Resources

298 Resources found

  • Public Participation in the Throes of Coronavirus

    by David Plumb

    CBI Latin America Director David Plumb reflects on the unique challenges posed by convening while social distancing in the wake of Coronavirus.

  • 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.

  • 10 Tips for Improving Our Online Meetings

    by Gina Bartlett

    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.

  • Extractives & Climate Change: The Unspoken Community Impact

    by Merrick Hoben and Larry Dixon

    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.

  • Pipeline Construction: When Safety Goes Global

    by Patrick Field and Osamu Kumasaka

    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."

  • Breaking Through to the Table: New Thoughts on a Perennial Problem

    by David Fairman and Stacie Nicole Smith

    CBI is employing four critical elements of its breakthrough collaboration framework – trust building, creativity, negotiation, and joint action – to support stakeholders who are facing what seem like intractable disagreements on a public issue. These ingredients are powerful catalysts for collaboration, but they beg the question: how do we get stakeholders to the table in the first place? Using a challenging case in a New Jersey community as an example, CBI Managing Directors David Fairman and Stacie Smith discuss enabling conditions and catalysts needed to bring parties together to consider the possibility of collaboration.

  • Could SONGS offer a sightline to solving our nuclear waste dilemma?

    by Catherine Morris

    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.

  • Taking Our Headphones Off

    by Elizabeth Fierman

    In the midst of social and political upheaval in Chile, CBI’s Chile Director and Senior Mediator Betsy Fierman discusses the importance of actively listening to one another as a starting point for dialogue on some of the key reforms being called for by citizens. Riots erupted in Chile in mid-October in response to a metro fare increase and have led to more than a million people protesting and calling for a new constitution and improved pension, health, and education systems. Read Betsy’s account of her experiences on the ground in the midst of the unrest and insights on how Chile’s citizens might begin to engage in dialogue, across ideological differences, to help the country move forward.

  • We are All in it Together: Collaborative Governance Advancing Water Management

    by Gina Bartlett and Tania Carlone

    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.

  • Reflections on a Collaborative Documentary Experiment

    by Merrick Hoben

    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.

  • To Stay or Go: New Insights on Managed Retreat

    by Carri Hulet

    CBI Senior Mediator Carri Hulet shares insights on managed retreat, or relocation due to climate change, while at a recent conference at Columbia University focused on this topic. After CBI launched the Climigration Network in 2015 to encourage conversation among a small number of people who were then exploring managed retreat, Carri was pleased to witness hundreds of people at the conference discussing and innovating around retreat strategies. In this article, Carri reflects on the evolution of the climigration field of practice, recent progress, and how to grapple with the complicated emotions that accompany this challenging issue – for herself as well as millions of residents who are facing tough decisions about whether to stay or go, and how to go if that is the choice.

  • Breakthrough Collaboration: What is It and How Do We Help Make It Happen?

    by David Fairman and Stacie Nicole Smith

    CBI’s vision is a world in which the most complex problems are solved through collaboration. In this era of high polarization on pressing public issues, creating strong partnerships to meet public challenges is more urgent, and more difficult. At CBI, we have been discussing the need for what we are calling "breakthrough collaboration" to help groups and organizations work together in situations where trust is low and there is no shared vision, yet the stakeholders know they need to work together over the long haul to tackle the challenge at hand. In this article, Managing Director David Fairman and Associate Managing Director Stacie Smith present CBI’s preliminary thinking on what it takes to advance breakthrough collaboration, and how the key ingredients can be blended to create sustainable solutions to seemingly intractable problems. We welcome your input as we continue to explore what it takes to achieve breakthrough collaboration!