Negotiation Skills and Collaborative Process Design and Management 

Negotiation Skills

Creating a collaborative effort among multiple landowners and stakeholders to achieve mutually agreeable goals is often critical to achieving success, minimizing conflict, and building long-term commitment to conservation. In these two sessions, we will: 1) come to understand the benefits and challenges of collaborative approaches; 2) demonstrate how negotiation is used to develop an awareness of the differences among stakeholders and find mutually-acceptable solutions that enable conservation projects to go forward; and 3) develop a working understanding of how collaborative processes can be designed and managed. In this first session, we will participate in a roleplay negotiation exercise and debrief this exercise to draw out principles of effective negotiation in achieving joint gains in conservation.

Process Design and Management Skills

The insights from the morning session will be used as a stepping-off point in identifying guidelines for designing and managing collaborative processes.

We will use a scenario-based exercise to: 1) diagnose the challenges inherent in creating, managing and sustaining large-scale collaborations and 2) develop strategies for process design and management that can overcome these challenges. Fellows will then apply these tools to strengthen the designs of their own projects