LEAD-Europe
Residential Session
BARCELONA
Report

24 January to 3 February, 1998

Introduction

The overall appreciation by the Associates was unanimous: the Barcelona course was superior to the courses in Geneva and in St. Marienthal. Being oriented towards skill enhancement, this reflects first of all the relevance to the Associates’ direct performance in their professions, whereas Geneva and St. Marienthal were oriented towards more lasting parts of the curriculum. Secondly, Barcelona brought together a sizable group, 32 Associates. These Associates had met last September in Costa Rica. They subsequently pursued a large number of common issues and, meeting in Barcelona, they renewed these common interests with more focus. The high appreciation of the Barcelona course reflects therefore the momentum of the LEAD-Europe programme as it moves into the third year of operation.

The central design element of the course was the structuring of skill training. The approach was both bold and innovative. Skills were set up around important social issues in sustainable development, starting from small group relations and leadership, moderation and facilitation in focus groups, negotiation and conflict resolution and finally presentation skills. On the whole, the negotiation and the focus group training was successful and should be pursued. The small group relations and leadership, as well as the presentation skills training was not so successful and will need to be refocused.

Two elements were combined to put the skill training in context: first the social issues addressed and second the use of one particular case of conflict as a organizing thread through the course. The extension of Barcelona airport should have served as an illustration of leadership, of bringing public opinion into planning, of risk assessment, of negotiation and conflict management, and finally of value trade-off's and ethics. The airport is the most important issue in the Barcelona region. Nonetheless, the airport case did not serve well as a thread through the course. Essentially this is, because the local political process in not transparent and straightforward. A suitable case for such a course has to be found elsewhere.

The three approaches to dealing with the environment overlapped considerably, and their interrelatedness appeared, although the one case study could not illustrate this well. Alternatively, instead of one case, different cases could illustrate the overlap between the approaches, for example, biotechnology would serve for the risk - ethics overlap, employment for the conflict - ethics and so forth.

Cohort Comparison

Beyond the overall appreciation by the Associates, the average normalized appreciation between the cohorts can be compared. Each Associate used a questionnaire where each event could be ranked between 1 and 6. The criteria were formulated so that the answer reflects the novelty of the event (the highest mark was qualified as "opened up a new perspective formerly unknown). In that comparison it is important to take the composition of the cohorts in account. Cohort V was at the end of two years of Associateship and has a "business - NGO axis" to it, while cohort VI were at their first residential course. This difference explains why cohort VI appreciated the tutorials more than cohort V. Over the two years cohort V has established a perspective where business and NGO's are the major actors. While both cohorts gave the negotiation training the best marks (5.12 from cohort V and 5.02 from cohort VI) cohort VI judged the tutorials in ecological economics and in environmental risk also very high (4.93 and 4.56 respectively), whereas cohort V appreciated all tutorials considerably less than the negotiation training (below 4.0). The difference in cohort composition also explains the slightly higher rank given to ethics by cohort V (3.58 and 3.88 versus 3.55 and 3.37) and the lower rank for social theories of risk (2.49). The high rank from both cohorts for the negotiation training should not be interpreted as an indication that negotiation skills are the most important skills for the Associates, as more resources were spent for that training than other parts of the course. Nonetheless the higher marks for the training in general indicates that these resources were spent effectively.

More experiential learning tools got off to a bad start with an 2.44 appreciation by cohort V for the leadership training. Repeating the leadership training with a new cohort in order to assess whether the close relationships within cohort V were the reason for the lack of appreciation, should be instructive. Certainly the tutorials and training events that followed the leadership training benefited from the exercise. The focus group and the negotiation exercise gained, as participants had been alerted to their group behavior.

Comparison by Associate Background

As often the case, one should not compare the appreciation of the Associates between them but in a more structured approach. The average appreciation amongst cohort V Associates does not show any pattern with respect to age, discipline and institutional affiliation. This was already so with the appreciation of the first residential course in Geneva. Therefore the course content throughout the 2 years was equally interesting to the Associates from industry, government, NGO and media. The only distinction appearing is illustrated in the Table 2 below. High appreciation's come from Associates concerned with specific issues and instruments of change, whether in education or in industrial operations; content counts. Lower appreciation's come from the Associates engaged in public opinion, concerned with vision and communication.

Table 1:

Cohort V Ranking of each Associate’s appreciation
for the whole course compared between three courses

Looking at LEAD’s curriculum and Associates’ professionals paths, this outcome is fully explainable and should not therefore be translated into major changes in the residential courses.

