The Wallace Stegner Center’s Environmental Dispute Resolution (EDR) Program believes that with the right skills and awareness, all people can work together to tackle pressing societal challenges and create a better today and tomorrow. To help individuals, teams, and organizations skillfully navigate conflict and effectively collaborate, we offer teaching and training, collaboration assistance and advising, and thought leadership.
The EDR Program’s teaching and training efforts include our flagship Collaboration Certificate Course (CCC). In fall 2023, we will run two separate CCC cohorts for the first time and will reach our largest audience yet: one cohort will be a diverse mix of environmental, natural resource and public policy professionals from across the U.S. and Canada; the other will be specifically for federal land management agency employees. This coming spring, we will also offer a new bootcamp course “Negotiating Conflict” for graduate students in the S.J. Quinney College of Law and across campus.
In our on-going efforts to normalize conflict and help people work through conflict productively, we are placing renewed emphasis on thought leadership. As part of this, EDR Program Director Danya Rumore published a recent Salt Lake Tribune Op-Ed (“To Disagree Better, We Need to Increase our Conflict Competence”) and co-authored an American Bar Association Dispute Resolution Magazine article (“Environmental Dispute Resolution: Past, Present and Future”). We have also been publishing a series of articles on how to make conflict productive on our EDR Blog. Additionally, the EDR Program continues to partner on the Gateway and Natural Amenity Region (GNAR) Initiative, which received three major grants in the last year and was featured on PBS Utah (“Digital Nomads and the Housing Dilemma”).
The EDR Program also continues to offer collaboration assistance and advising. In spring 2023, the EDR team facilitated the successful 3-day “Wilderness Convergence” workshop, which brought together wilderness advocates from across the country to identify challenges and explore pathways forward for protecting and enhancing wilderness through relationship-building among wilderness advocates. To learn more about the EDR Program, visit https://stage.law.umc.utah.edu/stegner-center/edr/