Resources

1999. Authors: L. Susskind , McKearnan, S. , and Thomas-Larmer, J. Over the past decade, consensus building has emerged as the most practical and effective way for groups of people — be they members of a permanent organization or disputants in a public conflict who come together on an ad hoc basis — to make decisions and solve problems. Consensus building is an agreement-seeking process that enables a group of people to satisfy everyone's primary interests and concerns. Using consensus-based...

2013. Author: Wesley Look. The political economy of US climate policy has revolved around state- and district- level distributional economics, and to a lesser extent household-level distribution questions. Many politicians and analysts have suggested that state- and district-level climate policy costs (and their distribution) are a function of local carbon intensity and commensurate electricity price sensitivity. However, other studies have suggested that what is most important in determining...

2019. European Business Review, no. 3. Authors: S. Dinnar and Susskind, L. We all know the statistics. Most start-up businesses fail. While many experts attribute the high failure rate to the risks associated with innovation, we have found that an equally significant cause is the mismanagement of key relationships, and more specifically, the way that founders and entrepreneurs negotiate. Being the leader of a start-up company entails a range of negotiations with partners, potential partners...

Authors: L. C. Stokes, Susskind, L., and Selin, N. E. Despite decades of scientific work on issues such as ozone depletion, climate change, and toxic chemicals, effectively communicating scientific uncertainty remains a major challenge in all environmental treaty negotiations. Strategies for incorporating scientific information into policy include developing scientific assessments, setting up subsidiary bodies to treaty negotiations, and framing the information in an appropriate manner. How...

2011. Author: Tyler Corson-Rikert. The Sustainable Water Management Initiative is a multi-stakeholder process that the Massachusetts Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs convened in early 2010 to seek advice on how to more sustainably manage the state's water resources. The initiative followed growing scientific understanding of the importance of adequate instream flows to the ecological health of the state's waterways, and several years of political mobilization and litigation...

2015. Author: Katherine Blizzard. In 2014 Washington, D.C.'s Metrorail system opened Phase 1 of its new Silver Line, which extends the current system to include significant portions of Fairfax County in Northern Virginia. This extension runs through Tysons Corner - a major regional business district that is notorious as a sprawling and auto-oriented "edge city" - on elevated tracks that are an average of 36 feet off the ground. Fairfax County hopes the Silver Line will help transform Tysons...

2010. Author: Sarah Hammitt. With their high concentrations of impervious surface, urban areas generate stormwater runoff that overwhelms existing infrastructure causing flooding, sewer overflows, water pollution, and habitat degradation. Under pressure to find cost-effective, environmentally sustainable, and socially responsible solutions to stormwater management, cities are looking to green infrastructure. The term "green infrastructure," when used for stormwater management, denotes design...

2008. Author: Nancy Odeh. This dissertation focuses on the use of public-private partnerships (PPPs) in the water sector in Jordan, a Middle East pioneer with respect to experimenting with different approaches to delivering water services in both cities and rural areas. Jordan's efforts to decentralize water services began in the late 1990s at the prodding of the World Bank. A management contract was awarded to a private consortium to operate and maintain Amman's water system. One major...

2019. Author: Jeremia Mamola. Indonesia is the largest archipelagic state in the world. It holds very important marine resources and some of the most biodiverse marine ecosystems. Marine spatial planning, a tool that can be used to control development and maintain ecosystem services, is vital to the future of the marine environment in Indonesia. Since 2007, the national government has required each province to create a Marine Spatial Plan (MSP). These are supposed to mesh with the already long...

2013. Author: Tijs van Maasakkers. The concept of ecosystem services has become ubiquitous in environmental planning and policy. One way of turning the insight that society depends on nature for a wide range of benefits into practice is by creating markets for ecosystem services. Despite much enthusiasm and research, relatively few such markets have been implemented successfully. The basic question that this dissertation seeks to answer is why has it been so difficult to create successful...

2007. Author: Katherine Wallace. Since its passage in 1972, the majority of pollution reduction under the federal Clean Water Act has resulted from technology-based limits imposed on point source dischargers. However, most U.S. water bodies are unmonitored and of those that are, between 40 and 50 percent remain impaired. Given this limited progress, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, multiple state agencies, and non-governmental organizations have proposed water quality trading as a cost...

2006. Author: Boyd Fuller. Disputes over the management of water resources in the United States often seem irreconcilable because stakeholders' differences in values, beliefs, and identities are so hard to resolve. Yet, while many efforts to resolve such disputes fail to generate agreement, some do. Looking at these fundamental disagreements about how to manage water, this dissertation attempts to understand why stakeholders in some consensus building processes were able to generate and agree on...