Anticipatory Governance: Do You Know What It Is?

I finally found the right phrase to describe what city planning is, and what city planners do. Planners provide ideas, analyses and organized settings in which governance (i.e. collaborative problem-solving) can take place.  And, unlike many

other professionals they focus on normative concerns (i.e. what ought to be done?) regarding the future (not just an analysis of what is happening at present). Planners are the facilitators of anticipatory governance. 

This doesn’t mean that certain planners don’t do other things as well, but as a profession as a whole, planners are primarily focused on problem-solving and informed decision-making that spotlight the needs and interests of future residents (to say nothing of future generations). This includes the needs and interests of current residents and stakeholders as they imagine themselves and their community in the future.

Why Governance Not Government?

In a democratic setting, elected governments have final decision-making authority (along with the courts). Yet, representatives of non-elected stakeholders (i.e., interest groups) also have important roles to play in democratic decision-making. Governance networks can help set the public policy agenda and tee up policy or programmatic options for consideration by officials, along with arguments to support them.  

To the extent that governance can produce informed consensus proposals, it is not clear why elected and appointed officials would disregard them. If you were an elected official, and I could tell you which action on a policy question would win you unanimous support from all sides, wouldn’t you be inclined to go along?  The only reason not to accept a well thought out proposal that all groups publicly support is if a particular political donor or backer secretly disagree with it. I say secretly because as a stakeholder that individual, company or group would be included in the public consensus building effort that generated the proposal in the first place. But, they might want to be seen as supporting common efforts (and so involve themselves in a consensus building effort) while privately trying to sabotage wat the group produces. Other than that, though, elected and appointed officials know that continuing to ignore informed consensus recommendations would be political suicide. 

In the public realm, the focus is on collective decision-making rather than individual priorities. When we rely on majority rule or raw political discourse, it is easy for elected and appointment officials to disregard competing policy proposals, and do what they want.  They can just say that the public was divided, so they had to do what they thought was best.  That’s not possible, though, if all interested stakeholders get together to generate a policy proposal that all of them support.  If all the relevant groups were consulted, and they all support what is being proposed, it is almost impossible for officials to disregard their suggestions.  

In the current political climate, with a clear divide between liberals and conservatives, no action is often the only outcome. But if governance networks take responsibility for working out their differences, whatever larger political divide might exist wouldn’t stop officials from taking action. The product of governance should be informed (i.e. science and other technical considerations must be in the story) policy proposals. Such proposals can only emerge if stakeholders are able to resolve whatever differences they have.  While this may sound difficult, it is much easier than many people suspect.  Groups take extreme positions when they are in a majority rule situations and they want to ensure their views get attention. They are much more reasonable if they know that everyone’s goal is an informed consensus.  

            

Most, but not all, political action focuses on short-term concerns or commitments.  Those in power at any point in time know that a swing in the majority might well lead to a shift in policy down the road. But, if society needs to take action on issues or problems that require consistent support over a longer-term (i.e. such policies won’t succeed unless they remain in place for a much longer timeframe than the normal electoral cycle), bi—partisan or multi-partisan support is required. Governance aims to generate support for actions that requires long-term, multi-partisan support, like efforts to address the possible effects of climate change. 

Who is the Client?

Meaningful governance requires ad hoc representation of all relevant (and self-

identified) stakeholder groups.  While it may be difficult at first to identify spokespeople for some unorganized or hard-to-represent interests, it is almost always possible to find acceptable proxies to represent them. Anticipatory governance is client-oriented.  That is, it doesn't authorize a select few to propose action in the name of a vague public interest. Instead, representatives of the full range of relevant stakeholders have to do the hard work of sorting out their differences and generating proposals that they all think are better (for them)  than taking no action at all. New online technologies, when used by skilled facilitators, can engage large numbers of people in such collaborative deliberations. And the more this happens, the more skilled and efficient groups will become in identifying spokespeople, and the spokespeople will become in reaching an informed consensus on a pressing issue or question that a government body must address.  

The clients for the planners who seek to facilitate anticipatory governance cut across all strata and categories of interested stakeholders. However, this is the opposite of advocacy planning -- which involves spokespeople who are trying to maximize the interests of only a few stakeholder groups, often at the expense of others. Spokespeople in the context I am describing, must be able to pursue their group’s interests while simultaneously taking account of the interests of others. (This is not a win-lose situation.) This involves crafting agreements through a search for mutual gains, and trading across sub-issues or linked issues the parties value differently. This is what happens in a global context when the sovereignty of nations ensures they can not be bound by an international law or requirements they don’t voluntary accept. 

