Call it application of the law of unintended consequences. This time, though, the results were positive.

Like most instances where good intentions produce unintended consequences, Eric Peterson began with the goal of helping ranchers develop a way to be better stewards of the public lands they graze in Western Wyoming. In the process, he also developed a program that would lead to a much better relationship between the ranchers and the federal agency rangeland managers they work with.

Peterson, a natural resource education specialist in Pinedale with the Wyoming Cooperative Extension Service, began work in the mid-'90s on the Cooperative Permittee Monitoring Program after public lands ranchers in the area wanted to develop a monitoring program on their Forest Service grazing permits.

“The guidelines for that program recognized the importance of establishing a pretty good partnership between the agency range specialist and the permittee,” Peterson says, “a partnership within which they would set out objectives for that rangeland that they both could support and also agree on the methodologies they would employ in gathering data on that rangeland.”

That means taking a relationship that has lots of potential for antagonism and turning it into a positive for both sides. While the idea of sitting down in a spirit of mutual cooperation may have at first seemed as odd to the ranchers as it did to the Forest Service personnel, that's what they did. And what started as simply a desire by those public lands ranchers to be better stewards of the resource turned into something much larger — an approach to a positive relationship between people who too often have looked at each other as adversaries.

Public lands partners

Public lands ranchers and public lands agencies, whether they like it or not, are partners in managing the land, Peterson says. And as both the ranchers and the agency employees in Western Wyoming discovered, that partnership can be a positive relationship.

“The two large grazing associations we first started with are ardent supporters of the program and so are the range specialists and the district forest ranger,” Peterson says. “We've got Bureau of Land Management range specialists on board and actively seeking to put together more of these programs. They've seen the value of being able to get together in a friendly fashion and have a true dialog about how to achieve the things everybody wants.”

But getting to that point first requires that everyone involved agrees to at least try to agree. “There can be all kinds of relationships,” Peterson says. “Some of them are good and some are bad. In order to make it work, you need to forge a relationship that's healthy. So if you're interested in having a win-win situation where everybody's happy with their involvement in the program, it's important that you identify what your interests are and share them with your partner and they do the same.”

Once those interests are identified and heard, both parties can begin to forge the elements of a relationship and the elements of a program that bring them together in a common venue.

How it works

Getting to win-win is the difference between interest-based negotiation and position-based negotiation, Peterson says. Interest-based negotiation begins when you share with others what your interests are, understand what their interests are, and begin to look for solutions that move you toward an objective everyone can identify as a uniting factor.

“Contrast that with positional negotiation where you would basically predetermine in your mind what needs to happen, then fight for that. That puts you in a confrontational situation."

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