COMMUNITY CONFLICT RESOLUTION

CHARLES G. FIELD

Finding new ways to mobilize disparate groups

Improving living conditions in many urban, poorer communities is a difficult undertaking. We have the resources to do the job. We have many inspired residents who willingly give their time to create better places to live. When we make those resources available to communities, hope soars. Yet, our efforts often come up short. People become unhappy and frustrated. They express anger and despair because of the lack of progress or widespread participation.

This is the story of Langston Jones in one such community. It is also the story of thousands of people like him in communities across the country. While his name is changed to preserve confidentiality, his experiences are generally real.

Langston lives in a lower-income inner-city neighborhood of a major eastern city. Housing is in poor shape. Drugs are prevalent. Crime is a problem. Unemployment is high. Infant mortality is high. He hopes to rebuild his community with targeted programs to address economic needs, reverse housing deterioration, make streets safe for residents, and improve the health of children. The time is ripe, as the federal government is looking to pump millions of dollars into inner-city communities.

Langston’s city is eligible for federal grants for economic development, housing, public safety, and health care. Spirits are high and many residents and businessmen in the community share his goals. Langston’s city created an umbrella organization with jurisdiction over specific groupings of neighborhoods. This organization was designed to let local residents decide how to spend available funds. Neighborhood groups elected representatives to the umbrella organization’s board, so the competition for funds took place within the board. Langston’s neighborhood group voted him onto the board, and he moved into a position of authority. But conflict soon began as individuals and community groups fought to get a share of scarce resources. Sometimes, the fight was over money; sometimes, over power. No matter how much he worked for his goals, he encountered resistance and frustration. At board meetings, he would be challenged on every detail by an organized opposition. He had friends, but could not survive the assaults. A stalemate in funding specific programs ensued and the funding authorities eventually pulled the plug. The umbrella board was placed into receivership.

THE ANATOMY OF FAILURE

In any society, various kinds of conflicts tend to emerge. Few proposals or adopted policies or tactics for problem solving please everyone. While this story oversimplifies a very complex situation, the underlying conflicts are repeated in community after community. There are few “smooth” mobilizations for action. In an optimal scenario, community leaders collaborate. In Langston’s case, the tale was one of impasse and failure. In other situations, the tale might involve programs that under-per-form. These failed efforts leave community residents frustrated, angry, and skeptical as to whether anything can be done. They blame funders, politicians, and other community leaders for failure. Government and funders, in turn, grow impatient, react to these shortfalls, blame failure on local incompetence, and move to eliminate programs. It may be years before the next substantial effort is undertaken.

Why do we fail so often in our efforts to improve inner-city life? Complex analyses still lead to incomplete answers. One critical variable seems to be how communities manage their differences. While Langston was motivated by the best of intentions—some of which were personal—he ran afoul of the interests that motivated others in the community. He couldn’t do it by himself. He needed the cooperation and collaboration of others. Yet, when it was time for people to come together, they didn’t. Why?

Years of program experience in lower-income communities suggest that it is very unlikely to find a single organization with the breadth of community support and depth of resources needed to address successfully the core problems of crime, housing deterioration, poor health services, the lack of jobs, and inadequate education. Community groups have to partner with each other, as well as other public and private groups, to marshal the critical mass to make a difference.

In Langston’s case, the umbrella organization held the promise of developing this type of partnership approach, but found itself caught up in conflict. Typically, such conflict reflects competitive approaches, i.e., un-addressed and deeply held feelings of injustice and pain; competing imperatives; and failures at communication. Langston and others operated on a competitive model, drawing from their own win/lose life experiences. At school, they had to compete to join sports teams and, once on the team, beating the other side was their goal. On the streets in the community, the gang was the team. Each gang staked out its territory and fought to preserve control and stay alive. There were few models of collaboration. So the notion that for anyone to win meant that others also had to win was foreign and not part of Langston’s instinctive thinking.

Another reason for failure is that people bring to the table deeply held feelings of injustice. They perceive themselves as having few resources and little real power when it comes to mobilizing for community action. When the federal government comes into the neighborhood with its programs, neighborhood leaders feel they have to struggle to control those programs, or risk being controlled by them. And well-intended public officials often respond by creating an orderly system for delivery, but one that is top-down. Members of Langston’s community felt they had no voice in decisions affecting them. They became leery of promises by government and other “do-gooders.”

