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

The Public Disputes Program (PDP) is a long-term research program committed to formulating and testing strategies for enhancing the fairness, efficiency, stability and wisdom of public decision-making efforts. Our approach has been to capitalize on actual invitations to work with public agencies and stakeholder groups to experiment with carefully structured “interventions” that provide opportunities to engage in carefully structured “action-research.”

In a democratic society, we assume that elected officials are supposed to be accountable to the people who elect them; that agency personnel are supposed to be responsive to the elected officials who appoint them; and that both elected and appointed officials are supposed to take account of the concerns of the people affected by the decisions that governments make. We assume that “open deliberation,” freedom of the press, freedom of information requirements, and the scrutiny of regulators and the judiciary contribute to political responsiveness and accountability.  We’re not sure, though, how to benchmark these objectives or gauge success in specific instances.  We know that elected officials often fail to vote in ways that a majority of their district would prefer (yet they still get re-elected).  And, we know that agency staff are often more inclined to follow the dictates of their professional peers than the political demands of their department heads.  We know that extensive deliberations don’t always produce desirable results.  And, finally, we have a great deal of evidence to suggest that non-government and unofficial “representatives” often do a better job of  signaling and responding to the concerns of stakeholders than their official counterparts.

The U.S. constitution is vague about how we are supposed to measure the representativeness, responsiveness and accountability of government.  Over the past fifty years, western democracies have adopted a variety of extra-constitutional mechanisms to supplement what the separation of powers, checks and balances, and the Bill of Rights have not guaranteed.  These mechanisms include surveys, plebiscites, focus groups, public hearings, charrettes, blue ribbon advisory committees, negotiated rulemaking, interactive websites, and collaborative or negotiated problem-solving efforts.  The MIT-Harvard Public Disputes Program has, over the past two decades, demonstrated that the proper application of consensus building and multi-party negotiation techniques, assisted by professional mediators, can in fact enhance the fairness, efficiency, stability and wisdom of public decision-making.

A number of award-winning books summarize PDP’s findings:  Resolving Environmental Regulatory Disputes (SUNY Press), Environmental Dispute Resolution (Plenum), Breaking the Impasse (Basic Books), Dealing with an Angry Public (Free Press), Environmental Diplomacy (Oxford), Consensus Building Handbook (Sage), Transboundary Environmental Negotiation (Jossey-Bass), Breaking Robert’s Rules, and the forthcoming four-volume set Multiparty Negotiation (Sage) and The Cure for Our Broken Political Process (Potomac).

The Director of PDP is Larry Susskind, Ford Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning at MIT.  The Co-Director is William Moomaw, Professor of International Environmental Policy at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts.  The two Associate Directors are David Fairman, Co-Managing Director of the Consensus Building Institute and Lecturer in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT and Patrick Field, Co-Managing Director of the Consensus Building Institute. 

PDP is affiliated with the Environmental Policy Group in MIT's Department of Urban Studies and Planning and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. We pursue research in five areas:  Global Environmental Treaty-making; Consensus building in the Public Policy Arena; Global Responses to the Land Claims of Indigenous Peoples (in conjunction with MIT's Program on Human Rights and Justice); The Use of Traditional Peacemaking Tools and Techniques in Navajo Nation (in conjunction with the clinical programs at Harvard Law School), and Resolution of Science-intensive Disputes Surrounding the Management of Natural Resources (in conjunction with the MIT-USGS Science Impact Collaborative). 

Global Environmental Treaty-Making

Another round of global climate change negotiations (following the Kyoto Protocol) will begin in 2009 in Copenhagen. New rounds of negotiations regarding possible changes in dozens of global environmental agreements are also planned in the coming year.  The "system" of global environmental treaty-making is still in a rather primitive form. There is much we can do to help enhance the effectiveness of the negotiations involved.

In just the past two years, we have published a number of articles and books that have contributed in important ways to theory building in the multi-party negotiation and deliberative democracy fields. Susskind and Moomaw have released Volume XV of their annual series called Papers on International Environmental Negotiation. Each year the best papers from the advanced MIT/Tufts/Harvard graduate seminar led by Susskind and Moomaw are published both on-line and in a monograph format by the Program on Negotiation.  Their book, Transboundary Environmental Negotiations (Jossey-Bass, 2002) presented the best  student papers from the first 10 years  Their seminar  will be offered again in September 2008 for 25 MIT, Tufts and Harvard students. This year's class will focus on the upcoming Climate Change negotiations in Copenhagen. (N.B. Moomaw and PDP Associate, Professor Adil Najam (Boston University) were part of the IPPC team that shared last year's Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore for their work on climate change.)

