Influential members of the urban planning profession have developed certain ideas about new town design,including notions such as self-containment, social balance, and the neighborhood unit. These parallel, to some extent, concepts that have emerged from the field of community sociology. Efforts to put these ideas into practice have fallen far short of the mark. Without more sophisticated implementation mechanisms, better theories of social interaction at the neighborhood level, and new approaches to citizen participation, efforts to build new towns are likely to remain severely crippled. The aim of this paper is to summarize past efforts to translate implicit theories of social organization into actual new town designs. The possibilities of closing the gap between theory and practice through the use of more explicit forms of social experimentation are discussed in the context of the fledgling new towns program in the United States.

The Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP) Guide is designed especially for college students contemplating career in urban and regional planning and for counselor who want to assist students in locating appropriate training and educational opportunities.

The MIT Energy Impacts Project, funded by the United States Department of Energy, began as an inquiry into the nature of the energy boomtown problem confronting the western states in America. We are now investigating strategies for calculating the “social costs” of energy development and compensating communities and individuals who bear the brunt of continued efforts to exploit energy resources in the United States.

In 1977, when the accumulation of well-intentioned regulations made it difficult to site a liquified natural gas (LNG) facility in California, the lcgislature, with the full support of Governor Edmund G. Brown, Jr., passed a law, Senate Bill 1081 (Chapter 855, Statutes of 1977), that said, in effect, "not withstanding any previoti'sly cnacted legislation or regulatory requircments, California will designate an LNG terminal sitc within a year." The state's attempt to preempt local regulatory authority, to say nothing of the legislature's willingncss to circumvent its own facility siting, coastal protection, and environmcntal impact assessment laws, seems to liave failed. This case study describes the circumstances leading up to the enactment of S.B. 1081 and analyzes tile dangers associated with preemptive legislation. Had California confronted the real weaknesses in its energy facility siting process, the state could have identified positive steps that" would have accelerated site ~selection without triggering the staunch opposition that now threatens indefinite delay.

The mediation process is a noncompulsory procedure in which an impartial, neutral party is invited or accepted by disputants to help them identify issues of mutual concern and design solutions to these issues which are acceptable to both. A mediator is a catalyst, an educator, a translator, an expander of the resources available to the parties, a bearer of bad news, an agent of reality, and a scapegoat. Structuring the agenda for discussion and moving the parties toward agreement comprise an integral part of the mediator's effort toward a resolution. Contrary to Susskind's suggestion, the mediator actually gains strength -- 'clout' -- precisely because of a basic commitment to a posture of neutrality. Susskind's environmental mediator or 'mediator with clout' assumes an intervention posture that differs importantly from that of the traditional mediator. Thirty-eight footnotes are provided.

Five years ago, in the second issue of the EIA Review, I suggested that it was time to shift our attention from impact assessment to strategies for resolving environmental disputes. In his state-of-the-art summary in that same October 1978 issue, David O’Connor reviewed the first twenty environmental mediation efforts in the United States and concluded that “mediation by neutral parties has played a significant role in resolving a number of important and controversial environmental disputes.”

The development of more and more information of the sort provided by successful impact statements often exacerbates rather than resolves the value conflicts that are at the heart of most environmental disputes.

Judges often appoint special masters to help with complex cases. In many of the desegregation cases of the 1970s, for example, special masters were assigned to oversee the development and implementation of court-ordered busing plans. In bankruptcy proceedings, special masters serve as court-appointed executors to preside over the liquidation of holdings. Judges have also appointed special masters to serve as "receivers" of public agencies and to oversee implementation of consent decrees involving reforms at prisons and mental institutions.

And, during the past few years, federal and state judges have employed special masters in a new way --as mediators in complex public policy disputes. I recently served as a special master in a multi-party, multiissue environmental dispute, and the experience proved to be both novel and instructive. Functioning primarily as a mediator, my assignment was to help the parties develop a strategy for allocating the costs of a long-delayed pollution cteanup effort. 

