Public Policy Mediation Workshops in Europe

Susan Podziba & Associates has helped to introduce the tools of environmental and public policy mediation to government officials and academics in the Netherlands and Finland. Both countries are working to create mediator capacity to engage stakeholders and the public in effectively addressing environmental and land use conflicts.

Workshops have ranged from introducing concepts of environmental and public policy mediation and consensus building to skills development to consultation on existing conflicts and building an infrastructure for the field of professional mediation.

Susan Podziba maintains ongoing relationships and provides consultation to workshop organizers and participants. For example, in Finland researchers are working to develop Finnish-based negotiation simulations to address requests from environmental and urban planners for training in conflict resolution. In addition, she is providing expert support for a research project entitled, “Procedural environmental rights in land use conflicts,” funded by the Finnish Academy and based at the Centre for Urban and Regional Studies, Helsinki University of Technology.

Negotiation, Mediation, and Interactive Policymaking Workshop
Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research (TNO)
Delft, Netherlands

Susan Podziba & Associates designed and delivered a workshop for environmental professionals and academics to gain negotiation and mediation skills and to learn about interactive policymaking processes. Each day of the three-day workshop had a different focus area: negotiation fundamentals, mediation and facilitative processes, and complex stakeholder involvement. The final day of the workshop included consultations on a European Union project on sediment in Dutch waterways.

The “Negotiation Fundamentals” sessions introduced participants to core elements of mutual gains negotiations. This provided the essential background for understanding mediation practice, which involves assisting others to negotiate more productively.

During sessions on “Mediation and Facilitative Processes,” participants learned a framework for understanding the dynamics of mediation. The use of hands-on simulations enabled them to make the mediation framework tangible, test its practicality, and develop additional skills. The sessions covered methods for understanding the dynamics of conflict, including mediator entry into negotiations already embedded in conflict.

Finally, the sessions on Complex Stakeholder Involvement moved trainees from the basics of mediation to the dynamics of multi-party, multi-issue public policy mediation where the fundamental techniques of mediation still apply, but many additional factors must be taken into account. These include the scale of the negotiations, given the number of negotiators and the range of issues they must decide; challenges of representation, power, and authority; time and resource constraints; and mediator leverage. In this session, participants used existing cases to identify stakeholder involvement complexities and strategies for managing them.

Environmental and Public Policy Mediation Workshop
Centre for Urban and Regional Studies, Helsinki University of Technology

Susan Podziba conducted a workshop on environmental and land use mediation for Finnish government officials and academics seeking to learn better ways to implement the Finnish Land Use and Building Act of 1999, which requires public participation in land use decisions. Its implementation led to increased conflict, which in turn prompted Finnish urban planners to request conflict resolution training. Workshop participants are now developing materials to provide this training.

The workshop featured the fundamentals of U.S. public policy mediation at the local, regional, and federal levels of government and their potential application to current Finnish public dispute resolution processes. The workshop provided an opportunity for Finnish professionals to present on current conflict resolution experiments and to discuss new approaches in light of the tools provided in the workshop.

The initial session introduced environmental and public policy mediation as distinct from other kinds of public conversations and participatory processes, and as a systematic process composed of pre-negotiation, negotiation, and implementation phases.

This was followed with three case studies that concretely illustrated the dynamics and tensions inherent in deliberative processes that bring together diverse stakeholders such as officials of various levels of government, experts and citizens, industry and environmentalists, and immigrants and old-time residents. The case studies also illustrated how process designs can be tailored to the unique circumstances of each situation so as to ensure actionable agreements. For example, participants explored the process design differences between one project that involved regulatory enforcement by the U.S. government and another that required voluntary action by individuals from various industry sectors.