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Introduction:
Frank Dukes, director of the Institute for Environmental
Negotiation at the University of Virginia, suggests that it important for mediators
not to seek to advance a particular set of interests. However, this does not mean
that mediators are fully neutral. This is evidenced by the fact that in environmental
negotiations, mediators need to be advocates for sustainability.
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This rough transcript provides a text alternative to audio. We apologize for occasional errors and unintelligible sections (which are marked with ???).
Neutrality in Environmental Negotiations
Frank Dukes
Director, Institute for Environmental Negotiation, University of Virginia
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A: You
really need to be an advocate for sustainability, working on environmental
issues, and that is probably controversial if anyone was paying attention to it.
We don't think that we are neutral; we have an impact on everything that we do.
We do think that it is important that we are independent, that we are not
dependent on any particular party or set of interests, and that we are impartial
or co-partial. That is that we are not seeking to advance a particular set of
interests over any other set of interests. By being advocates for
sustainability, we mean that we do believe that we need to be responsible in the
work that we do, the public decisions that are made, and we need to find ways
that insure social equity, economic gain, and ecological. It may not have to
happen in the same balance for each project, but we need to find ways to enhance
all of those, and we will tell people that. People do not often ask, we will
tell people about that; that's what we look to do. We found the best way to do
that is as working as a third party, as facilitators, and as mediators to bring
people together for not for us to advocate for ourselves what we think people
need.
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