Traditional approaches to the siting of potentially hazardous but regionally necessary facilities are often ineffective and lead to drawn-out legal disputes ultimately satisfactory to none of the parties. Research at MIT over the last decade has indicated five factors that may solve the siting puzzle. Application of these principles do not guarantee that a decision will not be disputed but may enhance the possibility of a wise and durable agreement.

Discusses 5 procedural concerns of mediated negotiation used in complex public resource allocation disputes. These are (1) problems of representation, (2) the difficulties of setting an appropriate agenda, (3) obstacles to joint fact finding, (4) difficulties of binding parties to their commitments, and (5) obstacles to monitoring and enforcing negotiated agreements. Discussion builds on 3 cases: a negotiated investment strategy undertaken by the state of Connecticut; a dispute over the siting of a low-income housing project in Forest Hills, New York; and an environmental dispute involving energy production facilities along the Hudson River. These experiences indicate that the difficulties associated with mediation can be overcome with the application of innovative techniques and the assistance of a skillful and astute mediator. (18 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)

Some American cities demand that developers pay "linkage feeg' (some- times cared exactions) over-and-above required property taxes. Presumably, these are meant to cover short-term costs and "social impacts" that exceed the development's expected tax payments. The level of linkage payments in each city is determined either through case-by-case negotiations (as in Boston) or by the application of a formula that assumes an average charge per square foot (as in San Francisco). My aim in this column is to review the strengths and weaknesses of these two approaches, then describe still another approach that I think will produce superior negotiated development agreements.

Like the public official and the citizen, the representative of business interests must first determine whether certain general prerequisites can be met before he or she should enter a consensus-building process. Will the right people be at the table? Will they be able to negotiate effectively? Can they avoid the traps that tend to sabotage consensus?

The United States has had a comprehensive system of environmental regulation for almost twenty years. Beginning with the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act in 1969 (and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970), federal, state, and local governments in American have been involved in activities aimed at eliminating air, water, noise, and other kinds of pollution and managing the country’s resources more wisely.

While the American approach to environmental regulation will surely change again in response to political, economic, technological, and scientific pressures, it may be helpful for other countries to look closely at the way the American system of environmental regulation has evolved thus far.

The ideal of neutrality in punic sector mediation obscures more than it clari- fies. Worse still, it distracts our attention from the skillful, ethical, judgments every mediator must make in practice. To explore the political and ethical influence mediators inevitably exert as they manage dispute resolution processes, we have designed a scorabte three-party mediation exercise for teaching and research, "Westville: Mediation Strategies in Community Planning;' that allows us to investigate activist, non-neutral mediation strategies (Forester and Stitzel,1988).

We begin here by identifying a community planning negotiation dilemma whose perverse outcomes lead us to consider seriously the adoption of media- tion roles by planners. We turn next to controversial questions regarding power, representation, and neutrality that challenge both the desirability and the via- bility of planner-mediator roles.* To explore these questions concretely, we con- sider a composite case in the fictional town of Westville, the subject of our teaching and laboratory simulation designed expressly to investigate non-neutral mediation strategies. If planners typically work for governments and have agendas of their own, as in Westville, can they nevertheless help to resolve public sector disputes as activist, non-neutral mediators? We wish to argue the afftr- native case: activist mediation is a viable, practical and ethically desirable strategy.

Building regionally necessary but locally noxious facilities such as power plants, landfills, waste incinerators and prisons has become increasingly difficult. David Laws and Lawrence Susskind discuss some of the traditional steps involved, including needs assessment, choice of technology, site selection, assessing and mitigating impacts, and management. They provide an alternative approach to facility siting that includes, among other things, seeking consensus, working to develop trust, setting realistic timetables, getting agreement that the status quo is unacceptable, choosing a design that best addresses the problem, and fully compensating for negative aspects of the facility.