Finding the right participants for each policy dialogue requires careful stakeholder assessment. It also means the number of participants in facilitated anticipatory governance is likely to be pretty large. To begin, a team of neutral facilitators needs to reach out to potential participants, talk with them confidentially and generate a list of possible participants that all stakeholder groups (and elected officials) accept as legitimate. The techniques of stakeholder assessment have been codified and professionalized over the past few decades. 

Trades or packages (not single issue deliberation) are usually required to build 

a consensus on a controversial issue.  This can only work if all the relevant stakeholder groups are represented and the process of collaboration is facilitated by skilled neutrals (acceptable to all parties, including the elected officials who will receive whatever recommendations the ad hoc process generates).  So, 

“blue ribbon” participant selection by officials is not acceptable. 

The Need for Collaboration and Consensus Building

Once the right stakeholder representatives are assembled (and they might meet in person at the beginning and end of a collaborative process while all the work in between might be done online or by sub-committees), the task of generating an informed agreement can begin. Usually, this requires a period of joint fact finding involving a range of technical experts acceptable to all the participants. The planners, or neutral facilitators, can bring possible names (and credentials) to the attention of the participants. The experts they choose agree (and are paid) to share what they know, in terms that everyone can understand, with all the participants. This avoids advocacy science where each party seeks expert advisors who will say what they want them to say. 

The most useful tool for this kind of collaborative problems solving is scenario planning. This is a technique that imagines a range of possible futures (in which different policies or programs could be pursued even though there is substantial uncertainty about what the future hold. The governance network doesn’t have to agree on how to frame a single version of the issue or problem it has come together to address. It can work simultaneously with multiple futures in mind, looking for policies or actions that will bring about results that are attractive to the participants regardless of which “version of the future” they think is correct.

Scenario planning sometimes requires the stakeholder participants to attach probabilities to highly uncertain futures.  So, if I want the government to take action to avoid the effects of something that has a small chance of occurring, while you prefer a policy aimed at a future that is more likely, we can agree on a proposal that addresses both of our concerns.  We can say to our elected officials, those of us who are most concerned about something that has a 10% chance of occurring (but if it does occur will have impacts that are likely to be devasting), support Policy A.  Those of us who define the issue in terms of a future that has a 90% chance of occurring prefer policy B. Our elected officials will have to choose between A and B, but in so doing, they will reveal which version of the future they expect. By involving all of the stakeholders, and engaging in joint fact finding and scenario planning, the participants will be able to narrow the policy choices to two, contingent on which of two futures one selects. The officials involved might choose to adopt policy B in the short-run with a commitment to monitor events and results over time, and agree ahead of time to switch to Policy A if the monitoring shows that a certain threshold has been crossed. This formulation of what needs to be done is one that all parties can endorse, and that officials can feel comfortable supporting.  It is also an adaptive approach to policy-making that best accounts for the increasing uncertainty surrounding a great many of the systems at the heart of public policy-making. 

Anticipatory governance does not operate on the basis of majority rule. Nor does it require unanimity among all the stakeholder participants. A unanimity rule would allow one holdout to blackmail everyone else. Typically, consensus in these circumstances requires overwhelming agreement, as long as the concerns of outlier participants are clearly addressed by everyone, and all the participants have tried to think of a way of incorporating the outlier’s concerns into the final agreement. Holdouts who disagree, can count on their views and arguments being included as a footnote or appendix to the consensus proposal submitted to the officials who must make the final decision. 

Obviously the product of an anticipatory governance effort needs to take the form of a written agreement that all the participants sign on behalf of their organizations or constituencies.  While it is not legally binding, it should have an impact, especially when it is widely distributed via social media.  It needs to be delivered and explained to the relevant public officials by the planners who facilitated the joint problem-solving effort. 

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How Should We Educate the Facilitators of Anticipatory Governance?

Some of the skills that planners must master to facilitate anticipatory governance should now be clear. They need to know how to complete a stakeholder assessment. This might require technical background on the issue or question that is the focus of the collaborative effort, so that the interviews they do with potential stakeholders can be completed efficiently.  They need to be able to help the group draft and enforce ground rules regarding how they will interact. They also need to know how to organize and manage a joint fact-finding process and a scenario planning effort that lead to the drafting of a written proposal.  They have to be able to organize in-person and online dialogues involving quite a few people, and to keep a clear written summary of what groups and sub-groups have agreed. Finally, they need to be able to communicate with public officials, clearly and efficiently, and answer whatever questions might come upo about the group’s proposal and the process by which it was developed. 

