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Local governments in cities around the world will not be able to cope with climate change impacts until they enhance their capacity to adapt. Past efforts to build local capacity, however, have often been unsuccessful. Building municipal capacity to formulate and implement climate adaptation plans will, in our view, require a new approach. Special attention will need to be paid to (1) contingent financial arrangements; (2) widespread and continuous stakeholder engagement; and (3) a commitment to experimental problem-solving. Most important, to respond to the scientific and technical uncertainties surrounding climate risks, local governments will have to enhance their 'adaptive governance' capabilities. Key policy insights Building local capacity to adapt to climate change is likely to require moving beyond traditional forms of financial and technical assistance so that the uncertainties and complexities of climate change can be addressed. We suggest a new three-pronged approach to municipal capacity building. The first element of this new approach will require structuring financial investments in a more adaptable (i.e. contingent) fashion. The second will involve widespread and continuous stakeholder engagement, both for coalition building and for public learning. The third encourages an experimental approach to problem-solving so that communities can learn-by-doing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As governments have digitized their operations, they have opened themselves to cyberattacks, resulting in harmful disruptions to government services. The scholarly world has been slow to pick up on this growing risk. Professional associations have conducted studies of their own, and produced recommendations, but few scholars have looked closely at cybersecurity practices at the municipal level. The interconnectedness of local infrastructure—across and among agencies and levels of government—makes it hard to figure out what is happening. In this paper, we urge scholars from multiple disciplines to examine the dangers created by the cross-linkages that characterize local cybersecurity. We examine the existing academic research, and demonstrate the significant growth in cybersecurity practice that has cropped up in spite of the relative sparsity of academic work. Theory and practice need to catch up with each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When it comes to conflicts over the allocation of freshwater supply, who bears the burden, at what cost, and at what scale are important questions. While science can contribute to resolution of certain water allocation disputes, more scientific certainty will not resolve most water allocation controversies. Water stress in Africa and in the Middle East—particularly in the Nile Basin—is likely to lead to a range of conflicts, not because there is not enough scientific information to go around, but for other reasons. Water stress is likely to emerge as an increasingly important concern because population growth, current allocation practices, unchecked demand, and underinvestment in infrastructure are not being appropriately addressed. An effective way to resolve water crisis is to reframe conflicting needs and uses of water as opportunities for joint decision-making about this shared resource. The authors use the Nile Basin to illustrate how such informal problem-solving and decision-making can be initiated. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Many water governance and management issues are complex. The complexity of these issues is related to crossing of multiple boundaries: political, social and jurisdictional, as well as physical, ecological and biogeochemical. Resolution of these issues usually requires interactions of many parties with conflicting values and interests operating across multiple boundaries and scales to make decisions. The interdependence and feedback among interacting variables, processes, actors and institutions are hard to model and difficult to forecast. Thus, decision-making related to complex water problems needs be contingent and adaptive. This paper draws on a number of ideas from complexity science and negotiation theory that may make it easier to cope with the complexities and difficulties of managing boundary crossing water disputes. It begins with the Water Diplomacy Framework that was developed and tested over the past several years. Then, it uses three key ideas from complexity science (interdependence and interconnectedness; uncertainty and feedback; emergence and adaptation) and three from negotiation theory (stakeholder identification and engagement; joint fact finding; and value creation through option generation) to show how application of these ideas can help enhance effectiveness of water management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing legal and regulatory frameworks in Chile do not ensure adequate opportunities to address the trade-offs associated with hydropower effectively. As a result, hydro projects have become the focus of intense public protests and legal disputes. This article provides a historical overview of hydro development in Chile, and then analyses three elements of Chile's hydropower 'problem': the need for improved governance of the electricity and water sectors, more comprehensive and timely environmental and social impact assessment, and fuller respect for the rights of indigenous peoples affected by hydropower projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In most democratic countries, government officials make water-allocation decisions. Citizens depend on these officials and their technical advisors to take account of both technical and political considerations in determining which water uses get priority, what infrastructure investments to make and what water quality standards to apply. In many parts of the world, water users and stakeholders have additional opportunities to comment on such decisions before they are implemented. Under some circumstances, citizens can challenge water management decisions in court. This is not enough. More direct democracy, involving stakeholders before such decisions are made, can produce fairer and increasingly sustainable results. The steps in collaborative adaptive management – a form of stakeholder engagement particularly appropriate to managing complex water networks – are described in this article along with the reasons that traditional forms of representative democracy are inadequate when it comes to water policy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

1. Collaborative adaptive management (CAM) is regularly touted as the best way to handle natural resource management in the face of uncertainty, change and conflict. Successful applications of CAM have, however, been elusive in practice. 2. This article examines the Glen Canyon Dam Adaptive Management Program (AMP) in the United States, and other CAM efforts, to illustrate why and how procedural shortcomings may lead to natural resource management failures and reflect on how they may be overcome. 3. Synthesis and applications. To increase the chance of success, CAM efforts should set clear overarching goals and concrete and measurable objectives, employ tools and incentives to facilitate participation and foster collaboration, implement well-defined joint fact-finding protocols to promote shared learning and manage scientific uncertainty, and commit to monitoring and adapting their management regimes over time. Even in complex and contentious resource management contexts, future CAM efforts that integrate these design elements are likely to lead to more effective natural resource management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers several insights from various individuals on the practice stories of planner-architect Laurence Sherman regarding the architects' design complexities and the participation of professional experts and multiple lay stakeholders. They say that the mediation and collaboration of experts and stakeholders are very important to make a consensus design plan of public buildings. Furthermore, people matter most in every participative experience and communications in decision-making.

