Please visit the Public Disputes Program website for complete information and online resources.

The MIT-Harvard Public Disputes Program, one of the largest and busiest components of the Program on Negotiation, is an internationally known center for action research committed to a new way of thinking about and resolving disputes in the public sector. Put most simply, the Public Disputes Program exists to replace "win-lose" outcomes with "all-gain" solutions to highly controversial and complex problems of public policy making.

Over the years, scores of journal articles and books-as well as television and newspaper reports-have helped to chronicle the work of the Public Disputes Program. Part of the reason for this high profile is that the Public Disputes Program deals with complex, "tough-nut-to-crack" disputes that often seem impervious to negotiated solutions such as:

• balancing economic needs of the developing world with global environmental safeguards;
• developing a national energy policy for the United States;
• helping consumers, providers of services, and government officials set fair electric utility rates;
• siting such LULUs (locally unwanted land uses) as radioactive waste disposal facilities; or
• mediating a statewide confrontation over affordable housing.

For many years, PDP faculty and associates have been working on an "Alternative to Roberts Rules of Order" for groups that want to operate by consensus. Now, in conjunction with the Consensus Building Institute, such a guide is available. The Consensus Building Handbook by Lawrence Susskind, Sarah McKearnan, and Jennifer Thomas-Larmer was published in 1999 by Sage Publishers. This reference also includes contributions from more than 50 of America's best-known public dispute resolution professionals and contains 17 chapters and 18 case studies examining all aspects of consensus-building theory and practice.

PDP affiliates are also extensively involved in mediation, research, and teaching. Some illustrations follow.

Mediation

Examples of PDP's mediation efforts include:

• organizing and supporting a bi-cultural team of mediators in Israel to assist in the resolution of long-standing Bedouin land claims;
• support and training for the Joint Environmental Mediation Service (JEMS), an Israeli-Palestinian NGO (linked to the Israel-Palestine Center for Research and Information) that is mediating land, water, and other development disputes in contested areas;
• serving as mediator/convenor of a group of over 100 policy makers, government officials, environmentalists, and business representatives who met in a nationally televised exercise to try to negotiate a workable national policy on energy;
• working in a similar capacity to help develop an affordable housing compact for the Hartford, Connecticut region; and
• collaborating with government officials, environmentalists, business interests, and others in Maine on the safe disposal of the state's low-level radioactive waste.

Research

"Action-research" is a hallmark of the Public Disputes Program, with faculty and graduate students undertaking projects that help both to build negotiation theory and to explain how and why particular processes may or may not work.

For instance, PDP (with support from the General Electric Foundation) has documented the Environmental Protection Agency's experiments with "reg neg," or regulatory negotiation. This technique is aimed at broadening participation in the government's rulemaking process before draft regulations are issued, thereby improving the chances that the regulations will be viewed as legitimate and stimulate compliance.

Another example of this kind of activity is PDP's extensive involvement in global environmental negotiation, research which has led to the publication of several books and numerous journal articles. The most recent book is Transboundary Environmental Negotiation: A New Approach to Global Cooperation, by Susskind, Moomaw and Gallagher, published in 2002 by Jossey-Bass.

Teaching

PDP faculty teach graduate-level courses at MIT, Harvard, and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. One particularly popular course is Lawrence Susskind and William Moomaw's Seminar on International Environmental Negotiation, offered jointly by MIT, the Program on Negotiation, and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts. Graduate students in business, law, economics, government, and other disciplines from several universities and many different nations participate in this fall semester seminar. Ten collections of published work have evolved from work initially presented in the seminar.

Faculty also devote a considerable amount of time to the development of curriculum materials suitable for use in teaching and training programs. In all, the Public Disputes Program has published more than 80 negotiation teaching simulations. These range in complexity from situations involving just two stakeholder groups in a public dispute to extremely complex multilateral negotiations involving a dozen or more parties in global treaty negotiations.

With support from the Program on Negotiation and the Surdna Foundation, PDP Associate Director David Fairman has produced A Workable Peace, a high school curriculum that can be used in conjunction with social studies and history classes to teach other ways of managing intergroup conflict. Using a series of simulations (based on conflicts in Rwanda, Guatemala, Hebron, and Northern Ireland), students learn about the dynamics of interethnic conflict resolution. The curriculum has been tested in a variety of school systems, most extensively at Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School.

Susskind and Michael Wheeler teach a short course called "Dealing with an Angry Public." This intensive two-day training program, aimed at government officials, business representatives, environmentalists, and others who are frequently at loggerheads, is offered twice yearly, attracting an audience of approximately 150 senior managers for each session. As is the case with the Program on Negotiation executive training programs, tuition fees from this course help to support PDP's many research projects and publications.

Current projects (undertaken jointly with the not-for-profit Consensus Building Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts) include:

1. the development and presentation of a community training package prepared for the U.S. EPA's Office of Environmental Justice entitled "Achieving Environmental Justice Through the Application of Dispute Resolution Techniques";
2. the preparation and presentation of an advanced training program for the United States Geological Service dealing with Strategies for Resolving Science-Intensive Policy Disputes;
3. four regional programs presented jointly with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy on "Mediating Land Use Disputes"; and
4. the development and presentation of an on-line, instructor-led week long course entitled "Negotiating for Sustainability" prepared for the United Nations Development Programme.

Affiliated Faculty

Saleem Ali
University of Vermont

Eileen Babbit
Tufts University

Jason Corburn
Hunter College

John Forester
Department of City and Regional Planning
Cornell University

Howard Kunreuther
The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania

David Laws
Department of Urban Studies and Planning
MIT

Adil Najam
Boston University

Michael Wheeler
Harvard Business School

Practitioner Associates

Larry Dixon
Stacie Smith
Mary Skelton Roberts
Ron Morad
Merrick Hoben
Mieke van der Wansem
Consensus Building Institute
Cambridge, MA

Matthew McKinney
Montana Consensus Council

Sarah McKearnan
University of Michigan

Herman Karl
United States Geological Service

Don Edwards
Justice and Sustainability Associates

Susan Podziba
Susan Podziba and Associates

Jonathan Raab
Raab Associates

Graduate Student Research Assistants

Michele Ferenz
Boyd Fuller
Dong-Young Kim
Pia Kohler
Gregg Macey
Janet Martinez
Masahiro Matsuura
Tina Rosan
Department of Urban Studies and Planning
MIT