Many policy analysts believe that once electricity from renewable energy becomes less expensive than electricity from fossil fuel, new renewable energy facilities will be built quickly across the United States. Cost-effective renewable energy has largely been achieved, but there appear to be substantial barriers to building new renewable energy facilities. We identified 53 utility-scale wind, solar, and geothermal energy projects that were delayed or blocked between 2008 and 2021 in 28 U.S. states. Using multi-level qualitative analysis, we have identified seven key sources of opposition. Of the projects we studied, 34% faced significant delays and difficulties securing permits, 49% were cancelled permanently, and 26% resumed after being stopped for several months or years. Project delays and cancellations account for potential lost generating capacity of almost 4600 MW. State and local governments and renewable energy developers need to pay closer attention to the full range of socially-oriented sources of opposition to new facilities.

Local governments in cities around the world will not be able to cope with climate change impacts until they enhance their capacity to adapt. Past efforts to build local capacity, however, have often been unsuccessful. Building municipal capacity to formulate and implement climate adaptation plans will, in our view, require a new approach. Special attention will need to be paid to (1) contingent financial arrangements; (2) widespread and continuous stakeholder engagement; and (3) a commitment to experimental problem-solving. Most important, to respond to the scientific and technical uncertainties surrounding climate risks, local governments will have to enhance their ‘adaptive governance’ capabilities.

We highlight a worrisome situation in American cities—rising water bills that growing numbers of residents cannot afford to pay, leading to water shutoffs. A study of each state’s two largest water utilities suggested fifteen million Americans experienced water shutoffs in 2016. We describe how utility responses to financial challenges facing older cities have caused shutoffs that disproportionally hurt low-income customers. We present new data from public records requests illustrating the scale and distribution of shutoffs in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Detroit, and discuss the potential of income-based pricing to solve the water affordability challenge.

Malaysia has made an ambitious commitment to reduce the intensity of its carbon emissions, notably a 40% reduction (compared to 2005 levels) by 2020 and a 45% reduction (compared to 2005 levels) by 2030. As with other developing countries, Malaysia’s challenge is to decarbonize its energy-centric economy in the face of population growth pressures and substantial levels of poverty. Drawing on extensive interviews with both public and private stakeholders, we examine how Malaysia has launched its transition to a decarbonized development path. Based on our multi-year analysis, we identify key breakout factors, including behavioral transformations, institutional shifts, and action by a broad network of actors that have allowed Malaysia to begin decarbonizing its economy. At the same time, we note that federal-state friction, limited government capacity, the absence of a centralized management agency, the lack of international funding, incipient environmental awareness, and numerous barriers to investment in renewable energy reinforce carbon lock-in. Our analysis suggests ways in which other rapidly developing countries can learn from Malaysia’s initial successes and challenges.

Even when “warring parties” know that eventually they will have to talk to one another so that there can be peace, it is extremely difficult to get them to “fast‐forward” to that moment. The reasons for this vary. Sometimes the parties think that “time is on their side”—that continuing the battle will benefit them. Other times, leaders worry how they will appear in the eyes of their own followers if they seem to have lost heart or are ready to give in. A third reason that parties may not initiate talks is their concern that a willingness to do so may lead the other side to assume that they are ready to give up. This article examines a new way of helping parties move forward in such situations using what is called “breakthrough collaboration,” an idea invented by the Consensus Building Institute. Breakthrough collaboration allows parties to take advantage of a critical moment to initiate preliminary trust‐building activities, share information and send messages through a neutral party, and engage in internal efforts that can make it easier to move toward joint problem‐solving. Such efforts can be triggered by a convener (who is not a party) and assisted by a mediator (who may not meet with the parties simultaneously). The goal is to do more than merely encourage dialogue. The hope is that an extended sequence of facilitated activities or events can lead to a shift in thinking on all sides. The key is to know when a critical moment creates an opportunity for breakthrough collaboration.

As governments have digitized their operations, they have opened themselves to cyberattacks, resulting in harmful disruptions to government services. The scholarly world has been slow to pick up on this growing risk. Professional associations have conducted studies of their own, and produced recommendations, but few scholars have looked closely at cybersecurity practices at the municipal level. The interconnectedness of local infrastructure—across and among agencies and levels of government—makes it hard to figure out what is happening. In this paper, we urge scholars from multiple disciplines to examine the dangers created by the cross-linkages that characterize local cybersecurity. We examine the existing academic research, and demonstrate the significant growth in cybersecurity practice that has cropped up in spite of the relative sparsity of academic work. Theory and practice need to catch up with each other.

