Negotiating Sustainability Transformations

Authors:

Abstract: As the world grapples with escalating environmental and social challenges, the role of sustainability and corresponding ecological and social outcomes becomes increasingly critical. Societal transformations towards sustainability needed to address these challenges have great conflict potential on a local, national, and international level that require our field’s urgent atten-tion. In fact, decision-makers are seldomly able to move sustainability transformations forward by themselves. Instead, joint decision-processes have been established so that agreements on how to design sustainability transformations can be reached on a broader organizational or so-cietal level. From a conflict management perspective, sustainability negotiators face unique challenges of for example multi-dimensionality, multi-laterality, multi-temporality and questions of morality. The symposia on Negotiating Sustainability Transformations therefore aims at a) set-ting the stage to exchange empirical findings on particular challenges that sustainability negotia-tors face; b) highlighting why we need novel methods to aid our understanding of the conflict structures in sustainability-related negotiations; and c) sparking a discussion on the importance of our field to focus more strongly on providing practitioners with the necessary tools for suc-cessful sustainability transformations. In particular, this symposia features a mixture of theoretical contributions which aim at setting the stage for understanding sustainability conflicts ho-listically, as well as novel experimental work. Specifically, this symposia presents experimental work on the handling of social and environmental externalities in individual vs. joint decision-making contexts; the significances of uncertainty on the consideration of externalities; the effect of faultlines in representative negotiations; and the role of moral framing in divers dispute resolution contexts.

Track: NEG

Keywords: negotiation, sustainability, externalities, representatives, morality