Projects on conflict management

Elaine Andrews' environmental projects are listed under the Community & Environment tab.

New conflict management techniques have been developed over the past thirty years. They have great potential to reduce the costs of conflict; but making daily practice live up to that potential is not easy. In particular, underlying systems and structures of conflict regularly defeat well-meaning efforts. 

We often find that the underlying structures have not been examined closely, let alone addressed in a sophisticated way. That's partly because such system-level work often demands skills and knowledge that no one individual has. It takes a team. Such a team may need very different kinds of people, so it probably needs a manager who has done this before, and successfully.

We have a track record of dealing with these conditions in a very practical way. This "R&D" work has focused on nine major areas:

• Developing a truly comprehensive conception of negotiation (Canon initiative)
• Helping organizations to think about conflict before it happens
• Redesigning how negotiation is taught (RNT project)
• Building a true field of conflict management (Broad Field project)
• Creating a closer relationship between ideas and practice (Theory to Practice project)
• Developing better qualifications and quality control for mediation
• Developing better definitions and structures of ethics in mediation
• Developing a more sophisticated approach to infrastructure needs
• Examining how the law interrelates with negotiation and mediation

Publications resulting from these projects are numerous. Many are now reproduced in PDF free of charge, at the sub-pages linked above. For a more comprehensive list please see the Publications page.