Publications

Cities, particularly those in coastal areas around the world, need to pay close attention to the risks posed by global warming and climate change. These risks are substantial, and the costs of not taking them into account are likely to be enormous. Planners should take the lead in preparing climate mitigation and adaptation plans, although these need to be approached somewhat differently from other planning assignments. Adaptation planning, in particular, should be viewed as a collective risk management task. As such, new tools for collaboration such as scenario planning, joint fact-finding and the use of role-play simulations to build public support in the face of high levels of uncertainty and complexity might be helpful.

State officials in Maryland realize that efforts to adapt to climate change require local support. They also understand that the uncertainty and complexity surrounding climate change make it hard for localities to reach agreement on what to do. Larry Susskind and Evan Paul of MIT worked with state officials to design a role-play simulation—that other states can now use— to help local leaders figure out how to manage climate change risks.

Negotiation analysts have increasingly focused on the internal decision-making dynamics in the minds of the parties. They ought to give more attention to the ways in which meaning is jointly constituted through sequences of verbal and nonverbal exchanges. The tools of conversation analysis (CA) and discourse analysis (DA) can be helpful in this regard.

Negotiation depends on communication. Whatever else goes on during a negotiation, parties attempt to manage their differences and reach agreements through exchanges of messages that make up sequences of moves and countermoves. Complementing language use, negotiation interaction is unavoidably situated within physical and social environments that can function as resources for negotiators: location (institutional, architectural), embodiment (posture, gesture, laughter, eye gaze), modes of communication (documents, symbol systems, telephones, e-mails), and social relationships. Furthermore, even the “mental” elements of negotiation (goals, planning and strategizing, emotional reactions, evaluating outcomes, etc.) are communicatively constituted, made public, and mutually understood in and through interaction. More than simply representing and conveying information, communication is the means by which social actors create meanings, outcomes, identities, and relationships.

In a recent book entitled Planning with Complexity, Judith Innes and David Booher (2010) make the case for a new way of knowing and deciding that they call collaborative rationality, an approach to problem solving that puts a premium on face-to-face dialogue and multiparty negotiation. Collaborative rationality involves interactions among a great many people with different perspectives, drawing on multiple sources of information, who manage to reach agreement. To explain how such broad-based collaboration is possible, Innes and Booher draw on insights from the field of complexity science.

The Glen Canyon Dam Adaptive Management Program (AMP) has been identified as a model for natural resource management. We challenge that assertion, citing the lack of progress toward a long-term management plan for the dam, sustained extra-programmatic conflict, and a downriver ecology that is still in jeopardy, despite over ten years of meetings and an expensive research program. We have examined the primary and secondary sources available on the AMP’s design and operation in light of best practices identified in the literature on adaptive management and collaborative decision-making. We have identified six shortcomings: (1) an inadequate approach to identifying stakeholders; (2) a failure to provide clear goals and involve stakeholders in establishing the operating procedures that guide the collaborative process; (3) inappropriate use of professional neutrals and a failure to cultivate consensus; (4) a failure to establish and follow clear joint fact-finding procedures; (5) a failure to produce functional written agreements; and (6) a failure to manage the AMP adaptively and cultivate long-term problem-solving capacity.

Over the past twenty-five years, public dispute resolution has emerged as an important area of practice — linked, in part, to ongoing efforts to promote deliberative democracy.As the field has evolved, however, the market for public dispute mediators has shifted. It is already possible to glimpse the further shifts and the new intellectual challenges likely to face the public dispute resolution field over the next twenty-five years.