Blog
68 Blog posts found
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A Time to Follow
After nearly 20 years, Patrick Field is stepping down as Managing Director at CBI and passing the torch to Stacie Nicole Smith. Pat reflects on his time leading the organization and why he decided to make this transition and continue his work as a Senior Mediator at CBI.
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Leading CBI: Looking Back and Ahead
As Stacie Nicole Smith stepped into her role as Managing Director at CBI, she took some time to think about what drew her to consensus building two decades ago, landmark developments in the field over the years, and what this era is demanding of practitioners – and CBI.
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Public Participation in the Throes of Coronavirus
CBI Latin America Director David Plumb reflects on the unique challenges posed by convening while social distancing in the wake of Coronavirus.
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Using Online Tools to Empower Collaboration
In this post, CBI offers more specific tips about the kinds of online tools you can use to generate participant input, both when participants are online together, and over time.
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10 Tips for Improving Our Online Meetings
CBI West Director Gina Bartlett shares a few tips that can help ensure that you are able to be productive and create value in an online environment.
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Extractives & Climate Change: The Unspoken Community Impact
Large-scale international projects hold promise for local community development; yet promises sometimes fall flat, and communities are left worse off. Climate change often compounds these negative impacts on communities, particularly in extractive projects. CBI Senior Mediator Merrick Hoben and Larry Dixon, Senior Consultant for Triple R Alliance, reflect on the structural factors impeding meaningful community engagement around project impacts, especially climate issues, in the extractives industry and the resulting implications.
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Pipeline Construction: When Safety Goes Global
CBI and its partner Environmental Resources Management embarked on a project to determine better practices for addressing conflicts related to pipeline construction. The results of this project – practical, actionable approaches to addressing conflict – are outlined in our recently released report, "Stakeholder Engagement and Conflict Mitigation in Pipeline Construction."
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Could SONGS Offer a Sightline to Solving Our Nuclear Waste Dilemma?
In its recently published book, Resolving Energy and Land Conflicts, CBI tackled one of the toughest and perhaps most intractable land use and energy dilemmas: where should we put the nuclear waste that is building up through decades of generation from our fleet of nuclear power plants? There is no licensed permanent repository for nuclear waste in the U.S., but a settlement agreement in California to relocate fuel from the decommissioned San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) may offer important lessons on how to find temporary or permanent locations to store nuclear waste. In this blog post, CBI Senior Mediator Catherine Morris draws on CBI's land use and energy siting expertise to propose a roadmap for successful collaboration to address this challenge.
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We Are All in it Together: Collaborative Governance Advancing Water Management
Challenges around water management in the American West are deepening, as weather becomes more variable and, at times, severe. CBI has been working on water issues with communities in the West for a decade and has found “collaborative governance” to be a very helpful approach to bringing people together to address management of critical water resources. Collaborative water governance assumes that managing water is most effective when everyone is in support of the decision-making process and has a voice in critical issues that affect their lives and livelihoods. In this blog post, CBI West Director Gina Bartlett and CBI Senior Mediator Tania Carlone discuss the benefits and challenges of collaborative water governance in the American West.
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Reflections on a Collaborative Documentary Experiment
In early 2019, in collaboration with the Colombian Center for Responsible Business, CBI envisioned and co-produced a documentary film as a medium to give voice to the experience and concerns of community stakeholders living in the coal-mining region of Cesar, Colombia. In this blog post, CBI Senior Mediator Merrick Hoben reflects on his filmmaking experience.
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Nurturing Collaboration in Colorado’s Water Community: What Have We Learned?
Building on the development of Basin Roundtables for each of the state’s river basins, Colorado's 2015 water plan set a goal of developing stream or integrated water management plans for many of the state's rivers. Now in full swing, these efforts are attempting to meet a range of stakeholder needs by seeking consensus-based solutions such as operational changes, infrastructure improvements, and restoration alternatives. CBI Senior Mediator Ryan Golten and CBI Senior Consultant Dan Birch reflect on the challenge not just of technically integrated planning, but of the human dimension of collaboratively managing water.
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Cities Building a Culture of Climate Action
Many municipalities are developing sustainability plans aimed at building local resilience to climate change impacts. The success of these initiatives is highly dependent on effective community engagement – and many leaders are realizing that they need to invest in networks and facilitate conversations to help build a culture of understanding and action. In this post, CBI Senior Mediator Ona Ferguson outlines questions that municipal leaders can employ to determine the most effective community engagement approach for their region.
