Conflict and Collaboration

For Better or Worse

Catherine Gerard, Louis Kriesberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367416287
• eBook ISBN: 9781351181266
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In this volume, scholars from different disciplines join together to examine the overlapping domains of conflict and collaboration studies.

It examines the relationships between ideas and practices in the fields of conflict resolution and collaboration from multiple disciplinary perspectives. The central theme is that conflict and collaboration can be good, bad, or even benign, depending on a number of factors. These include the role of power, design of the process itself, skill level and intent of the actors, social contexts, and world views. The book demonstrates that various blends of conflict and collaboration can be more or less constructively effective. It discusses specific cases, analytical methods, and interventions, and emphasizes both developing propositions and reflecting on specific cases and contexts. The book concludes with specific policy recommendations for many sets of actors—those in peacebuilding, social movements, governments, and communities—plus students of conflict studies.

This book will be of much interest to students, scholars, and practitioners of peace and conflict studies, public administration, sociology, and political science.

1 Introduction

Conflict resolution and collaboration

Catherine Gerard and Louis Kriesberg

This book is the product of faculty from many disciplines who are associates of the Program for the Advancement of Conflict and Collaboration (PARCC), an interdisciplinary center focused on research, practice, and education, at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. The Program has a long history of interdisciplinary inquiry and scholarship, beginning in the 1960s with important work on peacemaking and conflict transformation. In the mid-1980s, when the Hewlett Foundation began to fund conflict resolution theory-building programs, the first iteration of the center was born as the Program on the Analysis and Resolution of Conflicts (PARC), with broader interests including social movements, environmental disputes, structural violence, and intractable conflicts. During the mid-2000s, as the group of scholars expanded from sociologists, political scientists, environmental scientists, and anthropologists to include faculty from public administration and public policy, collaborative governance became a significant research focus and prompted a name change in 2009. The new name combines conflict and collaboration; however, the possible connections between those two concepts remained unexplored until years of hallway conversations became a serious dialogue.

When the authors of this book began meeting a few years ago, we focused on examining the relationships between the ideas and the practices in the fields of conflict resolution and collaboration. We were primarily inward looking, focusing on our respective approaches. As we listened to each other, we confirmed our shared underlying assumption: contrary to most connotations and understandings, conflict is not inherently bad and collaboration is not inherently good. Rather, conflict and collaboration can be either good or bad (and perhaps benign)—what matters is the where, when, why, and how of conflict and collaboration. Simply stated, various blends of conflict and collaboration can be better or worse. Thus, we set out to examine conflict and collaboration from multiple disciplinary perspectives and at multiple levels and scales.

As the months (indeed years) of our collaborative effort progressed, our focus broadened and our ideas solidified. Drafts, redrafts, and more drafts were circulated among the authors and editors, and slowly we began to see wider implications of our efforts for many social issues. We discerned implications of our analyses for dealing better with the challenges we face in our society, both today and in the future. Now, as we reflect on our chapters, we are sensitive to the many challenges that confront us as citizens for our communities, our nations, and our world, but we also see many opportunities for the constructive blending of conflict and collaboration.

Unfortunately, certain conditions and trends in the United States and several other countries do not seem conducive to constructive collaboration and conflict. Thus, collaboration and other kinds of coordination appear increasingly to be authoritarian, malfunctioning, or stalemated, rather than productive and mutually beneficial. Conflicts appear more often to be conducted with violence (or threats of violence), coercion, and shocking incivility, rather than with common-sense conflict resolution and collaboration practices. This is disheartening. However, in reflecting on the chapters as a whole, it is clear that better ways are possible, and that these better ways can be implemented immediately, despite current realities, issues, and contexts. Indeed, in many cases progress continues to be made in doing conflict and collaboration better. It is useful to begin the exploration of the relationship between conflict and collaboration with a brief summary of how the fields have developed.

Development of the conflict resolution and peace studies field

Human societies have long had rules for regulating the inevitable conflicts among society members. Such systems exist in every civilization, and even for some interactions between people in different societies. The modern field of conflict resolution, dealing with the relatively less institutionalized ways of contending, emerged and flourished in the years after World War II. It emphasized ways to conduct conflict that do not rely on large-scale violence and transforming the conflict to minimize mutual losses and achieve some mutual benefits.

The field drew from a wide range of sources, including peace studies, labor relations, law, and all the social sciences (Kriesberg, 2009). Several clusters of scholars undertook projects with perspectives that differed from the prevailing national security and international relations “realist” approaches. The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS), at Stanford, California, made a notable contribution to the emerging field of peace and conflict resolution studies (Harty and Modell, 1991). In its first year, 1954–5, several scholars were invited who shared interests in the subject. They included the social psychologist Herbert Kelman, the economist Kenneth E. Boulding, the mathematician Anatol Rapoport, the political scientist Harold Lasswell, and the general systems theorist Ludwig von Bertalanffy. Subsequently, the Journal of Conflict Resolution was founded at the University of Michigan, in 1957. Scholars there and in other institutions published books that offered perspectives about social conflicts in general (Schelling, 1960; Boulding, 1962). Other works focused on particular phases of conflicts, such as those about the formation of security communities between countries (Deutsch et al., 1957). Influential work also examined the bases for conflicts generally, for example, social psychological processes (Lewin, 1948) and the functions of social conflict (Coser, 1956). Important work also began to flourish in Europe, initially at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), established in 1959 with leadership by Johan Galtung.

