Compromise
ILM does not aim to eliminate conflict. It creates conditions in which legitimate differences and trade-offs can be confronted, negotiated and converted into arrangements that enough actors can live with.
Understanding is not yet redistribution.
Dialogue
Builds understanding, empathy and relationship. Valuable groundwork – but nobody is necessarily required to change position or give anything up.
Do not ask one workshop to do everything.
Deliberation can be distributed across an interconnected set of arenas. Bilateral preparation, brokering, knowledge translation, narrative work and formal convening can perform different functions together.
Surface real interests, fears, red lines and possible concessions before actors enter a shared arena.
Make evidence and different knowledge systems legible enough to enter the negotiation.
Use facilitated spaces to make distributional consequences explicit rather than smoothing them over.
Treat each agreement as a bounded compromise that creates institutional foundations for further cooperation.
Do not ask actors to cooperate on faith.
A credible compromise makes the collective payoff concrete enough for boundedly self-seeking actors to weigh it against what they are being asked to concede.
What authority, benefit, access, status or discretion is each actor actually being asked to give up?
Tenure security, social licence, market access, reduced political risk or collective capacity must be visible and credible.
Monitoring, repeated interaction, institutional rules and graduated sanctions can help cooperation become self-reinforcing.
Continue through connected concepts
Make winners, losers, costs and power redistribution explicit before negotiating.
→Read the regulatory positions each actor is being asked to change.
→Build a ferment of bilateral, narrative and convening interventions around deliberation.
→See compromise as movement towards mutual regulation rather than unanimity.
→Read the full Compromise chapter.
The full reading edition carries the complete argument, examples, references and methodological detail behind this page.