Consensus-building techniques have been used successfully to resolve many public policy disputes. A major obstacle to consensus building, however, is the unwillingness of disputing parties to come to the negotiating table. A relatively new method of accomplishing this is to invite the parties to participate in a simulation of the conflict they want to resolve. Such simulations are designed to show that policy deadlocks can be overcome if the disputants change the way they negotiate. In November 1988, the MIT-Harvard Public Disputes Program, in association with the American Energy Assurance Council (AEAC), ran the National Energy Policy Simulation. This 23-hour crisis simulation brought together many of the stakeholders involved in the national energy policy debate in the United States. Partly as a result of the simulation, the parties agreed to sponsor afar reaching effort to forge a consensus on a national energy strategy for America. The energy policy experience is evidence that simulations can help bring disputing parties together to resolve their differences. The experience with this and related simulations provides key lessons for subsequent simulation design.

This study examines weaknesses in the existing system of environmental treaty-making and suggests key changes necessary both to confront emerging global environmental threats (such as climate change, loss of biodiversity and pollution) and to achieve sustainable development.

Bargaining in the international arena is intrinsically positional. Negotiators are often instructed by their governments not to improvise or explore new options when they meet with their counterparts—even though the invention of additional tradeoffs or packages might well produce “better” results for all sides. This article describes an approach that we call “parallel informal negotiation” which encourages a collaborative effort between contending groups that were officially not even allowed to interact: international trade and environment policy makers.

Academic criticism of the administrative state has increased exponentially over the past several years, particularly with regard to environmental regulation. Many commentators insist that the command and control approach to enforcement is no longer useful Further, they contend that this approach likely will discourage innovation and create a disincentive to continuous environmental improvement. They also assert that many prevailing environmental regulations are economically inefficient, violate free market principles, and are undemocratic. Most commentators urge some form of "regulatory reinvention." Agreement ends, however, when it comes to determining which reforms to adopt.

Since 1995, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has struggled to implement an experiment in regulatory reinvention it calls Project XL ("Excellence in Leadership"). In doing so, EPA is experimenting with regulatory reform based on the theory of "adaptive management", a theory that can conflict with EPA's "command and control" enforcement philosophy.1 Project XL attempts to implement an adaptive management approach by planning "experiments" and monitoring their results for lessons that can be used to guide reform of regulatory systems. Proponents hope to encourage the private sector to collaborate with EPA to plan, run and monitor experiments in environmental compliance, rethink regulation and apply new technologies. To date, this has not occurred to the extent that XL's designers had hoped.

In The Risks and Advantages of Agency Discretion: Evidence from EPA's Project XL, we concluded that EPA's history and structure make it a challenging locale in which to attempt adaptive management. Indeed, the advent of XL caused a clash of philosophies (between adaptive management and "command and control" adherents) that generated significant tensions within EPA, and spilled over to project stakeholders outside the Agency.

We believe that Project XL can be improved. To that end, this paper offers strategies designed to succeed without statutory reform or other "sea changes" to the existing Project's framework. We propose strategies that: can be implemented quickly and without congressional intervention; focus all stakeholders on jointly defining and achieving XL's mission; encourage EPA to use the discretion it already has to facilitate a flow of more innovative XL proposals; and promote greater efficiency in the review and approval of new XL projects. 

Recently adopted international environmental treaties on climate change and biodiversity represent some of the most complex agreements ever negotiated, involving science-intensive policy questions and implicating not only governments, but industry and a range of nongovernmental organizations. The inter-connections that should have been taken into account in drafting these agreements were difficult to achieve, given the fractured struc- ture of multilateral institutions. Even if the parties were willing to expose their interests as necessary for effective problem-solving, commitments made to home constituencies made it impossible to be flexible. The Consensus Building Institute has pioneered efforts to design a process that can overcome such barriers in high stakes, high profile, multi-party negotiations. Each has involved senior diplomats in what is best described as collaborative problem solv- ing. This article will use the lessons learned from three experiences to show how parallel informal negotiation provides an alternative – or complement – to more traditional second track diplomacy.

