In this short book Lucy Moore tells several compelling stories. Their power for me comes in part from their honesty, including Moore’s willingness to examine her mistakes as well as her insights about the dynamics of her mediation work. The book is about attempts, through mediated negotiation, to resolve conflicts within and among heterogeneous groups of people. It’s about successes, failures, and outcomes that contain elements of both. It’s about helping to build relationships of trust in order to undertake collective action to further a common purpose, but also – not incidentally – for the sake of the relationships themselves.
In the Preface, Moore describes her work over nearly three decades as trying to create ‘communities of interest,’ “…where those who have come together share a common problem, strive for a common goal, or seek to resolve a conflict.” But she realizes that mediated solutions, particularly to natural resource dilemmas, are not always possible, and that even when progress is made the gains may be transitory.
Two major themes running through all these stories are heterogeneity and trust, and the relationship between them in the process of searching for “common ground.” Heterogeneity reflects the diversity of individuals’ endowments (their access to information, resources, power, and influence) and their values and preferences (reflecting cultural ties to place, language, and heritage). The greater the heterogeneity of the people with stakes in the outcome, the greater also seem to be the time and effort required to achieve a level of trust needed to reach agreements for collective action. However – and fittingly – the energy expended in successfully overcoming distrust may engender greater cooperation than in situations where a degree of homogeneity (and thus, common interests) is assumed from the outset. Some of the cases explored here reflect that possibility, although the lesson is not drawn explicitly.
A case in point involved a long-standing conflict between county and tribal governments over jurisdictional issues within those counties, mainly in Western states, which was causing serious problems for both. The National Association of Counties (NACo) had been asked by non-Indian county officials to sponsor a resolution calling on counties to end recognition of the treaty rights of tribes. At the same time, tribal members sometimes served on county commissions, and tribes were incensed by the failure of county officials to recognize the historical and legal status of tribal governments.
NACo created a task force made up of equal numbers of tribal and non-Indian county officials in an attempt to resolve the dispute. It had met five times over the course of a year, but had reached an impasse. Quite early in her career, Moore was called in to mediate at the group’s sixth and final meeting. Not knowing any of the members of the group and unsure about how to handle the situation, she asked for all participants to introduce themselves. After two non-Indian task force members perfunctorily announced their names and titles, the next to speak was a Hopi woman who started slowly but seemed to take heart from the interest shown by other participants and eventually told a fascinating life story culminating in her election to the Navajo County (AZ) commission. This act freed others, both native and non-Indian, to offer their own personal narratives, allowing each to see the others more fully as people, and each tribe’s and county’s jurisdictional situation as unique. In the final session, generalized talk about treaty abrogation disappeared and the group made recommendations about how NACo could provide a communication channel for tribal and county governments to work on specific issues together.
In a self-deprecating coda at the end of the same chapter, Moore tells how a few weeks later she attempted to apply this ‘life-story-telling’ technique in a meeting of the Sandia Pueblo Economic Development Committee whose members were convened to develop a strategy to deal with encroachments from neighboring jurisdictions. It turned out to be an embarrassing mistake; what had seemed at first to be a disparate group of individuals was already focused on accomplishing a single, discrete task, and they would have none of the “touchy-feely” sharing the facilitator was trying to offer. Here, overcoming supposed obstacles posed by heterogeneity in order to achieve better communication and trust was not – nor should it have been – the group’s goal!
The question of “what works” in particular situations to help participants in heterogeneous groups discover common interests and build working relationships cannot easily be reduced to a simple formula. Many of the cases described in these narratives involve deeply contested questions of ownership. (Who has the “right” to make decisions about appropriate uses of land, water, and other resources?) These issues are fraught with deep historical and emotional significance. It is no wonder that many remain intractable even when disputants come to the table with the best of intentions.
As a policy analyst interested in how fallible people manage to build stable, long-standing institutions to achieve cooperation in such circumstances, I could wish Moore had chosen to articulate some more general lessons or “design principles” as guidance for those of us less skilled than she in helping diverse groups build trust and discover common ground. However, she has written about practice, not theory. That would have been a different book. We should instead be grateful for the stories she has given us here. Common Ground on Hostile Turf is well worth reading closely and learning from.
