This publication sets out practical guidance on how to establish and manage a process of consensual negotiations involving multiple stakeholders to manage conflict and build collaboration, intended primarily for use by practitioners working on participatory/collaborative natural resource management and rural livelihood projects.

Conflicts over natural resources abound in India, where much of the population is dependent on these resources for their livelihoods. Issues of governance and management are complicated by the competing claims of parallel legal systems, including state, customary, religious, project and local laws. Whereas much has been written about property rights, this unique collection takes a legal anthropological perspective to explore how the coexistence and interaction between multiple legal orders provide bases for claiming property rights. It examines how hybrid legal institutions have developed over time in India and how these impact on justice in the governance and distribution of natural resources. The book brings together original case studies that offer fresh perspectives on the governance of forests, water, fisheries and agricultural land in a diverse range of social and spatial contexts. This brand new research provides a timely and persuasive overview of the fundamental role of parallel legal systems in shaping how people manage natural resources. It will be of interest to scholars and practitioners of environmental law, property law, environmental politics, anthropology, sociology and geography.

Cultivating Peace: Conflict and collaboration in natural resource management

Strategies for transboundary natural resource management; winner of Harvard Law School's Raiffa Award for best research of the year in negotiation and conflict resolution. Transboundary natural resource negotiations, often conducted in an atmosphere of entrenched mistrust, confrontation, and deadlock, can go on for decades. In this book, Bruno Verdini outlines an approach by which government, private sector, and nongovernmental stakeholders can overcome grievances, break the status quo, trade across differences, and create mutual gains in high-stakes water, energy, and environmental negotiations. Verdini examines two landmark negotiations between the United States and Mexico. The two cases—one involving conflict over shared hydrocarbon reservoirs in the Gulf of Mexico and the other involving disputes over the shared waters of the Colorado River—resulted in groundbreaking agreements in 2012, after decades of deadlock. Drawing on his extensive interviews with more than seventy high-ranking negotiators in the United States and Mexico—from presidents and ambassadors to general managers, technical experts, and nongovernmental advocates—Verdini offers detailed accounts from multiple points of view, on both sides of the border. He unpacks the negotiation, leadership, collaborative decision-making, and political communication strategies that made agreement possible. Building upon the theoretical and empirical findings, Verdini offers advice for practitioners on effective negotiation and dispute resolution strategies that avoid the presumption that there are not enough resources to go around, and that one side must win and the other must inevitably lose. This investigation is the winner of Harvard Law School's Howard Raiffa Award for best research of the year in negotiation, mediation, decision-making, and dispute resolution.

Conflicts over natural resources abound in India, where much of the population is dependent on these resources for their livelihoods. Issues of governance and management are complicated by the competing claims of parallel legal systems, including state, customary, religious, project and local laws. Whereas much has been written about property rights, this unique collection takes a legal anthropological perspective to explore how the coexistence and interaction between multiple legal orders provide bases for claiming property rights. It examines how hybrid legal institutions have developed over time in India and how these impact on justice in the governance and distribution of natural resources. The book brings together original case studies that offer fresh perspectives on the governance of forests, water, fisheries and agricultural land in a diverse range of social and spatial contexts. This brand new research provides a timely and persuasive overview of the fundamental role of parallel legal systems in shaping how people manage natural resources. It will be of interest to scholars and practitioners of environmental law, property law, environmental politics, anthropology, sociology and geography.

ÿNatural resource management is closely linked to conflict management, prevention and resolution. Managing natural resources involves reconciling diverging interests that often lead to conflict, which can undermine management institutions and lead to exploitation, environmental destruction and deteriorating livelihoods. If conflicts turn violent, they can rip apart the entire fabric of society. Thus, managing conflicts in a peaceful manner is decisive not only for successful and sustainable resource management but for societal stability in general. Despite this connection, the knowledge and experience gained in the fields of conflict transformation and peacebuilding in the last decades are often not used by natural resource managers. One reason is that this knowledge has not been translated into user-friendly resources that can be easily understood by practitioners without prior experience in these fields. This handbook and toolkit helps fill this gap, providing an orientation to the issues and a suite of practical exercises and tools to support participatory processes.