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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.
List of contents
Preface
Crafting Effective Policy in a Contentious and Complex World
The Essence of Collaborative Learning
Understanding Conflict Situations
Collaboration as a Deliberative Process
Learning as a Foundation for Good Decisions
Systems Thinking
Collaborative Learning, Communication, and Culture
Techniques of Collaborative Learning
The Practice of Collaborative Learning: Citizens, Scientists, and Foresters in Fire Recovery Planning
The Practice of Collaborative Learning: Other Applications
Persistent Challenges and Future Directions
About the author
Steven E. Daniels, Gregg B. Walker
