Reaching agreement on regional growth strategies : evaluating alternative dispute resolution methods for resolving interjurisdictional regional planning disputes
Date
1996
Authors
Goodwin, Lois-Leah
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Abstract
Rapid population growth puts increasing pressure on local governments to accommodate and plan for this growth. Local politicians in municipalities and rural areas affected by the outward spread of growth are often in conflict as each has differing visions and planning priorities for their jurisdiction. The coordinated management of growth within the region is one way of addressing this conflict. A recent legislative amendment in British Columbia, the Growth Strategies Act, 1995, introduced an interactive regional planning model that requires local governments in a regional district to work cooperatively to address growth issues affecting the region. This model emphasizes alternative dispute resolution approaches such as interest-based negotiation and mediation for resolving conflict that inevitably emerges as jurisdictions with competing interests and political views continue to grow and shape the urban form.
No study to date had evaluated interest-based negotiation and mediation to determine if one approach to dispute resolution is perceived as more successful than the other in relation to complex multi-party disputes. This study evaluated the perceived success of interest-based negotiation compared with mediation as alternative dispute resolution approaches for assisting municipalities and regional districts in reaching agreement on regional growth strategies. Two scenarios, one depicting an interest-based negotiation approach and the other a mediation approach to resolving a multi-party regional planning dispute were developed for evaluation by locally elected officials. A mail questionnaire, which included one of the two scenarios, was sent to 846 locally elected officials from urban and rural jurisdictions in seventeen high growth and low growth regional districts throughout British Columbia. A total of 115 questionnaires were returned.
Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) procedures were used to determine any statistically significant effects of independent variables (scenario A/B, high growth/low growth regions, and urban/rural jurisdictions) with respect to dependent variables of fairness, participant satisfaction, efficiency and effectiveness. Qualitative data was also gathered to further gauge perceptions of locally elected officials regarding the two approaches to dispute resolution. The data analysed revealed that both interest-based negotiation and mediator assisted negotiation are perceived to be successful approaches to resolving regional growth strategy disputes. However, results show that rural respondents perceived the mediator-assisted approach to dispute resolution to be the most successful in terms of fairness , participant satisfaction and effectiveness, whereas urban respondents perceived the interest-based dispute resolution approach to be the most successful.
Whether jurisdictions were in a high growth or low growth region had no effect on perceptions. Conflict management training was found to be a significant influence on perceptions of locally elected officials from urban and rural jurisdictions. Also, the key principles of interest-based negotiation and mediation were considered by locally elected officials to be the most successful aspects of the two dispute resolution scenarios.