Catalyzing Sustainable Consensus

Resource scarcity has often been framed as a leading cause of civil strife and conflict by political scientists, sociologists, and planners alike (Lewicki, Gray, and Elliot 2002; Dobkowski and Wallimann 1998). Poverty as a result of droughts, or a general paucity of natural endowments, has frequently been correlated with a rise of belligerence in societies—environmental literature is also rife with terms such as resource wars, water wars, green wars, and so on. Planners have generally shielded themselves from such discourse by relegating these matters largely to the domain of political theorists. However, there is a growing realization among planners that underlying ecological indicators are the means by which communities often express their concerns at planning forums (Beatley and Manning 1997). Even so, the environmental concerns that are expressed in the planning arena are often taken in isolation of the overall sociopolitical conflict that may be undermining the fulfillment of the planning objective. While scholars of planning have a strong literature on collaboration and participation for achieving cooperative outcomes, the focus of these writings has generally been on resolving immediate disputes (Forester 1999; Gray 1991; Healey 1997; Innes 1996; Susskind et al. 1999) rather than on going the next measure to try to use the cooperative process for resolving larger conflicts. While some recent writings are beginning to focus on the wider applicability of planning processes in galvanizing adversaries toward peace (Booher and Innes 2002; Mandell 1999), this literature has not focused on environmental planning as an operational arena. When dealing with environmental criteria, issues are usually studied on a technical basis or socio-specific basis rather than using them instrumentally to resolve larger conflicts that would in turn facilitate the proposed plan (Margerum and Hooper 2001). The political science literature has reinforced this approach by focusing on the negative social consequences of resource scarcity. Recently, the confluence of environmental discourse and the literature on international security has led to a persistent hypothesis that environmental concerns can very often be at the core of interstate conflicts (Homer-Dixon 1999; Kaplan 2000; Walton 1993). While there are different schools of thought within this area of study, all of them begin with the proposition that environmental resources may be initiators of conflict. Indeed, even a study on conflict