Lawrence Susskind

City Planner, Mediator, and MIT Professor

Intellectual Contributions

Professor Susskind’s primary contributions to the fields of urban and environmental planning, negotiation and dispute resolution, and multilateral treaty negotiation are highlighted below. He is the originator of fourteen key ideas that have shaped theory and practice in the United States and elsewhere around the world.

Entrepreneurial Negotiation

In a period of technology innovation, start-ups and new ventures are getting a great deal of attention. Without proper attention to the unique features of entrepreneurial negotiations, inexperienced inventors and investors are likely to end up with little or nothing. The four unique features of entrepreneurial negotiation (i.e. the importance of ego and emotion, technical complexity, enormous uncertainty, and the importance of long-term relationships) must be kept in mind.

Public Dispute Resolution

Traditional approaches to resolving public disputes produce results that are not as fair, efficient, stable, or wise as they could be. This is true in almost every democratic society. By supplementing representative democracy with new forms of stakeholder engagement — facilitated by trained mediators — better results can be achieved at the local, state, and national levels. This suggests new roles for planners, a new profession of public dispute mediation, and ways of strengthening mature democracies.

Environmental Mediation

Environmental conflicts can often be resolved through mediated face-to-face negotiation. Environmental mediating raises a host of ethical issues. This is particularly true in the rule-making or regulatory context.

  • Negotiating Environmental Agreements: How to Avoid Escalating Confrontation, Needless Costs, and Unnecessary Litigation
  • “Environmental Mediation and the Accountability Problem.” In Vermont Law Review, Vol. 6, No. 1 Spring 1981
  • “Core Values of Dispute Resolution: Is Neutrality Necessary?” in Marquette Law Review, Volume 95, Issue 3, 2012
  • “Towards a Theory of Environmental Dispute Resolution.” (With Alan Weinstein) In Boston College Environmental Affairs Law Review, Vol. 6, No. 1, May 1981
  • Environmental Diplomacy Negotiating More Effective Global Agreements, Oxford University Press, Second Edition, with Saleem Ali

Joint Fact Finding

Joint Fact Finding is a method of ensuring that scientific and technical information is incorporated most effectively in any kind of public policy disputes.

  • Science Impact Collaborative (SIC)
  • “A Dialogue, Not A Diatribe Effective Integration of Science and Policy through Joint Fact Finding”, by Herman A. Karl, Lawrence E. Susskind, and Katherine H. Wallace, Environment, February, 2007
  • Joint Fact Finding Course – USGS
  • Consensus Building Handbook
  • Joint Fact Finding in Urban Planning and Environmental Disputes, Masahiro Matsuura and Todd Schenk, Routledge, 2016

Facility Siting Credo

The “decide-announce-defend” approach to siting regionally necessary but locally noxious facilities no longer works. Only an approach that follows the steps outlined in the Facility Siting Credo is likely to overcome claims of environmental injustice and political unfairness.

  • New Approaches to Consensus Building and Speeding Up Large Scale Energy Infrastructure Projects (with Jonathan Raab)
  • Environmental Technology and Public Policy Program at MIT
  • The Facility Siting Credo (with Howard Kunreuther), University of Pennsylvania Publication Services, 1991

Public Entrepreneurship

New “greener” technologies will be needed to shift to more sustainable development patterns throughout the world. The diffusion of these technologies will not be easy because communities (rather than individual corporate or public leaders) will have to decide simultaneously to try them and ensure that they work. New public entrepreneurship networks (with public and private sector actors playing very different roles) will have to be created and maintained to ensure the implementation of these “greener” technologies.

  • Environmental Technology and Public Policy Program at MIT
  • Public Entrepreneurship Networks (with David Laws, James Abrams, Jonna Anderson, Ginette Chapman, Emily Rubenstein, and Jaisel Vadgama). MIT Environmental Technology and Public Policy Program Publication ETP 01-01, 2001
  • A poster detailing the Sunline Public Entrepreneurship Networks

Mutual Gains Approach to Negotiation

So-called “win-win” approaches to negotiation have gained in popularity over the past two decades. There is actually no way, however, for everyone to get everything they want in most negotiations. So, building consensus in a way that ensures that all stakeholders exceed “their next best option if there is no agreement” is the key. Building on the work of Fisher and Ury at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, Susskind has spelled out how to make a mutual gains approach to negotiation work, especially in multi-party contexts of all kinds.

  • Good for You, Great for Me Finding the Trading Zone and Winning at Win-Win Negotiation 
  • The Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School
  • The Consensus Building Institute
  • The Consensus Building Handbook 
  • Breaking Robert’s Rules, with Jeffrey Cruikshank

Interactive Representation

Most parliaments and legislatures are comprised of representatives elected on a district basis (by majority rule). As with the United States Congress, this heightens party politics, leads to enormous instability in policy priorities, and usually ensures that “good policy is not good politics.” A new system of Interactive Representation that shifts away from geography and toward shared interests as the basis for elections and emphasizes proportionality rather than majority rule would produce far better policy.

