Creating Stable Agreements in Marine Policy

The entirety of this article was originally published in the Negotiation Journal.

Marine Protected Areas are frequently developed in consultation with the full range of stakeholders, but without proper process design, the agreements are not always stable. Marine Protected Areas are sometimes called “underwater parks”, because they designate various levels of protection for marine ecosystems. We at CONCUR have just published an article which details the challenges encountered in the stakeholder process to design Marine Protected Areas in Southern California. Our article, Creating Stable Agreements in Marine Policy: Learning from the California South Coast MLPA Initiative (in Negotiation Journal, which is published by the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, available here) draws insights from the conflict resolution field on how to improve the design and management of these multi-stakeholder processes to ensure a stable outcome.

Our article describes the South Coast Regional Stakeholder Group process to negotiate the development of proposals for networks of Marine Protected Areas stretching from Santa Barbara to the US-Mexico border south of San Diego. Two authors, Scott McCreary and Phyllis Grifman, participated in the process, as facilitator and stakeholder negotiator, respectively. Meredith Cowart helped analyze survey results. In addition to our first-hand experience, our analysis is based on a detailed post-hoc survey of the participants, and a close review of relevant literature.

Dozens of articles have been published on the California Marine Life Protection Act Initiative and, overwhelmingly, authors herald its successes. In contrast, our article examines the South Coast MLPA stakeholder process from the field of conflict resolution, and finds that the process was good – but not great.

In our view, while the South Coast stakeholder process had many positive outcomes, it failed to achieve what we call a “stable agreement” – for example, near consensus was not reached, and our post hoc survey demonstrated that stakeholders do not now view the process as fair. We assert that the pitfalls of the South Coast stakeholder process could have been avoided had the management and facilitation team consistently considered and applied best practices in dispute resolution.

We highlight four major problematic process design choices that encouraged stakeholders to engage in positional bargaining, discouraged them from developing cross-interest agreements, and ultimately led to a distrust of process legitimacy. We then offer recommendations for future stakeholder-driven marine planning efforts:

1. Ensure equal representation on the stakeholder group.
2. Provide up-front training in principled negotiation for stakeholder representatives.
3. Create stronger incentives for negotiation towards consensus.
4. Consistently articulate and enforce strong decision rules.
5. Integrate the facilitation team in all policy panel process design choices.

We hope that this deeper dive into the California Marine Life Protection Act process design will be used to improve future marine planning processes around the globe.

                       

Meredith Cowart

Meredith Cowart is an Associate at CONCUR Inc, where she supports the full range of facilitated and mediated negotiation efforts, training courses, and research inquiries. Her area of interest is finding effective ways to bring forest and climate science into multi-stakeholder environmental negotiations. She served as co-facilitator for the California… MORE >

                       

Scott McCreary

Dr. Scott McCreary, President of CONCUR Inc, is a Senior Mediator and Environmental Policy Expert. He specializes in convening expert panels, coaching agencies in collaborative governance, and facilitating multiparty deliberations. The range of his project involvement spans land use and natural resource planning, marine resources, water supply and quality, biodiversity… MORE >