We believe that simulations are a valuable tool for teaching negotiation. There has been an enormous growth in the number of professional schools and corporations teaching negotiation, and most of these teaching efforts are built around simulations. Indeed, the professionals and academics who teach negotiation claim that well designed simulations are the key to teaching graduate students and mid-career professionals. This claim is rooted in the idea that negotiation is best taught by “doing it.” Yet, most of the research and writing on the use of simulations offer little evidence to back up this assertion. We will review the pedagogical theory behind the use of simulations and review what leading academics have to say about their importance as a teaching tool.

The theories discussed in Chapter 5 (“Methods and Roles of Environmental Policy Studies”, above) suggest three overlapping sets of methods for conducting environmental policy studies: analytical methods, rhetorical methods, and process methods. We examine each in turn, relating them to the six examples of effective environmental policy studies discussed in Chapter 3. In light of this examination, we then turn once again to Congressman Randolph’s concern about the continued use of chlorinated organic compounds.

This article grows out of our experience teaching an advanced course on multiparty negotiation. The main question underlying the course is: “How can experts in two‐party negotiations make themselves effective multiparty negotiators?” In this article, we describe what and how we taught, what we think worked, and what we decided to change after the first year of teaching.

This article grows out of our experience teaching an advanced course on multiparty negotiation. The main question underlying the course is: “How can experts in two-party negotiations make themselves effective multiparty negotiators?” In this article, we describe what and how we taught, what we think worked, and what we decided to change after the first year of teaching.

Consensus building is a way for a group or organization to reach a nearly unanimous agreement, and then implement that agreement successfully. It means investing enough in your decision-making process to get the right people to the table, and to get the right ideas on the table, in ways that invite productive problem solving.

While “decisions based on sound science” has been a credo of natural resource management and environmental policy in the United States for more than 100 years, science is still not independent of politics. The concept of “decisions based on sound science” is predicated upon the presumptions that science is a neutral body of knowledge immune from value judgments, science can predict with certainty and clarity what will happen in the physical world, and policymaking is a rational process. None of these is true.5 Policymaking is not an entirely rational process of identifying problems and choosing optimal solutions, especially when scientists must make value-laden assumptions and extrapolations in the face of highly uncertain data to answer questions posed by policymakers.6 What is needed is a way to ensure, politics aside, that our understanding of the workings of complex ecological systems informs public policy choices about where and how development should proceed, how natural resources are managed to ensure sustainable supplies, and whether and how to regulate economic activities that pose a threat to human health and safety as well as environmental protection.

This is a facilitated, multi-party, multi-issue, international environmental negotiation, which brings together 13 players (eight country delegates; four representatives of international nongovernmental organizations [NGOs]; and one facilitator). This technically sophisticated mock exchange can be used to introduce students of international relations, global environmental policy, and sustainable development to the dynamics of international treaty making, as well as to the complexities of dealing with scientifically and economically intricate environmental issues.

The premise of the simulation is as follows: prompted by mounting evidence about the potential adverse impacts of organochlorines on public health and the environment, the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) has initiated discussions about the possibility of setting up an international regime to manage the global use of chlorine.

The global environmental treaty-making system—the set of mechanisms by which countries fashion agreements to promote more sustainable development—is not working very well. More than 400 multilateral agreements such as the Kyoto Protocol on climate change now exist, and new treaties are continually being added that address a wide range of problems, including the loss of endangered species and habitats, increasing levels of ocean dumping, the unregulated transshipment of hazardous substances, and desertification. Yet there is no evidence to suggest that the problems these treaties are intended to address are being corrected. There is a variety of reasons why the "system" isn't working and a number of ways it could be strengthened.

