Lawrence Susskind
Ford Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning; director, Environmental Policy Group; director, MIT-Harvard Public Disputes Program, Harvard Law School
areas of expertise: international environmental policy-making, global treaty negotiation, collaborative environmental management, environmental mediation, negotiation and dispute resolution, multiparty negotiation, consensus building, public attitudes
Lawrence Susskind, a member of the MIT faculty since 1970, is one of America's best known public dispute mediators and co-founder of the interuniversity Program on Negotiation (PON) at Harvard Law School. He is Ford Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning at MIT, where he co-directs the Graduate Program in Environmental Policy and Planning and the MIT-USGS Science Impact Collaborative, which trains "Science Impact Coordinators." He is also director of MIT's new Faculty Environmental Network for Sustainability.
At Harvard Law School he is vice chair for instruction at PON and co-director of the Negotiation Pedagogy Initiative. In 1993, Susskind founded the Consensus Building Institute, a nonprofit provider of mediation services in some of the most complicated disputes around the world. He is the author of 19 books, including Breaking Robert's Rules (Oxford, 2007), which has been published in seven languages, and Built to Win: Creating a World-Class Negotiating Organization (Harvard Business Publishing, 2009).
You can follow Susskind's comments on current conflicts in the public policy world viewing his blog at http://theconsensusbuildingapproach.blogspot.com.
request an interview: Sarah McDonnell | 617-253-8923 | s_mcd@mit.edu