Research Professor Danya Rumore has been on a mission to figure out how to help people work together since her days as an undergraduate.
“I wanted to figure out how we could use science and our best-available information to address complex environmental and public policy problems,” Rumore says. “That ultimately led me to do my PhD at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where I was enormously fortunate to work with Larry Susskind, a founding father of environmental conflict resolution and consensus building. At MIT, I learned the pragmatic skills of conflict resolution and interest-based negotiation, which are the foundation for effective collaboration. I also got to do facilitation work with the nonprofit Consensus Building Institute.”
Rumore wanted to teach others these skills and help them use them to solve problems in a fair, efficient, stable, and wise way, following in advisor Susskind’s footsteps. A north Idaho native, Rumore knew her heart was in the Mountain West and that she needed to live somewhere with access to the outdoors. She jumped at the opportunity to join the Utah Law faculty after finishing her degree.
“I got really lucky that right as I was graduating in 2015, the S.J. Quinney College of Law’s Wallace Stegner Center was hiring an associate director for the Environmental Dispute Resolution (EDR) program to help build and institutionalize the program,” Rumore recalls. “After interviewing for the position and getting to explore the Wasatch Mountains, I knew this was my dream job in my dream place.”
Nine years later, Rumore is now the director of the EDR program and also serves as a research professor in the College of Law and clinical associate professor in the University of Utah’s City and Metropolitan Planning department.
“I still feel extremely fortunate that I get to do work I love in a place that I love and to have such a great team here at the S.J. Quinney College of Law,” she says. “It is an honor to do this work under a center named after Wallace Stegner. Not only is he an iconic and inspirational figure for the American West, but he was a believer in cooperation. He is commonly cited as talking about the West as the native home of hope and about the need to create a ‘society to match its scenery’ in the West.”
“One cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope. When it fully learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that most characterizes and preserves it, then it will have achieved itself and outlived its origins. Then it has a chance to create a society to match its scenery.”
Wallace Stegner | The Sound of Mountain Water
Rumore believes working together to solve problems and create a world in which humans and the rest of the ecosystem can thrive is directly in line with what Stegner meant by cooperation.
“Like Stegner, we want to create a society to match the scenery, and we think this is going to require people to work through their differences to get to a better place, which is particularly relevant right now in our society and world,” she says. “Beyond that, it is an honor and a pleasure to be surrounded by leading academics on environmental law. We feel fortunate to have worked with Professor Bob Keiter as the Stegner Center director previously, and to welcome Professors Lincoln Davies and Brig Daniels as the new Stegner co-directors. We’re excited to see where they take the Stegner Center!”
Though the Stegner Center is well-known for its environmental goals, the name EDR can sometimes be a misnomer.
“We think of EDR as meaning ‘extra dialogue required,'” Rumore says. “While our official name is the Environmental Dispute Resolution program, we try to work far upstream in conflict to get people working together across their differences to problem-solve well before the conflict ends up in court. Once you have a true dispute, it is much harder to get parties to work together creatively to problem-solve, so your options are more limited. In other words, we try to work on issues before we have a dispute, so that part of our name isn’t entirely accurate.”
Environment also includes the human environment, Rumore clarifies.
“We want people to know that we don’t just work on traditional ‘environmental’ issues. For example, we have worked on a lot of community planning issues, ranging from how to site homeless shelters in Salt Lake City to how to manage visitors and protect community quality of life in the Zion National Park region,” she says.
As part of her goal to teach everyone how to productively work through conflict, Rumore conducts a lot of professional trainings, including an annual intensive collaboration certificate course for environmental and public policy professionals. Beginning in 2023, Rumore added a second annual training cohort just for federal agency personnel, and she has done basic conflict competence trainings with various local public officials and non-governmental organizations over the past few months.
“We are also just getting started with developing a conflict competence training program for the Utah League of Cities and Towns, which I’m really excited about,” Rumore says. “I love working with professionals who are out on the ground doing important work and seeing how these skills directly translate into increased efficacy—and optimism. These skills are very empowering.”
Rumore also taught a three-credit course called Negotiation and Dispute Resolution in the Public Sector for the City and Metropolitan Planning department until 2022. With increased demand for EDR program services, it became harder for her to offer that class each spring. She now teaches a one-credit intensive bootcamp-style course called Negotiating Conflict for the law school.
“Associate Dean Louisa Heiny and I devised the class as a great way to provide law students conflict competence and conflict resolution skills in a way that works with the rest of their law school curricula (and for my schedule). I think it is the perfect format for the concepts and skills I want all humans (again, especially lawyers) to have—for their personal and professional lives,” Rumore says.
The Negotiating Conflict class is an example of the value people can create when they communicate their needs and work together to negotiate a solution, Rumore explains.
“In co-creating the vision for the class, Louisa and I practiced the skills I teach in the class, and I think the resulting product has been a huge win for the law school and the EDR program,” she says. “The class is super fun for me and for students. I was thrilled it filled immediately last year, the first time I offered the class, and I think it did so again for this fall. I’m really excited that law students want these skills. I think lawyers, as much or more than anyone working in the public sector, need these skills to best serve their clients and help people get to truly good and lasting outcomes.”
Rumore is also excited by the positive feedback she’s received about Negotiating Conflict.
“Like our professional trainees, many of the students described the course as ‘life-changing’ and ‘one of the most valuable courses they’ve ever taken,'” she says. “That was my experience. These skills are so empowering, liberating, and world-changing. Hence, I want everyone to have them!”
In the future, Rumore would like to offer the Negotiating Conflict course to more law students and students around campus and would especially like to see conflict competence and conflict resolution skills, like interest-based negotiation, included in legal curricula. She notes that her team is also trying to figure out how to meet the demand for training with limited staff and that they try to facilitate one or two high-profile demonstration projects each year to show how collaboration can create productive outcomes.
“We’re in conversation with Brig Daniels and the Stegner Center’s Great Salt Lake Project about possibly cooking up a demonstration on Great Salt Lake,” she says. “This is a critical issue for our region, and we would love to help people work together to negotiate a solution that is going to solve the problem and actually get implemented in time to make a difference.”
Finally, Rumore has started work on a book about how conflict “just is” and we need to learn to deal with it productively.
“When I learned the skills of conflict resolution and interest-based negotiation as a PhD student, I thought, ‘Wow, this is life-changing. Why doesn’t everyone know this? And how did it take me 20 years of schooling to find this?’” Rumore recalls. “I truly believe that, with the right awareness and skills, all humans can (and will) work together to solve problems and co-create innovative solutions that create value for everyone involved. I see it happen every day through my work—and in my own personal life.”