Complex Problems, Negotiated Solutions: Tools to reduce conflict in community development - Softcover

Warner, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1853395323 ISBN 13: 9781853395321

Publisher: ITDG Publishing, 2001

Synopsis

The pace of change for many rural communities across the developing world is exponential. New technology, economic globalization, finite natural resources, political realities and cultural erosion can together represent change of such magnitude and shock that it overwhelms the capacity of civil society, government and business to adapt, leading to dysfunctional institutions, disputes and inter-personal conflict. This book suggests strategies, principles and tools to reduce development-induced disputes and inter-personal conflict as obstacles to achieving sustainable rural livelihoods. Consensual win-win negotiation is promoted as the preferred strategy, but set firmly within the context of the alternatives. The importance of conflict management processes that fit with local customary and legal approaches is stressed. The book provides a way to systematize the complexity of conflict situations in rural environments, offering a guide to designing practical conflict mitigation and prevention strategies. The key principles and tools of consensual negotiation are described, illustrated with examples from around the developing world. To enhance its utility for practitioners, over 20 group and individual exercises have been included, enabling the book to be used for training purposes. This book should attract anyone from civil society, government, business or the donor community interested in learning something of the art of brokering negotiated solutions to the conflicts and complexities of rural environments. Case studies used in the book include a South Pacific project (coastal zone management planning, and coral farming); a conflict management consultancy in Bolivia (disputes between two NGOs, involving a road block); recent FAO Community Forestry Unit case-studies on natural resource conflict (Latin America, India); conflict analysis work in rural Zambia (wildlife vs community conflicts); natural resources management and community forestry in India.

About this title

About the Author

Michael Warner has worked as a Research Fellow with the Overseas Development Institute, developing concensus-building tools and managing a programme of natural resource-based conflect resolution in Papua New Guinea and the Fiji Islands. He is currently co-ordinator of the secretariat for the Natural Resouces Cluster of Business Partners for Development.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Complex Problems, Negotiated Solutions

Tools to Reduce Conflict in Community Development

By Michael Warner

Practical Action Publishing Ltd

Copyright © 2001 Overseas Development Institute
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-85339-532-1

Contents

List of figures, vi, 
List of tables, vii, 
List of boxes, viii, 
List of training exercises, ix, 
Acknowledgements, x, 
1 Introduction, 1, 
2 Conflict management, 14, 
3 What is consensus building?, 32, 
4 Principles of consensus building, 37, 
5 Process of consensus building, 52, 
6 Office-based conflict analysis, 54, 
7 Provisional conflict-management plan, 68, 
8 Participatory conflict analysis, 73, 
9 The conflict analysis framework, 85, 
10 Capacity building, 93, 
11 Consensual negotiation, 95, 
12 Facilitation, 101, 
13 Workshop design and methods, 104, 
14 Managing difficult people, 108, 
15 Consensual negotiation tools, 111, 
Appendices, 
1 Briefing notes for Training Exercise 4.6 (Orange negotiations), 125, 
2 Briefing notes for Training Exercise 4.7 (Mining and wildlife reserve), 128, 
3 Briefing notes for Training Exercise 11.1 (Coralbay Coastal Resource Management Project), 130, 
4 Briefing notes for Training Exercise 11.1 (Tukubu Conservation Area), 139, 
References, 147, 

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Who is this book for?

This book is intended for people who have to deal with, and find solutions to, conflicts in rural areas of developing countries. It will be especially useful for staff of international and national non-governmental organizations (NGOs), advisers in donor agencies working on rural livelihoods, government departments and private companies.

The book is designed to be relevant to most types of rural livelihood projects and interventions. These include:

* Projects managed by community groups, for example in participatory forestry, community-based coastal resource management, integrated conservation and development, community water supply and sanitation infrastructure, and community-based revolving credit.

* Interventions where community-owned resources and capital are managed by outside organizations, such as logging firms, medium-scale mining companies, commercial agriculture enterprises, water and electricity utilities, tourism operators, microfinance NGOs and commercial community-based organizations.

Participation and sustainable livelihoods

This book promotes public involvement in sustainable development. It offers practical guidance on how conflict management and consensus building can help achieve sustainable rural livelihoods.

The past 15 years have seen increasing interest in community participation as a way to make development projects more sustainable. Negotiation is an important mechanism for such participation. This book provides guidance on how to establish and manage a process of negotiation that involves the various stakeholders in rural development.

The methods described in this book fit well within the 'sustainable rural livelihoods' framework espoused by DFID and other donor agencies. The livelihoods framework involves five main elements (Figure 1.1):

* Livelihood assets The different forms of capital – financial, social, human, natural and physical – that rural people may (or may not) have, and their ability to put these to use.

* Vulnerability context The impact of external events and trends (economic, natural environment, population growth, technological change, violence) and seasonality on livelihoods.

* Transforming structures and processes The institutions and organizations (government, private sector, etc.) and processes (policies, institutions, law, etc.) that affect the way people use the livelihood assets.

* Livelihood strategies The various ways that rural people make a living: farming, fishing, trade, wage labour, migration, etc.