Tutorials

Five different fields were addressed through tutorials: focus groups, regional planning, risk, ethics and ecological economics (only cohort VI). These tutorials are assessed in that order.

Focus groups, Regional planning, Risk assessment, Ethics, Economics

Focus groups

The presentation of focus group analysis rapidly reached advanced theoretical issues. The questions showed that not all Associates followed and the tutors suggested to run focus groups as illustrations. Four focus groups were set up, two on the outcome of the Kyoto COP negotiations and the other two on the Costa Rica LEAD session. This exercise showed that the rigidity of small group processes in focus groups had been widely underestimated. Differences in opinion about the Kyoto negotiation and the Costa Rica session remained and no consensus was reached despite the elaborate facilitation skills used in each group by many Associates. The focus groups on the Costa Rica session concluded with a successful session design and raised many questions about the LEAD programme in general. The Kyoto focus groups used those who attended the COP as resource persons. Their differences in the accounts they gave could not be resolved. The tutors used the facilitator’s records from these focus groups to repeat their explanation of the objective quality of focus groups pointing to the difficulty of manipulating the group interaction. The focus groups provided hard cognitive data to be used in integrated assessment and the conditions for doing so were successfully explored. Overall the focus group tutorial was very effective given the limited exposure to this process of the Associates prior to the Barcelona course.

Regional planning

Following a visit to the airport runway extension site, an expert roundtable on transport and regional planning comprised three presentations. First a representative of IBERIA exposed the business rational of the airline operation. Questions related to the operational constraints and several options for IBERIA were explored. A policy statement on conservation and the environment by A.E.N.A. and the airport authority was discussed (comprising legislation, planning, transparency, participation, integration, noise, water, air, energy, ground, waste, nature conservation and impact on the countryside). A representative from Barcelona Regional, the planning authority, gave the local authority perspective. It was apparent, that transport issues are distinct from other issues due to the importance of the regional level of analysis. Barcelona Regional’s top-down planning process was evaluated regarding its internal rational and appeared rigid to IBERIA’s growth strategy. The NGO Associates drew comparisons with other European regions, providing answers to many questions the site visit discussion had raised. A representative from the Spanish NGO Depana presented an alternative plan for the expansion of the Barcelona airport. The focus on wetland seemed to limit their thinking. The whole planning process appeared rather rudimentary, but this was due to the absence of key institutions as they were currently in a sensitive stage of a re-orientation of the negotiation between national and regional authorities.

A different approach to regional planning was exposed with an example of an innovative development plan for a new urban centre on the island of Mallorca. The total integration of theoretical aspects of business concerns and ecological principles contrasted well with the difficult combination that had appeared for the actual airport expansion.

Risk assessment

Mike Chadwick introduced risk assessment distinguishing between detriment, risk and severity. Some Associates asked about the depth of eco-systems disturbance and the difficulty of evaluating systemic conditions appeared. A consultant in corporate risk management from Price Waterhouse, Switzerland, presented the risk management practices in industry. Price Waterhouse seemed to be a market follower, and the different institutional interests for their services were discussed. Thomas Grammig introduced different approaches to social theories on risk, opposing the psychometric methods and their applications to cultural approaches and attempts to provide empirical evidence for them. Marin Ignatov, a cohort 6 Associate, presented his work on safety culture in Bulgarian nuclear power plants. Other Associates questioned the distinction between objective and subjective risk aspects and difficulty of defining meaningful risk parameters for policy making was brought to light.

Ethics

Two ethics tutorials then reached the foundation for much of the arguments during this residential course. Prof. Larrère explained the major schools of moral philosophy regarding the ecosphere. She started with the anthropocentric tradition in Christian religion and then briefly defined biocentric and ecocentric ethics. This provided the background for the questions from the Associates regarding globalization, the relation between work and the environment, genetic engineering, cost benefit analysis, environmental accounting, landscape preservation, socialization experiences, environmental awareness and education. Prof. Larrère’s comments dealt with most of these questions by restating the orientation of these issues in moral philosophy. Prof. Bourdeau’s following presentation of the Earth Charter and other practical concepts added to the presentation. Mike Chadwick spoke of the moral basis of the environment movement.

