After being stuck for months, Colorado River negotiators float bringing in a mediator to help. We asked an expert: Will that actually help?

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As the clock approaches midnight for new Colorado River guidelines, Utah and the other basin states have proposed bringing on an independent mediator to help states strike a deal.

The Tribune called Utah’s expert in collaborative decision-making, Danya Rumore, to get her take on the idea.

Rumore is the director of the Environmental Dispute Resolution Program, which is moving from the University of Utah to Utah State University this summer. She has facilitated conversations on some of Utah’s trickiest science, environment and recreation issues — from the Great Salt Lake to national park gateway communities.

Here is our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

How do you think an independent mediator could help the seven states reach a deal on the Colorado River?

I would recommend we think in terms of collaborative process designer, not mediator, because most people who are trained as traditional mediators don’t actually have the skills or experience to do this kind of work. There are people who I call “big f” facilitators, collaborative process designers, people who design consensus building processes, who are the right people.

We are operating in what I would call a pretty conflict incompetent society. So we’re asking people to work through really big, challenging conflicts when most of us don’t have the skills, and you’re getting pressure from people who don’t have the skills.

I think of myself as a facili-trainer. Part of my job is to help those parties have the skills they need to productively negotiate.

Another role of the third party is to manage the complexity, because the parties, who are there to negotiate, need to be thinking about their interests or the state they represent or the people they represent. It’s a whole other thing to think about, how do I help these parties productively work through their differences to negotiate a solution that really works?

What makes this conflict particularly challenging?

You have a number of states. This is also an international thing. [And] we have changing hydrology.

Using science as a weapon rather than as a tool to inform decision making is at play. Is climate change actually happening? Are we just in a dry period, and we don’t actually need to plan as if there’s less water in the future? That can become a barrier to problem solving and a way of stalling.

The federal government [is] an interested party. They can be a helpful interested party, or they can be a hindrance party.

A state is not a singular entity. You may be a negotiator for Colorado or for New Mexico, but what does that even mean? Who you’re working for and what they think the mandate is will change. You really are thinking about the well being, hopefully, of your whole state. You’ve got lots of cities, all these different pressures that have their own idea of what they think should happen with the river.

The other big elephant in the room is water law is tricky and not necessarily set up for success in modernity. The law doesn’t solve problems; it’s bumpers. We solve problems within those bumpers. When the law is outdated or doesn’t reflect reality, all of a sudden, those bumpers can be more of a problem than even helpful for problem solving.

We are in a notable drought year. We just had the worst snow pack on record. How does that potentially put negotiators in this survival mode that you’ve written about?

The human brain is wired to survive, not to thrive. It can treat anything from a difficult conversation to a tricky situation as if it’s a bear in the woods. It’s not, right? Like I’m not in mortal threat right now because of the state of the Colorado River. Sure, it could have some very real impacts. And it’s not a bear in the woods that’s going to potentially kill me right now.

But if I don’t learn to train my brain, my brain will conflate the two. It starts this whole neurobiological process that involves lots of hormones being released. My amygdala flares up, my lizard brain flares up, and my prefrontal cortex, which people call the wizard brain, the more evolved part of our brain, starts to go offline.

When this happens, we basically devolve into those fight, fight, freeze, or appease behaviors. We lose our ability to listen effectively, to think creatively, to emotionally regulate.

[Negotiators] can have very big, involved back tables who are putting a lot of pressure on them. And probably a lot of those people are freaking out. There’s probably a lot of defend or attack stuff coming to these negotiators. And they probably care very deeply. They probably want to find a solution, and it feels like, oh my gosh, this is dragging on.

Yes, time is of the essence. We should have been taking a different approach many, many years ago, and we wouldn’t have ended up here. But here we are now, and the most important thing we can do now is say we really need to find a solution that’s going to work for all parties so we can actually get it implemented [and] solve this problem.

Glen Canyon Dam could fail this summer. How do you get around situations where there is an imminent thing that could happen and help a group address that, while also making sure there’s time to get at the deeper issue?

One of my jobs as a facilitator is to address the preoccupations in the room. If one of those preoccupations is that this dam is going to fail this summer, my brain can’t think about anything else until that is somehow taken off the table.

One of the overall principles of our work is “go slow to go fast.” And so often in these processes, we try to rush it. More often than not, we rush, rush, rush because we think things need to happen now, and then we end up going fast to go slow. And that’s totally Colorado River management.

This stuff could have been addressed a long time ago — not that the negotiation would be done. It’s probably going to need ongoing adaptive management, but we’d be in a much better place, if we actually developed the management strategy that reflected the changing hydrology.

And in the meantime, there may be some things that we need to address pretty quickly. And addressing those immediate things can be a way to build skills and trust among the negotiators that they actually can work together to solve difficult things.

If a third party comes in, they’re going to need to be authorized and resourced to do what we call a situation assessment. They’re going to need to have a lot of one-on-one conversations with the involved parties to understand, what really are your core interests? What are your needs? Who are you beholden to? What are your mandates? Where do we have wiggle room? What really is the problem here?

I’ve been super surprised before. The things that seem the most intractable, actually, just having those conversations reveals a promising pathway that makes it pretty fast, pretty efficient and pretty easy.

This article is published through the Colorado River Collaborative, a solutions journalism initiative supported by the Janet Quinney Lawson Institute for Land, Water, and Air at Utah State University. See all of our stories about how Utahns are impacted by the Colorado River at greatsaltlakenews.org/coloradoriver.