All of this needs to be done in a way that does not betray a personal bias for or against what any of the participants prefer.  Any sign of bias is sufficient reason for one or more participants to ask that the planner/facilitator to be replaced. Sometime the facilitator needs to organize preparatory efforts for participants who have never participated in such collaborative efforts. This might take the form of a short training course or coaching session. 

Many college and university departments that train professional planners might have to augment their faculty and curriculum to ensure that students graduate with the skills I have listed. It is difficult to impart this kind of knowledge and capability if you have never tried to do this work yourself.  Graduate students should be encouraged to serve as interns or apprentices to professional planners and facilitators who can tutor them in the relevant techniques. 

Finally, planners who hope to facilitate anticipatory governance efforts need to learn how to ensure that organizational or public learning happens. Every process of the kind I am describing offers an opportunity for the participants to “get better” at this form of interaction (while advancing their own organization’s interests). It is important to stop at several points during each process, and certainly at the end, to give the participants time to reflect on what has transpired and to modify their personal theories of practice if necessary.  

As I said at the outset, anticipatory governance can occur at any scale. The skills required to facilitate collaborative problem-solving are generally transferable from one scale to another. It is my hope that the requirements of organizational leadership in the private sector, public sector and non-profit sector will soon include the ability to participate effectively in the kind of process I have described.  The better prepared the participants are, the more likely it is that they will generate informed agreements that all of them can support. And, when they do, elected and appointed officials should be eager to implement their proposals. 

Overcoming the Not-In-My-Backyard (NIMBY) Syndrome

National Public Radio featured a story this week about growing opposition to renewable energy facilities, particularly wind power. Wind advocates were asked how they might overcome such local opposition -- dubbed the NIMBY syndrome -- in the future. The spokesperson said, "We've got to get in there earlier and educate people." Wrong! How arrogant! You think people are opposed because they don't understand? No, they're opposed because the "costs" and "impacts" ON THEM are likely to outweigh the likely benefits TO THEM. The only way to overcome the NIMBY syndrome, regardless of the type of facility, is to make sure that the overwhelming majority of people in the area believe that the benefits TO THEM if the facility is built will outweigh the costs and impacts THEY are likely to experience.

Why is this so hard to understand? Facility siting scholarship has been clear about this for almost thirty years. (See O'Hare, Bacow and Sanderson, Facility Siting and Public Opposition, Wiley, 1983.) More than twenty years ago, we figured out how to overcome the NIMBY Syndrome and crafted what we called The Facility Siting Credo (Lawrence Susskind, Negotiation Journal, Volume VI, Issue 4, October 1990, pp. 309-314) ). The Credo was tested nationally against the siting experience in a great many American cities (Howard Kunreuther, Kevin Fitzgerald, and Thomas Aarts, Risk Analysis, Volume 13, Number 3, 1993, pp. 301-318)

Every siting effort starts with a small percentage of people who favor whatever is being proposed, probably less than 10%. These are usually people likely to gain personally if the facility is built, maybe by selling their land directly to the facility developer). And, as Mike Elliott, a Professor at Georgia Tech demonstrated many years ago, an equally small percentage of people usually start out opposed. Typically, these are people likely to bear disproportionate costs -- because they live right next to whatever is being proposed. While there are some people in every community who pay no attention to anything (maybe 10%), the vast majority -- 60% - 65% -- fall into a category called "Guardians." It's what that this middle group does that leads to most facility siting controversies.

We know two things about Guardians (thanks to Professor Elliott). First, if they think a licensing or permitting decision is unfair, they will side with the opponents. And, second, they want to hear whatever the arguments are for and against a proposed facility "on their merits." If believable information isn't presented in an open forum where questions can be asked of experts and proponents in a problem-solving format, they will side with the opponents. NIMBYism occurs when these two facts about Guardians are ignored.

Let me get back to the wind energy spokesperson on NPR. If proponents put out one-sided information to help "sell" citizens on the need for new renewable energy facilities, or try to convince them that there won't be any adverse impacts, that's sure to backfire. The Facility Siting Credo indicates how to avoid these and other mistakes, but I'm just going to emphasize the three most important principles in the Credo (and that are, for the most part, ignored in most facility siting disputes in the United States because proponents are typically way overconfident).

