Abstract
Public conflicts refer to situations in which members of a community must make or delegate collective decisions with conflicting positions or preferences. The jurisdictions under which such decisions must be made may be legal, informal, or voluntary, but conflicts are “public” in the sense that any decision made will affect all members of a community, to a greater or lesser degree. This chapter describes the characteristics of public conflicts, and presents a discussion on how research in Group Decision and Negotiation has evolved to address fundamental challenges within the field. After describing and defining the theoretical and practical challenges of public conflicts, the chapter goes on to review how problem structuring methods and other GDN techniques have been applied to some of the largest and most complex public conflicts. Promising lines of research are then identified and discussed to illustrate how public conflict resolution processes can be further enhanced. The discussion reveals how Group Decision and Negotiation research to support community decisions in the public realm has and will continue to produce a unique set of decision support systems, such as support systems that capture linguistic and spatial dimensions.
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Horita, M., Maemura, Y. (2020). Supporting Community Decisions. In: Kilgour, D., Eden, C. (eds) Handbook of Group Decision and Negotiation. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12051-1_44-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12051-1_44-1
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