This essay is the thirteenth in a series on the recipients of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning Distinguished Educator Award, ACSP’s highest honor. The essays appear in the order the honorees received the award.

Read the full article here.

Technical tools dominate the cyber risk management market. Social cybersecurity tools are severely underutilised in helping organisations defend themselves against cyberattacks. We investigate a class of non-technical risk mitigation strategies and tools that might be particularly effective in managing and mitigating the effects of certain cyberattacks. We call these social-science-grounded methods Defensive Social Engineering (DSE) tools. Through interviews with urban critical infrastructure operators and cross-case analysis, we devise a pre, mid and post cyber negotiation framework that could help organisations manage their cyber risks and bolster organisational cyber resilience, especially in the case of ransomware attacks. The cyber negotiation framework is grounded in both negotiation theory and practice. We apply our ideas, ex post, to past ransomware attacks that have wreaked havoc on urban critical infrastructure. By evaluating how to use negotiation strategies effectively (even if no negotiations ever take place), we hope to show how non-technical DSE tools can give defenders some leverage as they engage with cyber adversaries who often have little to lose.

David Godschalk and I first worked together in the 1970s on a book titled Paternalism, Conflict, and Coproduction (Susskind & Elliot, 1983 Susskind, L., & Elliot, M. (1983). Paternalism, conflict, and coproduction: Learning from citizen action and citizen participation in Europe. New York, NY: Plenum Press.
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) in which David shared the results of his inquiries into neighborhood planning in The Netherlands. The purpose of the book was to bring together planners, urban designers, and public participation specialists in the United States with their international counterparts to see what they could learn from the city planning and development experiences of other countries. David was, by that time, totally committed to the idea that public participation in local decision making could ensure that development and conservation efforts embodied the contending interests of a full range of stakeholders. But providing opportunities for groups who were usually ignored to speak out was not enough. In our discussions, David was concerned that newly emergent ideas about advocacy planning addressed only part of the problem. Merely giving more people and groups a voice would not guarantee that any of their interests would be realized. Conflict would be generated (and that was good), but the cacophony of voices needed to give way to coproduction. The only way to ensure that the full range of interests could be implemented was to generate a consensus on how development should proceed.

Empreendedores, cujo trabalho é o de transformar ideias em novos produtos ou serviços para os quais exista um mercado, orgulham-se por criar disrupção e fomentar a inovação. Mas, muitas vezes eles tropeçam em negociações-chave porque não sabem manusear os desafios negociais que quase sempre aparecem. Empreendedorismo tipicamente envolve séries de interações entre fundadores, sócios, parceiros em potencial, investidores, e outros, nos vários estágios do processo empreendedor – desde a “semeadura”, quando o negócio é apenas uma ideia, até o estágio do “desligamento”, quando o empreendedor aliena ou deixa o negócio. Nós analisamos todas as variedades de negociações em empreendimentos, procurando identificar os erros mais comuns cometidos pelos empreendedores, e, neste artigo, descrevemos oito deles. Nós debatemos como os empreendedores podem aprender a evitar tais erros – especialmente através de preparação adequada – e quais estratégias podem ser desenvolvidas para superar esses inevitáveis deslizes.

We all know the statistics. Most start-up businesses fail. While many experts attribute the high failure rate to the risks associated with innovation, we have found that an equally significant cause is the mismanagement of key relationships, and more specifically, the way that founders and entrepreneurs negotiate.

A critical challenge in natural resource management is to bring all stakeholders together to negotiate solutions to critical problems. However, various collaborative approaches to heading off conflicts and resolving natural resource management disputes have been used. What drives these efforts, however, still needs further research. Our study provides a systematic look at the drivers likely to initiate collaborative problem-solving efforts in four cases in Romania. We use Emerson’s et al.(2012) framework for collaborative governance and multi-value qualitative comparative analysis (mvQCA ) to analyze cases involving endangered species, restrictions on forest harvest, conflicts associated with infrastructure development projects, and disputes over the managementof environmentally sensitive areas. Our findings contribute to the already existing collaborative governance literature indicating which of the four factors: uncertainty, interdependence, consequential incentives, and leadership, in which combination, are necessary and sufficient to spur collaborative resource management efforts. Our results showed that in Romania the initiation of collaboration is best explained by positive consequential incentives (i.e.,financial opportunities) which has determined leaders to take initiative. This study provides additional information for the complicated process of natural resource management which is often overriding collaboration by investigating what enables and constrains collaborative efforts in a country where natural resources were managed and used according to the principles of central planning.

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.

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.

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.

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.