attention to what they see as the important insights contained in Brunswik’s Theory of Probabilistic Functionalism (TPF). And, they have made a praiseworthy effort to demonstrate how Brunswik’s insights can be applied to many kinds of organisms or systems, at many levels and, at the same time, contribute to the management of social complexity. In its scope, Scholz’s paper is truly transdisciplinary. (So much so, that I am not adequately equipped to comment on several portions of the review.) The primary goal of the paper is to demonstrate that it is possible to apply Brunswik’s insights about visual perception, including contemporary knowledge about its corresponding biological processes, to the way we understand social phenomena (like the functioning of human groups). Therefore, I will focus on the portion of the paper that seeks to explore this connection.

I worked with Howard Raiffa for almost three decades, first to create the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School (PON) and then to build the Consensus Building Institute, a nonprofit organization that I founded in 1993. Most of the time, I felt more like one of his students than a faculty colleague. I could always learn something from Howard, even from the most casual interaction. I just had to ask the right questions, and then listen, and I always regretted it if I did not write down what he said.

I want to focus on four concepts that Howard developed and their impact on me. They are:

• post-settlement settlement;
• collaborative preparation of negotiation templates;
• full open truthful exchange (FOTE) versus partial open truthful exchange (POTE); and
• approaches to multiparty negotiation.