حل تعارض در مدیریت زیرساخت های پایدار

Planning of infrastructures typically involves many organizations with conflicting interests and diverging control over crucial issues, such as technological and social safety, economic potential, and environmental concerns. Traditional planning assumes that all conflicts must, and can, be resolved and that the resulting master plan represents a compromise solution being carried by all parties. In this paper we apply a new methodological approach which departs from this unrealistic assumption. Instead of aiming at resolving all conflicts, we try to manage all planning conflicts by searching for an optimal exchange of control which minimizes the remaining differences among the planning organizations. The focus is on analyzing dependencies among different actors involved in the planning process. We discuss the application of this approach to the urban center melioration project for Alphen on the Rhine, in The Netherlands. Fourteen actors, representing seven planning agencies, governmental departments, and business associations, participated in a workshop for the urban center amelioration project for Alphen on the Rhine (NL). The applied methodology allowed the participants to gain insights in their mutual dependencies. Moreover, post-workshop analysis allowed us to conclude that the current configuration of actors and issues provides little potential to reduce the tension caused by conflicting planning objectives. The most important recommendation to the urban center amelioration project for Alphen on the Rhine (NL) is to broaden their approach to include additional actors and planning issues.

The increasing interaction of urban and rural infrastructure systems requires more intense coordination between planning organizations with quite diverse objectives. Sustainability, safety, and economic planning have become indispensable focus points. Developing effective infrastructure plans means finding a compromise between safety, economic, and environmental aspects, and having different organizations agree on a course of action. The way that organizations develop plans, deal with uncertainties, and look at safety is strongly affected by the management culture of the different organizations (Turner, 1978). Much has been written on how cultural differences in organizations affect the course of action of safety management, accompanied by a call for more efficient coordination (Parker, 1992 and Pidgeon et al., 1992). Hitherto, however, little attention has been paid to the value of compromise agreements and, subsequently, the consideration of the fact that compromises might not have to be resolved but, rather, control over crucial issues should change hands. The concept of exchanging control over crucial issues is a well-known concept in social theory and market economics (Coleman, 1990). The application of this concept, however, has been restricted to explanatory studies of political systems (Pappi and Knoke, 1991). In this paper we apply the concept of exchanging control for participatory infrastructure management in an operational setting. The analytic concept has been implemented in a multimedia system as part of a group decision room, which allowed the actors to exchange information. Special attention was paid to the user interface to facilitate data input and visual interpretation of the results. Due to its operational characteristics, the system can be used to guide the multi-actor planning process in a real-time setting.

We have proposed an approach to land-use management that acknowledges the existence of conflicting interests in, and control over, crucial issues. This approach differs radically from traditional approaches in land-use planning which either aim at imposing regulatory measures or at engaging the stakeholders in endless, and unstructured, discussions. The objectives of applying this approach to the Alphen on the Rhine project were twofold, namely to support DMI in resolving the deadlock present and to test the approach in a real-case setting. The fact that we could not resolve the problem was due to the narrow system definition proposed by the stakeholders; however, we could engage the actors in structured discussions, show paths to resolve conflicts, identify the need to enlarge the system, and build a basis of confidence among the actors. The application of this approach to the Alphen on the Rhine project gave valuable theoretical and conceptual insights. The multimedia system proved the case for providing a basis for integrating analytic reasoning and practical problem solving. Data input could be done without writing down a single number, using solely visual interactive input devices, and the computations could be performed rapidly to provide visual cues for real-time decision making.