Public Dispute Resolution

The quality of our democracy presumably rests on the deliberations we are able to promote and sustain among individuals and groups with contending interests and views.  The responsiveness  of our elected and appointed officials also presumably hinges on our ability to involve a wide range of stakeholders in policy-making and a range of administrative processes.  To the extent we can enhance the quality of deliberations and the responsiveness and accountability of government,   we can contribute to the continued development of our democratic practices (as the founders envisioned). 

In 2006, Susskind's Breaking Robert's Rules (Oxford University Press) was published (www.breakingrobertsrules.com).  In 2008, Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Portuguese and Dutch versions are scheduled to appear, each co-authored and rewritten (not just translated) to take account of political, cultural and legal differences.  In 2009, revised versions are scheduled to appear in Spanish, Korean, French, and Italian.  A number of public, private and voluntary organizations
are in the process of adopting consensus building bylaws to replace their old parliamentary operating procedures based on the ideas presented in Breaking Robert's Rules.  

Associate Director Patrick Field is preparing a manuscript on public apology. And, he has added a element on public apology to the popular Executive Education course called Dealing with An Angry Public that Susskind, Professor Michael Wheeler, and now Patrick Field offer twice a year in conjunction with the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.

 We are engaged in a number of "action-research" projects that will allow us to "test" various approaches to collaborative decision-making at the federal, state and local level in the United States and overseas.

The Indigenous Peoples Project

Susskind and MIT doctoral student Isabelle Angeleuski have just published Addressing the Land Claims of Aboriginal Peoples in conjunction with MIT's Human Rights and Justice Program.  This monograph lays the groundwork for a new PDP effort entitled the Indigenous Peoples' Project that will seek to formulate a "rights-based" doctrine in support of the land claims of aboriginal groups around the world."  

PDP has been involved in a range of efforts to assist First Nations in Canada, Bedouins in Israel, Mindanouans in the Philippines, and Indigenous communities through Latin America and North America all seeking to clarify their rights to manage resources on and under their traditional lands.

Traditional Peacemaking in Navajo Nation

A team of Harvard Law School, MIT and Harvard Divinity School students has prepared a series of papers on "Using Traditional Peace-making in Navajo Nation to Address Land and Natural Resource Management Disputes."  With support from the Program on Negotiation, PDP has built a long-term relationship with the indigenous peacemakers in Navajo Nation.  Harvard Law School's Clinical Program in conjunction with MIT's Department of Urban Studies and Planning will send teams of graduate students twice each year to Navajo Nation to learn about and assist traditional peacemaking efforts.  This field-based effort is organized jointly with Robert Bordone's Dispute Resolution Clinic at Harvard Law School.

Science-Intensive Policy Disputes

Susskind and Herman Karl, Co-Director of the MIT-USGS Science Impact Collaborative (MUSIC) have finalized a contract with the U.S. Department of the Interior that will support the training of eight MIT graduate students each year for the next three years in collaborative environmental management -- particularly adaptation to the impacts of climate change.  Building on the many books,
articles and reports published by PDP affiliates over the past decade, MUSIC students and faculty  will participate in action research projects to test a range of propositions concerning joint fact finding and adaptive environmental management. Susskind, Karl and their associates have produced more  than a dozen working papers and articles in peer-reviewed journals that deal with techniques and strategies for resolving science-intensive policy disputes. (scienceimpact.mit.edu)  Susskind is now editing a new book series with Springer Publishers that will present work on Sustainable Development and Collaborative Planning.

In August 2008, Sage will publish a four volume set entitled Multiparty Negotiation edited by Susskind and Larry Crump. They will also co-edit a special issue of the Journal of Conflict Management Research that will reprint the introductory and summary articles from the Sage collection. The first volume of the set deals with the interdisciplinary foundations of multi-party negotiation theory. The second volume analyzes multiparty negotiation through the lens of public dispute resolution. The third volume examines complex litigation as a multiparty negotiation process. The fourth volume explores inter-organizational interaction (in the private sector and in international relations) as a form of multiparty negotiation. Of the more than 100 articles and book chapters reprinted in this collection, 20 appeared originally as PDP/PON publications.

There are currently six doctoral students affiliated with PDP: Catherine Ashcraft (a former PON Graduate Research Fellow), Isabelle Angeleuski (MIT),  Nancy Odeh (MIT), Beaudry Kock (MIT), Tijs van Maakkers (MIT), and Mariah Levin (Harvard/Tufts). All are writing dissertations linked to one of the research themes listed above. 

Faculty associates include Professor Michael Wheeler (Harvard Business School),
Professor John Forester (Cornell), Professor Adil Najam (Boston University), Dr. Herman Karl (MIT), and Professor Balakrishnan Rajagopal (MIT). 

Students interested in participating in the work of the Public Disputes Program should  contact Professor Susskind at susskind@mit.edu.