Cross-Cultural Optimality: Navigating Tensions between Top-down and Bottom-up Approaches

Scholarship on cross-cultural conflict management has offered the distinction between more prescriptive versus more elicitive approaches to intercultural training and intervention (Lederach, 1995). While prescriptive training privilege the instructors’ expertise with a top-down transfer of knowledge, elicitive training uses a bottom-up strategy that centralizes local insights and cultural knowledge. Following up from findings from our mixed-method online survey, we conducted a series of interviews with expert negotiators, mediators, and conflict resolution instructors that would enable us to expand what the basic conditions conducive to hybrid of prescriptive and elicitive approaches to cross-cultural conflict resolution (CC-CR) training. Qualitative coding from interviews revealed five major themes that were related to challenges as well as innovations and basic principles of hybrid training. We hope to better inform practitioners in the international peacebuilding field by identifying innovative strategies that can come from CC-CR experts’ insights.