Record numbers of Americans fear that our political process is broken—for good reason. Our nation faces unprecedented challenges, yet our politicians spend most of their energy attacking one another. All the while, no one in public life has offered a practical way to neutralize the bitter partisanship that paralyzes Washington.The Cure for Our Broken Political Process fills that void. The authors show exactly how concerned citizens can get politicians from all camps to negotiate genuine solutions to the most vexing issues. Sol Erdman and Lawrence Susskind base their case on their thirty years of experience in resolving political conflict.The Cure begins with hard evidence that our country could work out practical solutions to nearly every major issue that now divides us, solutions that all sides could support. Why, then, don’t our politicians seek out those solutions? The authors debunk all the accepted explanations and then uncover the real reason. By telling the story of a concerned citizen who runs for Congress, the book shows that two basic features of our elections virtually compel politicians to bicker endlessly over major problems. So, as long as our elections work as they do today, our lawmakers will keep on fighting, leaving the critical issues unresolved.The authors then spell out how to redesign elections so that politicians would win only if they produced useful results—only if they negotiated practical solutions to pressing problems. The book concludes with a step-by-step plan proving that ordinary citizens have the power to bring about these changes. To anyone who fears that our country’s future is in peril, The Cure offers a realistic path to a political process they can genuinely believe in.

Lyn Carson initiates a conversation by email with Larry Susskind to explore concerns about and critical reflections on the IAP2 Spectrum of Public Participation. The terms comprising the Spectrum are inform, consult, involve, collaborate, and empower, representing increasing levels of public impact. Appreciating the Spectrum’s usefulness as a tool in teaching and explaining public participation to various audiences, the conversation aims to dig deeper into meanings and implications. In the early course of the conversation, Lyn and Larry weigh merits of amending the Spectrum, such as removing inform, combining consult and involve, and they examine what it means to empower citizens, including in relation to statutory responsibilities of officials, responsibilities that cannot be delegated away. Then, they open up the conversation by inviting John Dengate, Lewis Michaelson, John Godec, and Anne Carroll to join in. Concepts in the Spectrum are discussed in relation to the IAP2’s Core Values and Code of Ethics, and the Ad Hoc Working Group’s alternative to the IAP2 Spectrum, called the New Spectrum (Appendix A), inducing more critical reflection about how to distinguish the bases for some conversational disagreements and various premises and circumstances. In closing words, Larry posits the demands in the field to: base recommendations of particular forms of engagement on evidence, justify recommendations and reasonableness of purported outcomes from following them, and overall, deepen the commitment to deliberative democracy wherever we work.

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.

Imagine the following: a small city of about 30,000 must decide whether to allow construction of a controversial industrial facility. The plant will generate sorely needed jobs and tax revenue, but it might also pose serious environmental and public-health risks. Under normal circumstances, the city council would require the developer to undertake a set of technical studies that city departments would review before a permit could be granted. Then, the city government (including several elected and/or appointed boards) might hold a hearing, and ultimately vote on whether to approve the project. Along the way, there might be a lot of letters to the editor of the local newspaper and even a referendum.

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.

Adaptive management can be an effective approach for addressing complex ecosystem-related processes like the operation of the Glen Canyon Dam, particularly in the face of substantial complexity, uncertainty, and political contentiousness. However, the Glen Canyon Dam AMP shows that a stated commitment to collaboration and adaptive management is insufficient. Effective management of natural resources can only be realized through careful attention to the collaborative design and implementation of appropriate problem-solving and adaptive-management procedures. It also requires the development of an appropriate organizational infrastructure that promotes stakeholder dialogue and agency learning. Though the experimental Glen Canyon Dam AMP is far from a success of collaborative adaptive management, the lessons from its shortcomings can foster more effective collaborative adaptive management in the future by Congress, federal agencies, and local and state authorities.

There are negotiations underway in many parts of the world regarding the management of water resources. These cover allocation decisions as well as the measures that ought to be taken to ensure water quality and availability. Unfortunately, many of these negotiations have no produced fair, efficient, stable or wise agreements. In part, this is because multi-party, multi-issue negotiations, especially those in which scientific and technical uncertainty levels are high, and inherently difficult. It is also because many of the stakeholders and officials involved have not embraced ‘best negotiation practices’ in the design of their deliberations.

This chapter provides advice to the parties involved in on-going water negotiations regarding possible ways of shifting from the hard-bargaining techniques that characterize most (unproductive) negotiations to a consensus-building approach that is likely to be more effective.

