Working Through Environmental Conflict: The Collaborative Learning Approach

Environmental and natural resource policy decision making is changing. Increasingly citizens and management agency personnel are seeking ways to do things differently; to participate meaningfully in the decision making process as parties work through policy conflicts. Doing things differently has come to mean doing things collaboratively.

Daniels and Walker examine collaboration in environmental and natural resource policy decision making and conflict management. They address collaboration by featuring a method collaborative learning, that has been designed to address decision making and conflict management needs in complex and controversial policy settings. As they illustrate, collaborative learning differs in some significant ways from existing approaches for dealing with policy decision making, public participation, and conflict management. First, it is a hybrid of systems thinking and alternative dispute resolution concepts. Second, it is grounded explicitly in experiential, team-or organizational-and adult learning theories. It is a theory-based framework through which parties can make progress in the management of controversial environmental policy situations. They discuss both the theory and technique of collaborative learning and present cases where it has been applied. This is a professional and teaching tool for scholars, students, and researchers involved with environmental issues as well as dispute resolution.

Examines the uses of collaboration in environmental and natural resource policy decision making and conflict management.

Booknews

Daniels (western rural development, Utah State U.) and Walker (speech communications, forest resources, and peace studies, Oregon State U.) are not here suggesting that workers just keep doing their job while the demonstration rages around them. Rather they present Collaborative Learning as a framework for addressing problems with public policy. It moves beyond attempts to balance competing interests, which often generate compromise solutions that satisfy none of the participants, to craft technically competent decisions through processes that create and involve an informed citizenry. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

STEVEN E. DANIELS is Director of the Western Rural Development Center at Utah State University in Logan.

GREGG B. WALKER is Professor and Chair of the Department of Speech Communication, Adjunct Professor of Forest Resources, and Director of the Peace Studies program at Oregon State University in Corvallis.