1. Engage in joint fact finding, not one-sided "educational" efforts.

2. Let all the key stakeholders choose a mediator to help manage a consensus building process.

3. Promise to compensate potential "losers" and hold any adversely affected neighborhood harmless.

Most environmental impact assessments are prepared AFTER proponents have committed to build a facility. So, whatever data or forecasts are generated tend to be discounted by opponents as nothing but propaganda on behalf of decisions that have already been made. This is exactly the kind of thing that causes Guardians to side with the opponents. The Cape Wind Project in Massachusetts (the first off-shore wind farm in the United States) has been caught up in what must be the most elaborate regulatory review process in energy facility siting history in the United States. Whatever evidence has been presented by proponents has been countered by opponents. Everyone had made up their minds long before studies of the likely impacts of the facility became available. By the time the formal regulatory reviews took place, it was impossible to get all the parties in the same room for a civil conversation. Maine, however, has taken a different tack. The state has pre-reviewed all possible off-shore wind sites and noted publically those that seem to make the most sense in technical, economic and aesthetic terms. We'll see whether private companies proposing to build in one of these pre-designated and pre-reviewed areas faces the same opposition as Cape Wind. Joint fact finding regarding the likely benefits, impacts and costs of a proposed facility tends to be a lot easier if they take place before a specific site has been selected.

Most public involvement in government decisions in the United States is a joke. Hearings and so-called town meetings offer trivial opportunities for opponents and proponents to make short statements that won't convince anyone of anything. They are all for show. The real battle takes place in the media and behind the scenes as each group does its best to lobby the elected and appointed officials involved.

Only an extended public dialogue, when questions can still be asked and answered before the Guardians have taken sides, is likely to lead to believable analyses of the merits and demerits of each proposed technology, location, design, or mitigation strategy). We know how to do this, but it requires that some of the money that will inevitably be spent on lawyers and litigation be used to pay professional mediators to facilitate authentic problem-solving or consensus building efforts. This is not about public relations (which is what the wind spokesperson meant by "education"). Rather, it's about public learning through joint inquiry facilitated by a professional neutral. Most people don't even realize that such a thing is possible! Not everyone needs to be involved. Mediators know how to manage conflict assessments that can bring the right stakeholders to the table, to work on a jointly crafted agenda, with a range of experts advisors to help them. Such public inquiries can now be made entirely transparent on the web.

Now we get to the third principle at the heart of the Facility Siting Credo. Professor Howard Raiffa and others have written about this extensively. Unless you "hold potential losers harmless" they will oppose anything that is likely to hurt them. If you want to build a new facility in a particular location, there is no question that a small number of people living adjacent to the site will be opposed. Telling them that the "gains" to everyone else outweigh whatever "losses" they might experience -- so they should support the project -- is crazy. It's not rational. And, as Professor O'Hare noted years ago, it is easy for that small number of peole to find each other. And, they have a substantial incentive to try to block the facility. On the other hand, all the potential gainers (who could number in the millions if we are talking about switching from fossil fuels to clean energy) are usually unaware of the rather small gains they are might realize over the long haul. They don't have an incentive to organize themselves.

Iff the gains to the gainers far outweigh the losses to the losers, that's not going to stop the small number of potential losers from trying to block a facility. And, since regulators and public officials don't employ the Facility Siting Credo, they play into the hands of that small group who can easily recruit Guardians by complaining that decisions have been made without them and no one is doing anything to compensate the losers. Instead of 10% opposed, the opposition grows to more than 50%, and public officials have no choice but to fight the project.

Compensation to potential losers is not as tricky as it might seem. Most people haven't thought about the difference between compensation (something good) and a bribe (something bad). Also, compensation doesn't have to take the form of financial payments. A facility developer could promise to remove something that has for a long-time been a problem -- like cleaning up a contaminated site somewhere else in the area if they are allowed to go build their new facility.