Graphic insults can win elections. Sensible policy decisions often don’t. At least, that’s how American politics works today. Both Republican and Democratic lawmakers have clearly concluded that the surest way to win seats in November is to paint the other side as despicable. And soon after this election, most lawmakers will start to obsess about the contest in 2012. So no matter which party wins control, both parties will continue to publicly scorn the other’s positions on our mounting deficit, on taxes, on energy policy and on creating jobs. Congress will therefore make little progress on these issues, though all are critical to America’s future. Our country is thus destined to decline — for several more years at least.

To reverse that decline, we will have to get our lawmakers to negotiate in good faith over the issues on which they now mostly insult one another. How can we make that happen? To find a realistic answer, we need to look at ideological adversaries who have negotiated even-handed solutions to major national controversies. These episodes suggest how to coax Congress to resolve our problems sensibly: We have to significantly strengthen each lawmaker’s connection to his/her constituents.

1. Collaborative adaptive management (CAM) is regularly touted as the best way to handle natural resource management in the face of uncertainty, change and conflict. Successful applications of CAM have, however, been elusive in practice.

2. This article examines the Glen Canyon Dam Adaptive Management Program (AMP) in the United States, and other CAM efforts, to illustrate why and how procedural shortcomings may lead to natural resource management failures and reflect on how they may be overcome.

3. Synthesis and applications. To increase the chance of success, CAM efforts should set clear overarching goals and concrete and measurable objectives, employ tools and incentives to facilitate participation and foster collaboration, implement well‐defined joint fact‐finding protocols to promote shared learning and manage scientific uncertainty, and commit to monitoring and adapting their management regimes over time. Even in complex and contentious resource management contexts, future CAM efforts that integrate these design elements are likely to lead to more effective natural resource management.

Basically, our session is about Core Values of Dispute Resolution: Is Neutrality Really Necessary? We are going to focus on the issue of neutrality in terms of concerns about autonomy and substantive fairness. These goals may be implicit in neutrality, though not necessarily.

In this article, I describe my career as a pracademic. Over several decades, I have been able to maintain a substantial private practice in public dispute resolution and also meet the teaching, advising, and research demands of an academic career. I have achieved this by engaging primarily in action research: I begin with “problems” in the field and work collaboratively with stakeholders to generate “solutions” that meet their interests. I then document and analyze these interventions to build prescriptive theory through systematic reflection on my own involvement. In this article, I discuss how I have been able to achieve success as a “pracademic,” but also consider the challenges that young scholars who seek to engage in practice confront today. I further describe some possible strategies for successfully integrating a substantial practice component into an academic career in conflict resolution.

Making decisions about personal risk is pretty straightforward. However, making collective decisions about risk management is much harder. In all of the communities we are a part of—at the local, state, national, and international levels—people perceive risks differently. This makes it hard to agree on appropriate trade-offs involved in risk management, especially in the face of uncertainty. Unless we can reach agreement on how to manage climate change and other meteorological risks, though, no one will have peace of mind. And we will be setting ourselves up to repeat the disaster of Sandy—or worse.

So how can we help communities make the tough collective risk-management decisions necessary to prepare for climate change and future severe weather events like Sandy? We have an idea: how about games.

In this article, I describe my career as a pracademic. Over several decades, I have been able to maintain a substantial private practice in public dispute resolution and also meet the teaching, advising, and research demands of an academic career. I have achieved this by engaging primarily in action research: I begin with “problems” in the field and work collaboratively with stakeholders to generate “solutions” that meet their interests. I then document and analyze these interventions to build prescriptive theory through systematic reflection on my own involvement.

In this article, I discuss how I have been able to achieve success as a “pracademic,” but also consider the challenges that young scholars who seek to engage in practice confront today. I further describe some possible strategies for successfully integrating a substantial practice component into an academic career in conflict resolution.

