Conference 2010's blog

Mountaintop removal (MTR) has reduced energy prices and provided corporate income, employment in high-unemployment areas, and taxes to pay for schoolteachers and nursing clinics. It also has destroyed land and streams and divided families and communities. It also lays bare, in stark terms, choices conveniently ignored so that we can keep our current lifestyles.

One factor that makes MTR such an intractable issue is the perceived lack of other economic development options. Wendy Willis, Deputy Director of the Policy Consensus Initiative/National Policy Consensus Center (PIC / NPCC), and Frank Dukes, Director of the Institute for Environmental Negotiation, University of Virginia, are partnering on a community capacity building initiative that seeks to positively navigate community and social change and engage communities to reach shared goals. This effort will not address the suitability of MTR, but will help local leadership increase their capacity to address conflict and polarization and examine other community development options.

This session invites participants to consider these questions:

Carri Hulet and Lucy Park will share lessons learned about building trust from their work on a collaborative policymaking process involving five private irrigation companies, four cities, and one county in a developing, but historically agricultural region of northern Utah.

Prior to the start of the collaborative process in 2008, trust between parties was at an all-time low. During the first year of engagement, the trust level grew substantially and the group made admirable headway on three major initiatives regarding storm water management. However, the focus of the project drastically changed in July, 2009 when one of the canals breached and flooded a home, resulting in the deaths of a mother and her two children. The emergency tripped the involvement of the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), and prompted a statewide debate on canal regulation.

In spite of having one of the best developed, most institutionalized systems of court-connected ADR in the country, Georgia has certainly been a late adopter of ECR. Only in the last 3 years has the state’s Environmental Protection Division (EPD) dipped its toe in the pool of stakeholder participation in policy making processes. However, this did not stop a large group of water stakeholders in North Georgia from undertaking a collaborative effort at monitoring and managing water at the watershed level. The Lake Allatoona-Upper Etowah River Partnership began meeting in the fall of 2003 and has accomplished Georgia’s first comprehensive watershed monitoring, assessment and protection plan. This group includes seven counties and three water and sewer districts. It has been partially sponsored by the US Army Corps of Engineers and has included input from stakeholders in numerous government agencies and civic groups (e.g. FWS, EPA, USGS, TNC, and others). This presentation will discuss the key factors that contributed to the creation and continuation of these efforts, in the absence of regulatory mandates to conduct work at the watershed level.

"Trust in Allah, but tie your camel." - Muslim Proverb

Those of us in the dispute resolution field often talk about the resolution and management of conflict as a self-evident good.  We continually refine our approaches and improve our skills in order to better help our parties work through conflict and find solutions.  But one key element of the work that we do is often overlooked by conflict practitioners, or undervalued in terms of importance to the process: the element of trust. 

Trust permeates almost every aspect of multiparty conflict resolution.  There's the trust that the participants have in the process design, the trust they have in each other to participate in good faith, and the trust they have in institutions to abide by agreed-upon outcomes.  There's also the delicate balance of trust the parties maintain regarding the facilitators tasked with managing the process -- which may fluctuate over time, sometimes very rapidly and unpredictably.

The EPP Section conference is coming up -- May 24, 2010 at the Loews Ventana Canyon in Tucson, Arizona... less than two months away. All the details are here. Also, remember that it's followed the very next day by the USIECR conference, details of which are here. This is a must-not-miss event for folks in the ECR field. The sessions are just half of it -- many of the best conversations happen in the hallways, or on walks out in the desert. There's no other event where you can interact with such a rich group of practitioners, agency folks, or academics.

As we get closer to the conference, we will feature panels and events in this special conference blog -- and during the conference, we will post updates, images, and video for those of you who can't join us in person.

If you have any questions about the conference, please contact conference co-chairs Dan Adams at dadams (at) langdongroupinc.com or Lucy Park at lpark (at) langdongroupinc.com, phone 801-886-9052.

We hope to see you there!