  • Can America’s Democracy Be Improved? with Liora Zion
  • The Cure for Our Broken Political Process: How We Can Get Our Politicians to Stop Fighting and Start Resolving the Issues that Truly Matter, with Sol Erdman 

The Mediation of Land Use Disputes

Most land use and growth management conflicts (particularly at the state and local levels) can be mediated as long as the right kind of “homework” is done beforehand and certain modifications in traditional institutional arrangements are worked out.

  • The Sacred Lands Project 
  • Mediating Land Use Disputes Seminar at Lincoln Institute of Land Policy
  • Mediating Land Use Disputes: Pros and Cons (Lincoln Institute of Land Policy) 

Management of Sustainable Development

Sustainable development (i.e. patterns of growth and resource consumption that leave “good” options open to future generations) is an elusive goal. Only by treating the goals and methods of sustainable development as “negotiable” can they be achieved. Balancing economic, ecological, cultural and political objectives requires institutional capacity building and more effective management strategies, particularly in the developing world.

  • Sustainability Challenge Foundation
  • Consensus Building Institute

Using Simulations As a Teaching Tool

Too much teaching and training is purely didactic. At every level – from grade school through the most advanced professional training – simulations can and should be used to supplement traditional educational techniques. Simulations (unlike unstructured role plays or case studies) put learners in carefully structured situations that build in real-life constraints. Simultaneous debriefing of multiple groups using the same simulations generate powerful lessons.

  • MIT-Harvard Public Disputes Program/Teaching Resources
  • Workable Peace
  • Using Simulations to Teach Negotiation: Pedagogical Theory and Practice with Jason Corburn
  • Teaching Negotiation in Public Policy and Planning with Boyd Fuller
  • Reflections on the Program on Negotiation’s beginnings with Roger Fisher, Bruce Patton, Howard Raiffa, Frank Sander, James Sebenius, and William Ury
  • Teaching Environmental Negotiations Using Role-Play Simulations
  • Managing Climate Risks in Coastal Communities: Strategies for Engagement, Readiness and Adaptation with Danya Rumore, Carri Hulet, and Patrick Field
  • Role Play Simulations for Climate Change Adaptation Education and Engagement with Danya Rumore and Todd Schenk, Nature: Climate Change 6, 745-750, 2016

Global Environmental Treaty-making: Parallel Informal Negotiation

The global environmental treaty-making system is flawed. While hundreds of multilateral accords have been adopted, implementation (as with the Climate Change convention) has been difficult. A new approach to generating transboundary agreements — called Parallel Informal Negotiation– ensures much more than lowest common denominator agreements and increases the chances of effective implementation.

  • Global Forum on Trade, Environment and Development
  • Multistakeholder Dialogue at the Global Scale with Boyd W. Fuller, Michéle Ferenz, and David Fairman
  • International Environmental Negotiation with William Moomaw
  • Environmental Diplomacy Negotiating More Effective Global Agreements, Second Edition, with Saleem Ali 
  • Papers on International Environmental Negotiation, Volume 16: Enhancing the Effectiveness of the Treaty-making System
  • Papers on International Environmental Negotiation, Volume 15: Ensuring a Sustainable Future

Joint Training As a Dispute Resolution Tool

As a prelude to negotiation, it is often helpful to bring together the parties for a period of joint training. By introducing the actual parties to the mutual gains approach to negotiation (and ensuring that their constituencies also understand what is involved), it is possible to minimize the adversary nature of contract and other kinds of negotiations.

Water Diplomacy

The Water Diplomacy Framework offers an alternative to the notion of Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) as a way of generating policies and decisions regarding the allocation of water resources. WDF is a negotiated approach to the management of complex water networks.

  • Water Diplomacy: A Negotiated Approach to Managing Complex Water Networks with Shafiqul Islam
  • “Understanding the Water Crisis in Africa and the Middle East, How can science inform policy and practice?” with Shafiqul Islam 
  • Water Diplomacy Workshop
  • “The Political and Cultural Dimensions of Water Diplomacy in the Middle East, in Jean Cahan (editor) Water Security in the Middle East: Essays in Scientific Cooperation, p 185-206

Devising Seminars

In the absence of an established forum, it is possible to bring together individuals (in their personal capacity) who can speak like (if not for) a wide range of stakeholder groups to generate “good ideas,” (i.e. proposals that can probably win support from all relevant stakeholder groups) in a particular policy-making or problem-solving context. Such seminars need to be preceded by independent stakeholder assessments undertaken by skilled “neutrals.” Professional facilitation of such events is usually a pre-requisite to success. Scientific and technical experts are usuallyl part of such seminars.

  • Carri Hulet MCP thesis on Devising Seminars
  • Arctic Devising Seminar documents (link to SIC)
  • Negotiation Journal article by Susskind and Rumore about Devising Seminars
  • Article with Jan Martinez and Abram Chayes in Negotiation Journal on Track 2 ½
  • Article with David Fairman and Boyd Fuller in International Negotiation Journal