A bribe is an illegal payment which people would be embarrassed to have made public. But compensation, awarded based on clear principles that ensure that everyone in the same category is treated equally, is not a bribe. Community benefit agreements (currently being debated in New York City) seek to ensure that everyone in a community will benefit when a new facility of some kind is built. Some of the gains to the gainers (especially proponents who stand to make a profit) are, in effect, taxed (before they go to the gainers) and used to ensure that the small number of opponents who really stand to lose will be made whole. Some gains are also used to compensate neighborhoods or communities who experience real losses so that everyone else in the city or region can benefit. Compensation payments, or compensatory measures to eliminate a problem in the area, ensure that all those who bear disproportionate costs (even small ones) realize some tangible benefit over and above the general benefits that all the gainers will get if a facility is built. Construction jobs, for example, ought to be held for those adversely affected. Property tax abatements (or at least property tax insurance) should be offered to those who live near a new facility. This will hold them harmless against any property value losses caused by the new facility. The key is to ensure that potential losers are fully compensated. This will lead the Guardians to side with the proponents and NIMBYism will melt away.

If there is no way to tax the gainers, and capture some of the benefits to compensate the losers, then the proposed facility is probably a mistake -- its either in the wrong location, using the wrong technology or being proposed at the wrong time.

Now, there are some opponents who just don't care what they are offered or what their neighborhood is offered (and, again, I'm not just talking about money). They oppose a new facility for ideological reasons or because they just don't want things to change. In real life, when the Facility Siting Credo is followed, the folks in this category (ideological opponents) are a very small minority (fewer than 5% of the total population of a community or region). Elected and appointed officials (and courts) who see that every effort has been made to use some gains to compensate losers and make the host community whole (through an open problem-solving conversation managed by a professional mediator) are not likely to block what 95% of the community supports. So, the trick is to get the Guardians to side with the proponents.

Please, no more whining about NIMBY. Just adopt the Facility Siting Credo and run the process the right way.

Getting Agreement on Energy Policies and Plans

Energy planning ought to be about avoiding problems and seizing collective opportunities. Cities (and nations) have problems when there is not enough energy available at a reasonable price. And, if they could get their act together, cities, regions, states and countries could reduce wasteful patterns of energy use and take advantage of "greener" energy production technologies that reduce costs of all kinds --especially environmental cost -- and increase energy independence (i.e. reducing our dependence on "foreign" oil). Energy planning is about figuring out the best way to match energy supply and energy demand in sustainable ways. It gets complicated, though, because different groups have their own ideas about (1) the desirability of relying on various sources of energy; (2) the desirability of relying primarily on markets to set prices, encourage technology innovation and meet long-term needs, and (3) the appropriateness of allowing some groups and countries to tightly control certain energy supplies. In the final analysis, negotiations at the international, national, state, regional and local levels determine which energy supplies are available and what price we pay to meet our growing demand for electricity, transportation, home heating, and economic production.

Imagine a pie chart that shows the composition of our current energy supplies. We can do this at any scale. Let's think about the country as a whole. Coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear energy, renewables (like solar and wind power), and a few other sources each constitute a wedge. A similar-sized pie chart shows how we use energy: industrial uses, residential uses, transportation, commercial uses, and the like. Supply and demand must be in balance in the sense that we can only use what we are able to find and pay for.

If you ask what the supply and demand pie charts will look like at a certain point in the future, say 10 years from now, there is no correct answer. Different groups will prefer a different mix of energy supplies and want to reshape energy demand, either because a shift will benefit them directly or because they are committed to improving the net overall impact on society in some way. One thing is for sure, though, experts can't tell us what the pie charts ought to look like. We have to make those decisions for ourselves.

If it were up to you, how would you want to alter the pie charts for the United States? The current supply is made up of about 29% coal, 16% oil, 31% natural gas, 12% nuclear, and 11% renewables (including hydro). Current demand includes 30% industrial, 22% residential, 28% transportation, and 19% commercial. The overall price of energy is just over 9 cents per kilowatt, although not everyone pays the same price. The environmental costs of current energy use and production are hard to calculate. Sometimes these are framed in terms of impacts on public health: x people die or get sick each year from diseases associated with pollution of various kinds caused by energy production and utilization. Increasingly environmental costs will be framed in terms of what we would have to spend to artificially do the work that ecosystem do naturally like filter air and water or convert CO2 to oxygen. These are called ecosystem services and we can price them.

Any change in the overall size of the "pie" will effect certain groups -- either changing the price they have to pay for a unit of energy, redistributing job opportunities, reshaping environmental costs, or altering the balance of power in the world. Someone's got to pay for investments in new technology if we want to grow the pie or change the size of a supply or demand wedge.