Role-play simulation (RPS) exercises, and serious games in general, can be powerful educational tools in a wide range of situations, from the classroom to the high-stakes negotiating table. In some situations, they can even alter the outcome of real-world negotiations. However, in our experience RPS exercises can only have a direct impact on actual negotiations when certain conditions are met: They must be realistic and reflect the dynamics of the real-world situation; a skilled facilitator must be on hand to help the parties digest the outcomes; participants should have shared ‘general instructions’ that establish the context and role-specific ‘confidential instructions’ that help them play their roles properly; and, importantly, exercises should be played by the actual participants in parallel real-world negotiations. Even when RPS exercises do not impact real-world negotiations, they can convey critical insights and teach important negotiation skills.

In this paper, we make a case for when and how ‘serious games’ can and cannot influence real-world negotiations. We focus on what we call role-play simulation (RPS) exercises, but similar conclusions can probably be reached regarding other approaches to gaming. Substantively, the lessons we discuss are no doubt applicable beyond the issue of climate change.

In our experience, games can be extremely powerful tools. However, they are most effective when they are used by those who are, or will be, engaged in similar real world negotiations. We use examples from our own practice to demonstrate how RPS exercises can be designed and implemented to yield great value.

Why is nearly every member of Congress blocking the steps that would help nearly all of his/her constituents to prosper? Economists have, after all, largely agreed on how to promote wide prosperity: Invest in education and infrastructure. Curb the growth in entitlement spending. Lower marginal tax rates. Phase out tax deductions.

Unfortunately, voters of all ages, incomes and political persuasions would protest—either cuts in their entitlements, new government spending or losing deductions. So, any lawmaker who wants to keep his/her job has to appease a majority of his diverse voters. Nearly every incumbent has found strategies that clearly work:

1) reduce economics to slogans that indict the other party as the main threat to his voters' prosperity;

2) obstruct that other party from enacting the policies most of his voters oppose, even policies that would benefit them; and

3) demand policies that most of his voters want, knowing that the other party will obstruct them.

Incumbents have won so many elections this way, they have every incentive to retain these tactics — which virtually guarantee political gridlock and economic stagnation.

How, then, will our country ever prosper?

One of the trickiest aspects of negotiation is figuring out how to deal with an individual who cannot be convinced by the merits of evidence or arguments. How can you put a stop to irrational behaviors and demands—those that don’t appear to contribute at all to the effectiveness of a negotiation? How can you get someone to be reasonable? How do you move someone like this into the trading zone? We’ll look at how this story of the new purchasing agent can help you analyze the various possibilities you face when confronting an adversary who seems stubborn, irrational, or even downright crazy. Obviously, you can’t win at win-win negotiation unless you figure this out and find a way to move them into the trading zone.

International environmental agreements have increased exponentially within the last five decades. However, decisions on policies to address key issues such as biodiversity loss, climate change, ozone depletion, hazardous waste transport and numerous other planetary challenges require individual countries to adhere to international norms. What have been the successes and failures in the environmental treaty-making arena? How has the role of civil society and scientific consensus contributed to this maturing process? Why have some treaties been more enforceable than others and which theories of international relations can further inform efforts in this regard? Addressing these questions with renewed emphasis on close case analysis makes this volume a timely and thorough postscript to the Rio-Plus 20 summit's celebrated invocation document, The Future We Want, towards sustainable development.

Environmental Diplomacy: Negotiating More Effective Global Agreements provides an accessible narrative on understanding the geopolitics of negotiating international environmental agreements and clear guidance on improving the current system. In this book, authors Lawrence Susskind and Saleem Ali expertly observe international environmental negotiations to effectively inform the reader on the geopolitics of protecting our planet. This second edition offers an additional perspective from the Global South as well as providing a broader analysis of the role of science in environmental treaty-making. It provides a unique contribution as a panoramic analysis of the process of environmental treaty-making.

As a leader in climate mitigation and city “greening,” Boston established itself as an early innovator. But when it comes to climate preparedness, Boston, like other cities, is still trying to figure out what to do. The city faces numerous hurdles to implementing a climate risk management agenda—ranging from a lack of funds, to less than optimum interagency coordination, to uncertainty about which interventions are worth pursuing. Despite these hurdles, Boston has made one important modification in its permitting process that is moving its preparedness agenda forward.