On a more personal level, some of the opposition that plagued Langston’s leadership efforts arose from a deeply felt sense of hurt. Hurt can arise from battles over leadership in the community, or result from discrimination between religious or social groups. While the specifics of that “hurt” are unimportant here, there often is some hurt that lies behind the unwillingness of parties to work together. Deep unrevealed pain may erupt like a volcano that destroys everything around it. Failure to make visible and explicit the nature of that hurt subverts efforts at collaboration.

Even setting up programs everyone agrees need to be established can mean new tensions. Successful programs require management and technical knowledge, but local groups often lack these skills. Program advocates, who often come from outside the community, attempt to address this problem by encouraging the formation of strategic alliances with other groups who possess these skills. In the push by advocates to reach results, tensions increase because community leaders feel that they lose control over programs within their own neighborhoods.

Tensions often arise within the organizations themselves as a result of conflicting imperatives of programs and grassroots involvement. Program managers have their own timetables and decision-making processes that may be inconsistent with the slower pace of grassroots organizations. Tensions grow between the professional staff members, who see the need to push forward with programs, and community organizers, who see the need to keep community residents “plugged” into programs. Organizers fear that programs will take on lives of their own and the community organization leadership will lose sight of community residents, a frequently heard criticism of program-driven organizations.

Conflicts also can be traced back to poor communication. Often the community is split into factions characterized by poor communication between groups. If something had to be said to another group, the language was unidirectional, with each side talking “at” the other group. Discussions rarely sought to clarify and understand differences. Lack of effective communication creates opportunities for misunderstandings. For community activists like Langston, conditioned to think that others were out to “get them,” it would be easy to read the worst of intentions into the actions of others.

AN APPROACH FOR COMMUNITY SUCCESS

To make substantial differences in our poorer communities, we need to identify and use models of collaboration, learn techniques to bridge differences, and build strategic partnerships to marshal the resources needed to address the problems.

Interest-based negotiation can be an empowering model for use in communities. Roger Fisher and William Ury, co-authors of Getting to Yes, developed an interest-based negotiation curriculum at the Harvard Negotiation Program. Their approach has found widespread use in government and business, and is finding an increasing use in community settings. Interest-based negotiation is now being taught in a growing number of academic institutions, principally schools of law, business, and public policy.

Government and businesses are increasingly using the interest-based negotiation model to resolve conflicts and reach agreements. This approach has been used on a limited basis in community settings, including working with gangs in Roxbury and Boston, and resolving community conflict in Springfield, Massachusetts.

Interest-based negotiation is predicated on the notion that parties are more likely to reach wise agreements if the actions devised by the parties: (1) further their respective interests; (2) are perceived as being fair by some objective set of standards; and (3) create benefits for collaborative actions that exceed those attainable by either party alone. One has to explore and understand the interests of all parties that motivate action or resistance. These factors may be fear, self-respect, love, well-being, or survival. Parties must conclude that their interests are better served by reaching agreement than by continuing the conflict or status quo of no partnership. The value of the partnership increases when the parties seek integrative results: actions that address the needs of all parties (“I am better off if you are better off ”).

Most parties want to feel that they are treated fairly, and by some reasonable standard that is preferably beyond the ability of the parties to manipulate. An illustration in the housing market is the use of a third-party appraiser to establish the value of a home put up for sale. These may be benchmark standards of how others have successfully undertaken the work. If no standards are available, a fair process might suffice.

Good outcomes are not agreements made simply for the sake of agreement. A good outcome occurs when what the parties can do together produces results superior to those they could obtain by acting separately. Fisher and Ury label these separate actions “alternatives.” It can be empowering to know when it is wise to reach agreements (collaborate) and when the parties should walk away from a possible agreement and opt for their best alternatives.