Efforts at present, at the city level for instance, to change the pattern of energy supply and demand include (1) reducing the amount of energy used by municipal governments; (2) encouraging individual homeowners and businesses to conserve energy and reduce their carbon footprints; (3) encouraging more energy efficient patterns of land use and development, and (4) looking for ways to encourage more sustainable electricity production (through re-use of brownfields for renewable energy, building trash-to-energy plants and the like). In a big city, these can have a noticeable effect. Overall, though, states and national governments will have to get involved or the larger pie charts won't look very different in the future than they do now. In recent years, states have begun to require that at least 20% of the electricity produced within their borders come from renewable energy sources by 2020 or 2030. We'll see whether these provisions are enforced. If they are, the size of the renewable energy wedge could double in the national supply chart.

Unfortunately, we don't have proper forums in which we can work out agreements on how existing supply and demand pie charts should look in the future. Congress has never faced this issue directly; preferring instead to make incremental decisions about whether to subsidize one form of energy development or not (often, at one location at a time). As a nation, we have not set supply or demand goals; instead, we have just bumped along. As I mentioned, states have been trying to encourage investment in cleaner forms of energy production, but they are limited by the grid -- the system of power lines that allows energy produced and stored in one location to be "wheeled" to other locations as demand ebbs and flows. We need a national plan to expand and modernize the grid. We also need to figure out how to store and distribute highly distributed forms of (renewable) energy. We need to decide whether we are going to maintain or increase our reliance on nuclear energy even if we don't have a plan for storing high level nuclear waste.

If states try to change energy efficiency standards or subsidize new forms of energy production, they end up competing with each other. Localities are even more highly constrained. They can improve energy efficiency in public buildings, increase the efficiency of the municipal bus fleet and work with building owners to encourage retrofits that reduce the demand for energy. They can also urge residents to use less energy. But, most are not about to get involved directly in producing energy on their own. If we allow more drilling, maybe we can increase our reliance on oil and gas. But, how do we do that and decrease greenhouse gas emissions at the same time? Can we assume that technology innovation (i.e. clean coal technology or carbon sequestration) will resolve that apparent conflict?

What would it mean to create national, state and local forums in which we could negotiate agreements regarding the changes we want to achieve in the current supply and demand pie charts? At each level, we would have to bring together representatives of all the relevant interests groups, engage in joint fact finding (with the help of appropriately qualified experts), formulate comprehensive agreements regarding five, ten and twenty year objectives and commit to appropriate implementation strategies. These conversations would not be easy. It is hard to formulate overall "packages" that will leave everyone better off. Discussions of this sort need to be mediated by qualified consensus building professionals. At the national level, the Department of Energy could take the lead (in cooperation with the appropriate Congressional committees) but a great many other groups would have to be involved. At the state level, governors and legislative leaders could convene appropriate consensus building efforts, but first we would need to figure out how to define the scope of state energy policies and how they fit within certain national decisions. In every city, broadly-representative working groups would need to consider possible changes in their supply and demand objectives within the framework of state and national plans. Final decisions would be made, of course, by those with the legal authority to make them, but to ensure implementation, the trade-offs and shifting distribution of gains and losses would need to have broad political support.

In the end, energy policies and plans are political choices that ought to reflect the best possible scientific, economic and engineering inputs. Our traditional approach to making public policy -- careening from one crisis to the next -- won't produce the interlocking decisions required. We need to commit to a consensus building approach to energy planning.

Natural Resource Management

Consensus building can be applied in all kinds of natural resource management disputes. Even in the face of competing demands, contending stakeholders can reach agreement on how to proceed. With a help of a professional mediator, people or groups (including government agencies) can work out who should get what portion of the land, water, minerals, or forests and for what purposes. They can do this in a way that takes account of legally-mandated rights and regulations as well as radically different needs and values. Their task is to come up with a way of guaranteeing everyone something better than what they would most likely end up with if they took the battle to court or into the political arena.  Sometimes (voluntary) compensatory arrangements can make a difference.  Other times, what look like irreconcilable differences can be resolved by formulating new rules about when and how a resource can be used (for example, your group can use certain portions of the lake for sport fishing during specific weeks of the year while my group is guaranteed that there won't be any motorized vehicles on the water at other times or in other portions of the lake). Neither side "wins" in the sense that the other "loses," but both achieve their most important interests.  Sometimes the key is joint fact finding -- gathering believable information together. This can lead to entirely new problem-solving ideas that go beyond existing laws or practices.  To see how this actually works look at the web site of the MIT-USGS Science Impact Collaborative (scienceimpact.mit.edu).  Also, see Susskind et. al, Negotiating Environmental Agreements, Island Press, 1999 for more examples and theoretical background.