When it comes to conflicts over the allocation of freshwater supply, who bears the burden, at what cost, and at what scale are important questions. While science can contribute to resolution of certain water allocation disputes, more scientific certainty will not resolve most water allocation controversies. Water stress in Africa and in the Middle East—particularly in the Nile Basin—is likely to lead to a range of conflicts, not because there is not enough scientific information to go around, but for other reasons. Water stress is likely to emerge as an increasingly important concern because population growth, current allocation practices, unchecked demand, and underinvestment in infrastructure are not being appropriately addressed. An effective way to resolve water crisis is to reframe conflicting needs and uses of water as opportunities for joint decision-making about this shared resource. The authors use the Nile Basin to illustrate how such informal problem-solving and decision-making can be initiated.

In order to effectively adapt to climate change, public officials and other stakeholders need to rapidly enhance their understanding of local risks and their ability to collaboratively and adaptively respond to them. We argue that science-based role-play simulation exercises — a type of 'serious game' involving face-to-face mock decision-making — have considerable potential as education and engagement tools for enhancing readiness to adapt. Prior research suggests role-play simulations and other serious games can foster public learning and encourage collective action in public policy-making contexts. However, the effectiveness of such exercises in the context of climate change adaptation education and engagement has heretofore been underexplored. We share results from two research projects that demonstrate the effectiveness of role-play simulations in cultivating climate change adaptation literacy, enhancing collaborative capacity and facilitating social learning. Based on our findings, we suggest such exercises should be more widely embraced as part of adaptation professionals' education and engagement toolkits.

When authors set out to write or edit a book, they should have a clear and compelling answer to the question of why their work is important. That is, what contributions can it make in a world with thousands of books, articles and other sources of information. To us, editing a volume on joint fact-finding (JFF) was both an exciting opportunity and a project long overdue.

Water management within a country and water diplomacy across international borders depend on the problem-solving capabilities of the political entities involved, especially when the self-interests of the parties are not aligned.

Let us examine two hypothetical cases to understand why and how water diplomacy and water management often fall short.

An increased focus on ‘policy literacy’ for climate scientists, parallel to ‘science literacy’ for the public, is a critical need in closing the science–society gap in addressing climate mitigation. We define policy literacy as the knowledge and understanding of societal and decision‐making contexts required for conducting and communicating scientific research in ways that contribute to societal well‐being. We argue that current graduate education for climate scientists falls short in providing policy literacy. We identify resources and propose approaches to remedy this, arguing that policy literacy education needs to be mainstreamed into climate science curricula. Based on our experience training science students in global environmental policy, we propose that policy literacy modules be developed for application in climate science curricula, including simulations, case studies, or hands‐on policy experiences. The most effective policy literacy modules on climate change will be hands‐on, comprehensive, and embedded into scientific education.

This article is categorized under:

• The Carbon Economy and Climate Mitigation > Policies, Instruments, Lifestyles, Behavior
• Social Status of Climate Change Knowledge > Knowledge and Practice

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.

Although deliberative democracy and alternative dispute resolution (ADR), especially public dispute resolution (PDR), share many normative goals, they developed along separate tracks. Deliberative democracy emerged from a tradition of political philosophy, while alternative dispute resolution grew out of a separate legal tradition (Muhlberger 2011).

Our objective in this chapter is to show that PDR, or mediated problem-solving in the public arena, can enhance the theory and practice of deliberative democracy.

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 multivalue qualitative comparative analysis (mvQCA) to analyze cases involving endangered species, restrictions on forest harvest, conflicts associated with infrastructure development projects, and disputes over the management of 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.

Natural ecosystems are being lost to development in fast-growing countries around the world. While land development may often be a desirable objective, conversion from one land use to another rarely takes account of the myriad benefits that natural ecosystems, directly or indirectly, provide to humans. This is because markets often fail to capture the value of these benefits monetarily. If there were an easy way to compute the market value of ecosystem services, and local regulations required that their loss be taken into account, the disincentives to development that requires large-scale conversion of natural ecosystems would likely be substantially higher.