POLICY DIALOGUE AND NEGOTIATION

• Jurisdiction: United States

Resolution and Avoidance of Disputes
(Mar 1984)
CHAPTER 6C
POLICY DIALOGUE AND NEGOTIATION
James W. Shaw
Rocky Mountain Energy Company
Broomfield, Colorado

My remarks this afternoon are going to be more in the form of observations than in the form of a structured paper. What I would like to do is talk about some random thoughts in three specific areas. The first area will be the National Coal Policy project which published the book Where We Agree. The second area is the Federal Coal Management program, and some of the controversy that is going on now. I will close with a couple of issues and thoughts that should be of potential interest and which pull together some of my thoughts drawn from the first two areas.

The National Coal Policy project, which I trust most of you know something about, was one of the early efforts to make something like this work. In fact, if you go back and read the introduction of the report, it even says that readers of this book should give some consideration to the novelty of the project, and the fact that it was one of the earlier attempts at what we now call policy dialogue. I was not a participant in that project. I was working for a coal company that was not directly involved but was very interested in the kinds of issues that were discussed. My information comes from press reports and subsequently reading the book. It is important to recognize that I was looking at it from the outside. I think that there are some important observations that can be made.

The report itself discusses three important conceptual parts of the process. The first one was the progress that the group made on particular issues generally started when they moved from generalities into more and more specific levels of discussions. The more general they were, the more difficult it was to attempt to make any kind of progress.

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The second process issue was that progress was made as the group discussed group activities; that is, when individuals removed themselves from their role as representatives of a cause. When individuals removed themselves from some role model that they brought with them and tried to respond to specific data that the group would collect and review collectively, they found that they could become very specific and objective. Individuals could review data and respond to data with sound scientific interpretation. (I think it is important to note that participants in the study represented themselves. There was no attempt to publish the report as a representation of the organizations that employed or were represented by the individuals involved.)

The third process point was that group dynamics were very important, and much progress again came as the group was bought into the specific task of trying to reach some conclusion.

I agree that all three of these process observations are important, and I would like to discuss them in the context of the Federal Coal Management program in just a minute.

As an outsider, I looked at that particular...