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The Water Diplomacy Workshop is a five-day joint-learning experience that helps participants master important network-management tools and teach these tools to others. It combines the science of water with the negotiation instruction methodologies developed by the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School. Interactive lectures, problem-solving clinics, and role-play simulations help participants learn the techniques and strategies presented in the Water Diplomacy Workbook. They leave equipped to teach others in their agencies, organizations, universities, or communities.

Workshop Info

Masai Elders gather under Acacia trees before a meeting in Tanzania.

Masai gathering under the acacia trees before a meeting in Ngorongoro Conservation Area,Tanzania.

Water problems are complex because they cross physical, disciplinary, and jurisdictional boundaries. Water is a vital and limited resource—but fortunately, knowledge about water is not limited. Water professionals trained to synthesize scientific, societal, and political knowledge into practical solutions to water disputes can effectively transform water from a fixed to a flexible resource.

Traditional engineering and economic tools are insufficient to resolve conflicting water claims. Joint fact-finding and collaborative problem-solving tools must be added to each manager’s and decision-maker’s toolbox. Instead of thinking in terms of stable and bounded systems that fluctuate in predictable ways, water professionals must think of constantly changing and open-ended water networks.

What is unique about the Water Diplomacy Workshop?

  1. Participants learn how to train others.  The Workshop’s leaders are problem-solving practitioners with many decades of teaching, research, training, and field-based experience. We will show you how to present what you learn at the Workshop to groups, communities, and organizations back home. Spreading this actionable knowledge and helping as many people as possible, rather than reserving what we know only for those who can come to a one week workshop, is essential to addressing the world’s water problems.

  2. Participants become part of a global network. We aim to link reflective water professionals around the world. Attendees can use our private online forum to help each other implement what they’ve learned about water diplomacy.
  3. Our focus is on managing the science, policy, and politics of water networks through negotiations. Addressing water conflicts means managing complex networks. Focusing on just infrastructure investment, or just science or just public perceptions won’t work. Water networks are open-ended, and constantly changing. If water disputes are not properly framed, and don’t take account of the natural, societal, and political dynamics involved, it will be impossible to generate solutions that are implementable and enforceable. To that end, the Workshop emphasizes negotiation as a critical diplomatic skill.
  4. We are building on an extensive research record and real world experience. We teach a purposefully organized problem-solving approach backed by decades of theory-building and research in water science and negotiation. Professor Lawrence Susskind is one of the co-founders of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, arguably the foremost center for the study of negotiation theory and practice in the world. Professor Shafik Islam is the director of Tufts University’s new interdisciplinary doctoral program on Water Diplomacy, the only one of its kind. He also founded Aquapedia, which is a free online encyclopedia of timely and accurate information about water. It is carefully vetted, searchable, and built on a robust framework of water networks. No other professional training program in water diplomacy builds on this level of research in both negotiation and water science.


Who is teaching the course?

 
Shafiqul Islam

Shafiqul Islam

Shafiqul (“Shafik”) Islam is the first Bernard M. Gordon Senior Faculty Fellow in Engineering and Professor of Water Diplomacy at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He is the Director of the Water Diplomacy Program at Tufts University that involves over twenty faculty and fifteen national and international partners and is sponsored by the National Science Foundation. Dr. Islam’s interdisciplinary research and educational interests are to understand, characterize, measure, and model water issues ranging from climate to cholera to water diplomacy with a focus on scale issues and remote sensing. His research group, WE REASoN, integrates theory and practice to create actionable knowledge.

He maintains a diverse network of national and international partnerships including  MIT, Columbia University, Purdue University, Penn State University, Princeton, BUET in Bangladesh, University of Tokyo, ETH in Switzerland, ICDDRB in Bangladesh, IIT in India, and SaciWATERs to conduct multi-year and multi-million dollar interdisciplinary collaborative research for a wide range of problems focusing on scarcity and abundance of water. His major research sponsors include the National Science Foundation , National Institute of Health, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Dr. Islam maintains an active national and international consulting and training practice ranging from flood forecasting in India to national water planning in Bangladesh, to water policy planning for ExxonMobil, and to advising South Asian Consortium of Interdisciplinary Water Resources studies. He acted as consultant to the World Bank, United States Geological Survey, Proctor and Gamble, and several other governmental and nongovernmental organizations. He has published over hundred refereed journal and other publications.

Lawrence Susskind

Lawrence Susskind

Lawrence (“Larry”) E. Susskind is a teacher, trainer, mediator, and urban planner. He is one of the founders of the field of public dispute mediation. He has mediated a great many complex disputes in the United States and in other parts of the world. Since the early 1970s, he has helped to train thousands of negotiators and mediators in the public and private sectors and to promote the use of mediation to resolve resource management, regulatory, treaty-making, infrastructure development, and environmental protection disputes. Susskind’s ideas about the techniques and strategies of consensus building have helped to define best practice.

In 1993, he founded the Consensus Building Institute (CBI), a Cambridge-based not-for-profit that is now a leading mediation service provider throughout the world. Through CBI, he has advised the Supreme Courts of Israel, Ireland, and the Philippines; helped to found the International Programme on the Management of Sustainability offered every year in the Netherlands, helped to facilitate a variety of international treaty-making efforts; developed the techniques of conflict assessment and joint fact-finding; and created new strategies for building organizational negotiating capabilities. He has been part of the interuniversity Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School (HLS) since 1982 and taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) since 1971.