Despite all this academic work, no comprehensive theory emerged, funding for large-scale research was not forthcoming, and applications of conflict resolution ideas were scant. However, during the 1970s the field began to grow rapidly in the United States. The ideas and practices of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) contributed greatly to the growth of the field (Adler, 1987). The activism of the 1960s included social movements that increased access to the legal system for poor people. It also fostered collective self-help rather than deference to established authority. Furthermore, the practice of mediation seemed to promise a better option rather than reliance on slow and expensive court procedures. Officials and non-officials acted to establish ADR community centers across the country. People increasingly favored learning how to do interest-based negotiation and how to mediate; consequently, training in those skills became central in academic conflict resolution programs.

Academic work began to give critical attention to negotiation and to mediation, and many researchers tended to pursue a different research strategy. Rather than focus on wars and destructive conflicts, presumably to learn what not to do, some scholars focused their research on strategies that were used in waging conflicts constructively. For example, Gene Sharp published an influential book about the effectiveness of nonviolent action (Sharp, 1973). Work was done on the application of non-coercive inducements in transforming intractable conflicts (Baldwin, 1971). Studies were made of official and non-official strategies that helped de-escalate and transform conflicts, such as non-official, track-two diplomacy. Patterns of interaction that resulted in cooperative relations were identified (Axelrod, 1984).

With visible successes, interest in and support for conflict resolution grew. In 1984, The Flora and William Hewlett Foundation launched a large-scale program to establish theory-building centers for conflict resolution, associated with universities, to provide funds for research and practice, and to help establish supportive associations. These efforts over many years have had considerable benefits for the conflict resolution field (Harty and Modell, 1991).

Since the mid-1980s, the field has become well established and it has expanded into new spheres of endeavor. The field incorporates more specialized applications and research activities. For example, conflict resolution activities have moved into transforming protracted international and civil conflicts (Wallensteen, 2002). Even after violence was ended or an agreement was reached, wars often recurred and new kinds of interventions were needed. Governments and international governmental organizations were not fully prepared, and lacked the capacity to manage the multitude of problems that followed the end of hostilities. They increasingly employed nongovernmental organizations to carry out some of the needed work of humanitarian relief, institution building, protection of human rights, and training in conflict resolution skills. The number and scope of NGOs working on such matters grew quickly, many of them applying conflict resolution skills. One result of this and other work is the increasing recognition of the need for broader forms of governance that incorporate intra- and inter-organizational collaboration.

Development of collaboration as a field

Collaboration has become the buzzword of 21st-century governance. It is used both intentionally and casually to refer to all sorts of endeavors to work on public policy issues beyond the confines of governmental bureaucracy. Whereas governance was once conceived of as being hierarchical and command-and-control in nature, there is growing recognition that horizontal, cross-boundary, and collaborative endeavors are more suited to addressing modern problems (e.g., Frederickson, 1999; Salamon, 2002; Bingham, Nabatchi, and O’Leary, 2005). Indeed, as Goldsmith and Eggers (2004, p. 7) note,

The traditional, hierarchical model of government simply does not meet the demands of this complex, rapidly changing age. Rigid bureaucratic systems that operate with command-and-control procedures, narrow work restrictions, and inward-looking cultures and operational models are particularly ill-suited to addressing problems that often transcend organizational boundaries.

As a result, practice and research on collaborative governance in myriad forms and applications have been growing since the 1980s.

Barbara Gray (1985, p. 912) offered one of the earliest definitions of collaboration in a multi-party setting within the context of governance: “the pooling of appreciations and/or tangible resources (e.g., information, money, labor) by two or more stakeholders to solve a set of problems which neither can solve individually.” More recently and more specifically, Richard Margerum (2011, p. 6) defined collaboration as “an approach to solving complex problems in which a diverse group of autonomous stakeholders deliberates to build consensus and develop networks for translating consensus to results.” Implicit in these definitions is the impetus for collaboration (shared problems that cannot be solved alone), as well as the multifaceted attitudes, behaviors, and resources by which people work together toward that shared goal. In some cases, these multi-party collaborations are intra-organizational, meaning that they take place among groups or units within a single organization. In other cases, these multi-party collaborations are inter-organizational, meaning that they take place among people from different organizations, sectors, or jurisdictions (Agranoff, 1986; Bardach, 1998; Thomas, 2003). In the latter instance, the notion of collaboration and collaborative governance encompasses forums for public deliberation, community problem-solving, and multi-stakeholder dispute resolution.