Economics

Prof. Martinez-Alier’s tutorial followed closely his publication, distributed prior to the course to the Associates (only cohort VI). The Associates could thus complement the information they had received earlier. His presentation alternated between economic concepts and past environmental conflicts starting from the global level, contrasting the situation in affluent and in poor countries, down to the local level. Finally he reviewed recent progress in ecological economics comparing HANPP, MIPS, the ecological footprint concept and EROI. Responding to questions, Prof. Martinez-Alier suggested that Joint Implementation is a form of emission trading, explained that different values are incommensurable, and presented discount rates as ethical questions. The second economics tutorial by Jack Pezzey built upon this breathtaking introduction by exposing distinct functions of different sectors of an economy, industry, households and the environment. Based on his resource economics principles he explained the differences between environmental policy and sustainable development policy.

Site visit

The Barcelona course included one site visit as a illustration of parts of the course, the planned expansion of the airport. The wetland adjacent to the current runway was the first stop. Questions to the local officer allowed the Associates to add to their diverse knowledge about wetlands and Mike Chadwick provided some basic parameters. The following bus tour around the airport illustrated the current operation and a short stop at the water treatment facility was proposed by the environment manager. Finally the environment manager gave a short presentation and invited questions from the Associates. Given the wide professional experience amongst the Associates on the issue of airport expansion, the questions were very pointed and the level of knowledge of the environment manager was a good illustration of the policy process on the local level.

The site visits in the morning were elaborated during an expert roundtable in the afternoon, moderated by Hans Smeets (chairman of the environment committee in IATA and a cohort V Associate).

Skill training

Leadership

The leadership training was first introduced by a short presentation by the former minister for transport and environment in Spain. He presented notably the conditions under which decisions were made regarding the water supply in different regions of Spain and the learning process of the democratic institutions. In the following discussion relations between Spain and the E.U. were addressed. Many Associates asked questions regarding particular decision tools such as environmental impact assessments.

The following day, two trainers from the Tavistock Institute, London, took the opposite approach to leadership training, experiential learning events were used to allow the Associates explore their group behavior. Since all Associates had already met on several residential courses, their familiarity posed a difficult task to the trainers and the managed environment as well as the competitive environment events created a powerful group dynamic the trainers could not harness for the events. The emotional reaction from the Associates was strong. Delegated authority appeared in all its ambiguity with respect to subordinate needs. Correspondingly the appreciation of the Associates varied between praise and dismissal of the training events. Before the end of the course (two days after the events), a written comment by the trainers was distributed but this did not balance the insufficient debriefing of the training exercises.

Negotiation

The second skill training component, intensive negotiation training, was met with quite different success. Robert Weibel used three different negotiation exercises over two full days. First bilateral negotiations on commodity prices, second on a large infrastructure investment, and third a multilateral exercise over a pollution reduction agreement for the Mediterranean sea. Three pairs Associate groups negotiated in parallel on the commodity prices. Despite of the Associates’ wide negotiation experiences, the achieved commodity prices were half way between success and failure. One negotiation pair achieved optimal prices during one of 12 negotiation rounds.

The infrastructure case was negotiated in seven pairs and due to the complexity of the agreement the outcome varied. One pair could not reach an agreement. Six succeeded in reaching an agreement, of which two would have realized a new area of cooperation between "Ingo" and "Exton" (the names of the respective countries). The importance of a thorough preparation of the negotiation was illustrated.

The multilateral exercise comprised four country delegations. The heads of delegation and the chairperson were switched once. Throughout three negotiation sessions the delegations excelled in parallel negotiations amongst appointed issue specialists. During a brief period towards the end of the exercise, some Associates challenged the normative base for an agreement and last minute arrangements enabled a feasible compromise to be reached. The video debriefing was a vivid illustration of the challenging tasks for the chairperson and procedural issues were discussed step by step. The Associates commented that they had, over the course of the negotiation, proposed solutions which appeared illogical outside of the negotiation context. Robert Weibel’s maxim: "Think your way out of your emotions", was well appreciated. His best negotiation advice to the Associates was "to keep it simple", given the complexity of the human dimension. Contrary to Robert Weibel’s promise, the staff has kept the video tape of the multilateral exercise and if the Associates will not object, LEAD-Europe will offer it to other LEAD programmes. Again there was a considerable group dynamic developed during this training event, but the negotiation conditions put rigid conditions on this so that the results did not reflect individual personality aspects but reflected the organizational behavior of the Associates.

Assignments

Cohort 5 assignments
to be presented before the
LEAD International graduation session:

Barcelona related Programme, Tutors

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