* Livelihood outcomes The results of these strategies: income, well-being, security, sustainable resource use, etc.

Conflict management and consensus building can affect these elements by exploiting the opportunities and reducing the constraints they embody. They can exploit opportunities by:

* protecting and building all five types of capital assets – particularly social and human

* renegotiating the role of government and private organizations, so enabling the livelihood assets to be transformed into benefits.

They can reduce the constraints in the livelihood framework elements by:

* managing disputes within civil society, and between civil society and external actors

* helping to prevent violent conflict, and enabling people to cope with and recover from violence.

These approaches are discussed below in the context of managing conflicts.

Building and protecting capital assets

In themselves, conflict-management and consensus-building skills are a form of human capital. Skills that enable local leaders to negotiate with public water authorities or private logging companies, for example, are empowering in their own right. But conflict-management and consensus-building skills provide far more than this. They offer a rapid and cost-effective means of protecting and enhancing social capital – aspects of social organization such as the networks, norms and trust that allow society to function (Putman, 1993). It is human and social capital that together provide the capacity for protecting and enhancing physical, financial and natural assets.

For example, productive common property resources (forests, rivers, etc.) require robust social organizations, and people need skills for such organizations to emerge. People need also to negotiate with the formal or informal authorities, develop rules to govern competition over resources and manage those resources, and ensure access to alternative income sources for those excluded. Roads (physical capital) and credit (financial capital) will remain inaccessible if people lack the capacity to negotiate access to transportation services or to affordable repayment terms.

Consensus building can play a particular role in protecting and enhancing social and human capital. Jealousies, tensions, disputes and violence can undermine co-ordination and co-operation both among local people and between local groups and outsiders. Conflict-management skills can help prevent this.

Table 1.1 shows some of the ways consensus building can contribute to building different types of social and human capital.

Renegotiating the role of external actors

Not all rural people are farmers, and many farmers earn a large part of their livelihood from activities other than agriculture. The livelihood framework recognizes this. It separates the link between 'rural' and 'agriculture', and widens the scope for rural development to other sectors – health, education, training, infrastructure, financial services, etc. This calls for new associations between external structures (ministries, local authorities, firms, other stakeholders) and processes (policies, laws, cultures) on one hand, and the intended project beneficiaries on the other.

Such 'vertical' associations may be a prerequisite to strong local, 'horizontal' associations, in that they facilitate effective local representation, participation and institutional accountability (Harriss and de Renzio, 1997). However, emerging evidence (e.g. McIntosh et al., 2000) suggests that the importance of external social capital in strengthening civil society may be overstated.

This is because many disputes, and even some violent conflicts, are underpinned as much by localized competition over power, resource distribution and access to limited economic opportunities, as by structural injustices. The continuing violence in South Africa could, for example, be attributed in part to the replacement of political injustice of a structural nature with highly visible local economic inequalities.

This means it is not always necessary to address structural injustices in order to strengthen civil society and build social and other assets. Consensus building can find creative and lateral solutions to problems in the short to medium term, build co-operation and co-ordination, and reduce tensions – without the assistance of government institutions, and without having to resolve the structural, root causes of the conflict. Table 1.1 gives some examples of this.

In addition, consensus building can contribute to stronger co-ordination and co-operation between civil society and external institutions – central and local government, firms and statutory institutions – helping transform livelihood assets into sustainable benefits (Table 1.2).

Managing contested processes of participation

A 'livelihoods' approach enables planners to identify possible interventions with the aim of reducing rural poverty. But attempts to improve the economic security of the poor may well increase tensions, especially with groups that are excluded from immediate benefits – for example, entrepreneurs who own the vehicles needed to transport produce.

The concept of civil society as a 'contested space' runs counter to the earlier notion of civil society as a single entity, with the different organizations working towards common objectives of democratic governance. McIlwaine (1998, p. 656) forcibly puts this point in the context of El Salvador. Her argument is that: 'civil society and the social relations that underpin it are not, by their nature, inherently democratic or participatory. Nor does strengthening civil society organizations automatically engender democratization. Indeed, it may actually undermine it.'

Conflict management offers a set of principles and tools for managing the evolution of civil society organizations and groups, and for defusing conflict among them. In particular, they can be be used to strengthen the existing customary and quasi-legal mechanisms for resolving disputes. Box 1.1 gives an example where conflict management transformed a dispute between two community organizations into a force promoting more sustainable rural livelihoods.

Conflict management can equip natural resource projects, such as community forestry and mariculture, to manage tensions as and when they arise. It can do this by integrating into project design the management of existing, and the prevention of anticipated, disputes. It can combine this with building the capacity of project intermediaries in negotiation and third-party facilitation (ICIMOD, 1996; Resolve, 1994).

