This book has its origins in an M.I.T. research project that was funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Our immediate objective was to prepare a set of case studies that examined bargaining and negotiation as they occurred between government, environmental advocates, and regulatees throughout the traditional regulatory process. The project was part of a larger effort by the EPA to make environmental regulation more efficient and less litigious. The principal investigator for the research effort was Lawrence Sus skind of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning. Eight case studies were prepared under the joint supervision of Susskind and the authors of this book. Studying the negotiating behavior of parties as we worked our way through an environmental dispute proved enlightening. We observed missed oppor tunities for settlement, negotiating tactics that backfired, and strategies that ap peared to be grounded more in intuition than in thoughtful analysis. At the same time, however, we were struck by how often the parties ultimately managed to muddle through. People negotiated not out of some idealistic commitment to consensus but because they thought it better served their own interests. When some negotiations reached an impasse, people improvised mediation. These disputants succeeded in spite of legal and institutional barriers, even though few of them had a sophisticated understanding of negotiation.

In the last two decades, Indonesia has seen a dramatic proliferation of environmental disputes in a variety of sectors, triggered by intensified deforestation and large scale mining operations in the resource rich outer islands, together with rapid industrialisation in the densely populated inner island of Java. Whilst the emergence of environmental disputes has sometimes attracted political repression, attempts have also been made in recent times to explore more functional approaches to their resolution. The Environmental Management Act of 1997 created a legal framework for the resolution of environmental disputes through both litigation and mediation. This book is the first attempt to analyse the implementation of this framework in detail and to assess the effectiveness of litigation and mediation in resolving environmental disputes in Indonesia. It includes a detailed overview of the environmental legal framework and its interpretation by Indonesian courts in landmark court cases. The book features a number of detailed case studies of both environmental litigation and mediation and considers the legal and non-legal factors that have influenced the success of these approaches to resolving environmental disputes.

Resolving Environmental Disputes presents detailed case studies from the key contemporary themes in resource management and environmental protection, such as: access to the countryside for recreation, sustainable forestry, pollution and risks to health, and coastal zone management. The book spans both theory and practice in assessing the relationship between public participation and mediation. It is structured around detailed case studies from Britain, the USA and the Netherlands, which are interspersed with chapters providing explanation and interpretation of the theoretical and practical issues involved. In reviewing the state of environmental conflict resolution, the author examines how and why conflicts occur and whether approaches to conflict resolution based on consensus building could be more widely applied.

The concept of sustainable development is a source of inspiration for many, who see it as a call to cooperative action. In practice, however, policies intended to further this goal often generate conflicts of interest. The ensuing disputes occur among governmental organizations, but disputes also arise between public authorities, private interest groups, and the environmental movement. In the opinion of the authors, the fact that environmental policy can provoke such conflict may be attributed largely to decision making procedures in our society. Accordingly, the authors are convinced that a new approach to managing environmental disputes is needed in order to deal effectively with environmental problems. Indeed, this book presents a viable alternative, which is called network management.

This book takes a comparative approach to explore the legal framework of environmental mediation with a focus on the judicial, administrative and private procedures and the criteria for accrediting mediators in a range of jurisdictions across the world.