This model also stresses the importance of good communication and relationship building. Many of Langston’s problems arose from repeated miscommunications by various parties. People didn’t know how to manage the conversations, and tended to listen to others selectively, hearing only those data points that reinforced their preconceptions. Langston and the other parties either didn’t want to clarify their views or didn’t have the skills to do so. To make interest-based negotiation an effective method, parties to the community dialogue need to listen more carefully to each other. They have to be willing to say “I can listen to the other person and if he/she is persuasive, I am willing to change my views.”

Interest-based negotiation is a viable bridge towards creating trust. This approach encourages parties to focus on the interests of all the parties and to seek actions that address those interests. Effective working relationships are possible when the parties see that their interests are being served.

Given the competitive preconditioning of community leadership, the suspicious view held of others, and the sense of injustice, trust becomes a victim. Some threshold of trust is required if “partnerships” are to work. Partnerships require that parties do what they agree to do. In Langston’s case, none of the parties trusted the others, making it impossible to build effective working relationships. In community settings, problems in communication and relationship building often are the driving factors in the failure of efforts to improve local communities.

Community organizations have to reach out to other groups to form strategic partnerships to battle crime or drug problems that don’t stop at the community organization’s boundaries. They invite business and institutions (principally faith-based institutions) to serve on their boards. Occasionally, organizations will reach out to major lending institutions that operate within their neighborhoods. Community efforts at strategic partnerships would be well served if the strategic partners utilized interest-based negotiation frameworks for working with one another.

Empowerment is key. If all significant parties feel they have an effective voice in the outcome of community programs, they take ownership. As owners, they will invest the time and emotion necessary to tackle the difficult community problems. Interest-based negotiation is a process and a way of thinking that fosters empowerment.

Strategic partners must share the desire for empowerment if what they seek is a long-term solution to community well being. At some point, outside groups leave to work in other partnerships. To survive this separation, local partners must have the institutional strength and organizational skills to continue their work. Interest-based negotiation provides a platform for discussing this eventuality and finding ways to navigate the separation successfully.

THE STRUCTURE AT WORK

Langston’s story is not over. Having painfully learned the downsides of conflict, he is now an avid student of interest-based negotiation. By nature he reaches out to others and he now tries to use new tools for effecting collaborative working ties.

As Langston has learned how to manage his working relationships with other parties, his neighborhood organization has started to move forward. His new negotiation skills have helped him to form effective strategic alliances with other individuals and organizations. His board is becoming more active. There are inflows of human, organizational, and capital resources.

The Langstons in all our communities would be well served by acquiring these negotiating and listening skills. The challenge is to help these community leaders understand that these skills are important enough to justify the investment in time and energy to acquire them. Just recently, Langston’s board voted to undertake this learning process. They wisely concluded that the interest-based training should be open to other leaders within their community.

Community leaders, in turn, are finding new strategic partners in neighboring colleges and universities. These schools are a unique source of human capital, providing the resources of faculty members motivated by community service or an intellectual curiosity about community problem solving. These schools also are a source of student talent and enthusiasm, particularly schools specializing in social work, architecture, planning, public health, and public affairs. The potential exists within these academic institutions to take an integrative approach, by bringing faculty and students from diverse disciplines to the table.

Appealing? Yes. Difficult to accomplish? Yes, but it can work. The community organization needs the school’s resources to be focused on community problems. Absent this focus, community members will be wary of yet another outside institution pushing its agenda on the community, and the partnership will fail. At the same time, each school has its own incentive structure defining faculty and student success. For example, if non-tenured faculty must publish to be considered for tenure and community service efforts do not count, young faculty may well shun community work.

In our communities, we are challenged to work together to solve pressing problems. Strategic relationships, when structured around shared and understood interests, can bring rich rewards to the community. However, a gap exists when we are not adept in handling our differences. Good conflict resolution and negotiation skills can help bridge this gap.

Conflict resolution means managing differences among both adversaries and friends. Langston has to deal with differences between and among community groups and leaders who feel that Langston and his organization are a threat to their success. Langston also has to deal with those differences that arise amongst friends, who may be members of his own board. And he has to manage differences that inevitably will arise among strategic partners. Now that he is learning the art and substance of interest-based negotiation, he is beginning to succeed.

Charles G. Field (CC ’95) is a housing and negotiation expert who has written on conflict management in the community and public sectors. He is a senior research fellow at the School of Public Affairs, University of Maryland.

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