Today, the view of collaborative governance generally includes institutional forms that extend beyond the conventional focus on the public manager or public sector (cf. McGuire, 2006; Emerson and Nabatchi, 2015), and sometimes, to varying degrees, may involve public participation and civic engagement when associated with some kind of longer-term system. Thus, a commonly accepted definition of collaborative governance is

the processes and structures of public policy decision making and management that engage people constructively across the boundaries of public agencies, levels of government, and/or the public, private, and civic spheres to carry out a public purpose that could not otherwise be accomplished.

(Emerson and Nabatchi, 2015; see also Emerson, Nabatchi, and Balogh, 2012, p. 3)

A related subject of inquiry is collaborative public management, focusing on how traditional public management practices change in collaborative arrangements and the benefits of such arrangements for achieving service and policy goals. Collaborative public management has been defined by McGuire as “the process of facilitating and operating in multi-organizational arrangements to solve problems that cannot be solved or easily solved by single organizations” (McGuire, 2006, p. 33). Similar to the definition of collaborative governance, this too emphasizes the interdependence of collaborative work and the nature of problems requiring a collaborative process to attain new and creative solutions. Huxham writes that

collaborative advantage will be achieved when something unusually creative is produced–perhaps an objective is met–that no organization could have produced on its own and when each organization, through the collaboration, is able to achieve its own objectives better than it could alone. In some cases, it should also be possible to achieve some higher-level … objectives for society as a whole rather than just for the participating organizations.

(Huxham, 1993, p. 603)

Others have found that collaboration can result in innovative approaches to service delivery, including multi-sector partnerships and networks (Agranoff and McGuire, 2001; Bingham and O’Leary, 2008; Goldsmith and Kettl, 2009; O’Leary and Bingham, 2009). There is an equally rich body of work on network structures and how managers operate within them (Provan and Milward, 1995; O’Toole, 1997; Agranoff and McGuire, 2003).

The role of the individual in collaborations also has received attention under the labels of the “collaborative manager” (Alexander, 2006; Getha-Taylor, 2006), the “champion” (Eagle and Cowherd, 2006; Emison, 2006), the “boundary spanner” (Belefski, 2006; Donahue, 2006), and the “integrative leader” (Huxham and Vangen, 2000, 2005; Vangen and Huxham, 2003; Crosby and Bryson, 2010). More recent is work about the public manager’s “toolkit” or “strategies” (O’Leary, Gerard, and Bingham, 2006, p. 6), collaborative public management as an “option” or a strategic “choice” (O’Leary, Gerard, and Bingham, 2006, p. 6), and the necessary skill set and mindset of the collaborative public manager (O’Leary, Choi, and Gerard, 2012). A striking finding in the context of this book is the integration of conflict management approaches, such as interest-based negotiation, facilitation, and listening skills, into public management collaborative practices.

Recent convergences between fields

There are other examples of how the fields of conflict resolution and of collaboration overlap. A growing conflict resolution literature and practice focus on post-agreement problems and solutions, relating to external intervention and institution building (Stedman, Rothchild, and Cousens, 2002; Paris, 2004). The role of public engagement and attention to participatory governance also has increased in the conflict resolution field in relation to peacebuilding. There is greater attention to conflict prevention and to establishing new systems of collaborative governance to minimize ineffective and destructive conflicts. These developments relate to the growing view that conflict resolution must go beyond focusing on negotiating settlements and should examine the transformation of conflicts, which occurs at many levels over an extended time span (Lederach, 1997).

Some conflict resolution methods developed earlier to help prepare adversaries for de-escalating steps began to be employed at the later stages of conflicts as well. These include reconciliation policies, problem-solving workshops, dialogue circles, and training to improve capacities to negotiate and mediate. Such practices help avert a recurrence of vicious fights by fostering accommodations, and even reconciliation at various levels of the opposing sides. Ideas about reframing conflicts help accoun...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: conflict resolution and collaboration
• 2 Improving social relations
• 3 The Long Island, New York Pine Barrens experience: from confrontation to consensus
• 4 Understanding the link between collaboration and better or worse relations: the view from public administration
• 5 Building the International Space Station: leadership, conflict, and collaboration
• 6 The future of public participation: better design, better relations
• 7 Conflict as troubling waters? How steering for results can impede the public administrator as conflict arbiter
• 8 Coercing consensus? Notes on power and the hegemony of collaboration
• 9 Civil society–government collaborations in Belize Central America: from better to worse in shared ecological conservation governance?
• 10 The role of coercion in collaboration
• 11 Concentric circles of sisterhood: American nuns respond to Vatican Kyriarchy
• 12 Conflict and collaboration in international relations theory
• 13 Collaboration, conflict, and the search for sustainable peacebuilding
• 14 Conclusion: implications and recommendations
• Index