Preventing, coping with and recovering from violent conflict

At any one time, there may be 20 high-intensity conflicts (wars with more than 1000 deaths) (e.g. Algeria, Bosnia, the African Great Lakes) and over 100 lower-intensity conflicts with fewer deaths (e.g. Sri Lanka, northern Uganda, eastern Turkey). Many of these latter conflicts are long term, subsiding and escalating over time so that sporadic violence and the threat of violence become the accepted social norm. While at the beginning of the twentieth century, 90 per cent of war casualties were military, nowadays over 95 per cent are civilian. As well as death and injury, the civilian impacts of conflict include displacement, hunger and disease.

Sustaining livelihoods in conflict-prone areas requires capabilities to cope with the threat and reality of violence, and to contribute to recovery and post-conflict reconstruction. Conflict-management and consensus-building skills can play a part in this (Ndelu, 1998). However, this book is not designed for situations of open, armed conflict (for this, see Doucet, 1996).

The principles and tools discussed in this book are more applicable to situations of post-conflict reconstruction – especially where this involves civil society and local capacities – and to preventing latent conflicts from turning violent.

In addition to violent conflict, many other countries and regions are in a state of latent conflict. Armed conflicts may be subsiding or re-emerging. Or various structural injustices (land ownership, access to the media, etc.) or local economic grievances (such as competition over limited income-earning opportunities) are raising tensions to levels that present a risk of violence.

Latent conflict can also exist in a regional context. For example, relatively stable countries are threatened by violence in neighbouring countries, and economically significant but overexploited natural resources (such as rivers) cross national borders.

Projects in areas of latent conflict sometimes provoke or awaken disputes. In turn, these disputes sometimes feed on existing political or economic tensions, and can escalate into hostilities and violence. The social or political environment may be damaged without the project itself being undermined. But all too often, the project itself can be harmed through threats to staff, delays in activities, office relocations, adverse media coverage, loss of access to beneficiaries and unforeseen costs.

A number of rural development projects funded by DFID have incorporated conflict-management and consensus-building principles to reduce the damage caused by conflicts, and to help prevent conflicts and build peace. One aim has been to use conflict management tools to reduce tensions and economic grievances in situ, thereby removing one of the key factors pushing rural people towards the towns, where a mixing of cultural groups and poverty may trigger violence. Table 1.3 lists some ways conflict management and consensus building can reduce livelihood vulnerabilities and exploit opportunities for building peace.

Project cycle management

The approaches described in this book can be used at different stages in the project cycle: to manage conflicts that occur during the project implementation and to avoid potential conflicts identified while a project is being planned.

Managing conflicts during project implementation

The first strategy is to manage disputes and conflicts that arise while a project is being implemented. This may involve resolving the conflict altogether, i.e. not only managing the immediate cause of the dispute, but also removing all underlying contributing factors. Because these factors are often structural and operate at the national or regional level (e.g. land-tenure legislation, economic policy, political expediency, etc.), it may not be possible to resolve the conflict completely. In such instances, the conflict must be 'managed' rather than resolved:

* to prevent existing conflicts from escalating;

* to prevent latent conflicts from re-emerging;

* where possible, to transform the conflict into a force for positive social change; and

* to manage structural conflicts such that they no longer interfere with the efficient implementation of the project or intervention.

This emphasis on management rather than resolution is what underpins the term 'conflict management'. The task of true conflict resolution may be best left to other areas of development and peace building: policy reform, structural adjustment, institutional capacity building, democratization, and international conventions and protocols. However, where a project can contribute to these wider peace-building processes, such opportunities should be exploited.

Improving project planning

The second strategy is to build conflict-prevention measures into the design of projects before they are implemented. This approach is analogous to environmental impact assessment, where effects (in this case, conflicts) are first predicted and the project design is then revised to mitigate the most significant threats.

The structure of the book

The remainder of this book is divided into 14 chapters. Chapter 2 places the process of consensus building within the context of the different strategies for managing conflict. Chapters 3 and 4 describe the core principles of consensus building. Chapter 5 introduces the process of consensus building.

Chapters 6 to 10 give details of the various stages of consensus building, and present a series of tools that can be used at each stage. These chapters follow the same order as the consensus building process, though as the text stresses, this order is not fixed and steps may occur simultaneously or be repeated as required.

Chapter 6 describes how to undertake an initial office-based conflict analysis. Chapter 7 discusses a provisional conflict-management plan, while Chapter 8 outlines how to undertake participatory conflict analysis. Chapter 9 focuses on the conflict analysis framework – an approach that is particularly useful in dealing with complex conflicts. Chapter 10 focuses briefly on capacity building for stakeholders, while Chapter 11 describes the negotiations that aim to lead to consensus.

Chapters 12 to 15 outline some additional tools useful in consensual negotiation and other stages in the conflict-management process. Chapter 12 describes the functions and ethics of facilitation. Chapter 13 outlines the design and methodology of holding workshops for consensual negotiation and training to build capacity. Chapter 14 gives some ideas on how to manage difficult people, while Chapter 15 outlines some tools useful in consensual negotiation.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Complex Problems, Negotiated Solutions by Michael Warner. Copyright © 2001 Overseas Development Institute. Excerpted by permission of Practical Action Publishing Ltd.
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Edition details

• Publisher: ITDG Publishing
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1853395323
• ISBN 13: 9781853395321
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 160