The article discusses how consensus building approach can help achieve better public decision making in Ohio. It cites three problems to test the possible result of consensus building approach including the Majority Rule Problem, the Representation Problem and the Adversarial Problem. Then, it concludes that the approach has theoretical appeal for the development of democratic system and practical appeal to deal with controversial decision in the public arena.

The article presents the text of a speech by Lawrence E. Susskind, Ford professor of urban and environmental planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, delivered at the Second Annual Fordham University School of Law Dispute Resolution Society Symposium on October 12, 2007, in which he discussed public dispute resolution, social justice and democracy.

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one by Melissa Keely on using individual parcel assessments to improve storm water management and another by Vivek Shandas on riparian conservation.

This article discusses scientifically based decision making and the role of politics in establishing environmental dialogues. The authors argue that scientists must make value laden assumptions and extrapolate when data is uncertain. They suggest that policymaking is never completely rational and that in an adversarial process advocates seek to prevail rather than find solutions. They recommend collaboration and joint fact finding in which all participants have a role in framing the questions, analyzing the alternatives and their impacts, and fashioning solutions given the limits of the resources and levels of scientific uncertainty.

Recently adopted international environmental treaties on climate change and biodiversity represent some of the most complex agreements ever negotiated, involving science-intensive policy questions and implicating not only governments, but industry and a range of nongovernmental organizations. The inter-connections that should have been taken into account in drafting these agreements were difficult to achieve, given the fractured structure of multilateral institutions. Even if the parties were willing to expose their interests as necessary for effective problem-solving, commitments made to home constituencies made it impossible to be flexible. The Consensus Building Institute has pioneered efforts to design a process that can overcome such barriers in high stakes, high profile, multi-party negotiations. Each has involved senior diplomats in what is best described as collaborative problem solving. This article will use the lessons learned from three experiences to show how parallel informal negotiation provides an alternative –or complement – to more traditional second track diplomacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Argues that consensus-building techniques can be used successfully to resolve many public policy disputes in the United States. Getting warring parties to sit down through their participation in a simulation of the conflict they want to resolve; The National Energy Policy Simulation run by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University; Results.

Influential members of the urban planning profession have developed certain ideas about new town design, including notions such as self-containment, social balance, and the neighborhood unit. These parallel, to some extent, concepts that have emerged from the field of community sociology. Efforts to put these ideas into practice have fallen Jar short of the mark. Without more sophisticated implementation mechanisms, better theories of social interaction at the neighborhood level, and new approaches to citizen participation, efforts to build new towns are likely to remain severely crippled. The aim of this paper is to summarize past efforts to translate implicit theories of social organization into actual new town designs. The possibilities of closing the gap between theory and practice through the use of more explicit forms of social experimentation are discussed in the context of the fledgling new towns program in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A critical challenge in natural resource management is to bring all stakeholders together to negotiate solutions to critical problems. However, various collaborative approaches to heading off conflicts and resolving natural resource management disputes have been used. What drives these efforts, however, still needs further research. Our study provides a systematic look at the drivers likely to initiate collaborative problem-solving efforts in four cases in Romania. We use Emerson’s et al. (2012) framework for collaborative governance and multi-value qualitative comparative analysis (mvQCA) to analyze cases involving endangered species, restrictions on forest harvest, conflicts associated with infrastructure development projects, and disputes over the management of environmentally sensitive areas. Our findings contribute to the already existing collaborative governance literature indicating which of the four factors: uncertainty, interdependence, consequential incentives, and leadership, in which combination, are necessary and sufficient to spur collaborative resource management efforts. Our results showed that in Romania the initiation of collaboration is best explained by positive consequential incentives (i.e., financial opportunities) which has determined leaders to take initiative. This study provides additional information for the complicated process of natural resource management which is often overriding collaboration by investigating what enables and constrains collaborative efforts in a country where natural resources were managed and used according to the principles of central planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Frames major challenges to planning educators as they prepare a new generation of planners to work within and to shape the future metropolises. Discussion of the essays on the future of city planning in the Winter 1991 edition of the `Journal of the American Planning Association'; Need to consider public education as an urban problem.

The article presents views of several notable people including Larry Susskind, Josh Stulberg, and Bernie Mayer on the topic 'Core Values of Dispute Resolution: Is Neutrality Really Necessary?'. It informs that Larry Susskind states that he in involved in mediation such as human rights cases, environmental cases, and cases between two companies do not want to go to court. According to Josh Stulberg mediating is a justice event and participants are members of the political community.

Twenty-one senior researchers were interviewed about their conception of sustainability and implementation in projects linked to the Alliance of Global Sustainability, a joint project of MIT (Boston), ETH (Zurich and Lausanne), UT (Tokyo), and Chalmers (Gothenburg). We identified five complementary views on sustainability: i) science is sustainable per se, ii) sustainability is an ethical relationship with the past and future, iii) sustainability is the maintenance of a system within functional limits, iv) eco-efficiency, and v) sustainability is a form of ongoing inquiry. In total, the concept of ethical relationship was the most dominant, whereas science per se and eco-efficiency were less used. Natural, engineering and social scientists referred differently to these concepts in their research projects. Most of the researchers regarded implementation as the process of interacting with stakeholder groups. The relationship between knowledge and action is considered central to views on implementation. Three different concepts and habits could be identified with respect to the relationship between knowledge and action: a) action, I act to change the world; b) interaction, I exchange information with my environment through my actions; and c) transaction or mutual learning, I change as a result of my effort to bring about change in the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]