From supporting Tribal co-management of Pacific Northwest salmon to unlocking a 20-year impasse over farmland protection, Michael Kern finds consensus where others find only conflict. He joins Yale this July as the inaugural Bataua Professor in the Practice of Collaborative Solutions.
A 20-year agricultural land stalemate. A nuclear waste site. A flooding crisis threatening people and salmon. In his work forging solutions to challenging environmental issues, Michael Kern understands a very important distinction: compromise is not collaboration. What is needed is collaboration.
An internationally recognized leader on consensus building and conflict resolution. Kern has built a career on bringing stakeholders — many seemingly entrenched in oppositional perspectives — to the table to reach agreements on major environmental initiatives that had been at a stalemate for years. He’s done this by focusing on interests rather than positions and asking. what does each party actually need, not what solutions have the parties already decided on.
“Compromise is, ‘I’ll give up this if you give up that,’ and we keep trading things until we get to this lowest common denominator solution. Collaboration is recognizing that there are an infinite number of ways to resolve a particular challenge,” Kern said. “If you know what you need and you know what they need, there’s no limit to the number of solutions. It’s not a zero-sum game.”
In a world that is telling us that so much is hopeless and that it’s all about partisanship and conflict — there are these opportunities to be more and do more and have the sum be more than the parts and be collaborative leaders.”
Kern is joining the faculty at the Yale School of the Environment July 1 as the inaugural Bataua Professor in the Practice of Collaborative Solutions. At YSE he will take the lead in establishing the Collaborative Solutions Program that will convene diverse stakeholders and engage Yale students and faculty in addressing complex environmental challenges through dialogue and collaborative action. He will teach courses and workshops in collaborative skills.
“In a world facing urgent, complex environmental challenges, the ability to bring together people with competing interests and forge collaborative solutions has never been more critical — and Michael Kern is one of the most accomplished practitioners of that work in the country. His experience in teaching and training students in universities to acquire these skills is unmatched. We are delighted to welcome him to YSE,” said Indy Burke, the Carl W. Knobloch, Jr. Dean of the Yale School of the Environment.
For more than a decade, Kern was the director of the William D. Ruckelshaus Center, a joint effort by Washington State University and the University of Washington, which provides an impartial resource for collaborative problem solving. He was director of special projects at UW’s Center for Urban Waters/Puget Sound Initiative and a Fulbright Named Project Specialist for Tel Hai College in Israel in peace and conflict resolution.
Kern came to the field through a side door. After earning a fine arts degree from the University of Washington, Seattle in 1989, he was looking for office work to supplement his income and applied for a staff assistant position at the Northwest Renewable Resources Center. What he found instead was a front-row seat to a generation of extraordinary leaders who were working on the cutting edge of new ways to resolve multi-layered disputes. He also found a new direction in his career.
The center’s board and advisory circles included Bill Ruckelshaus, the first and fifth administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency; Dan Evans, who served as senator and governor and created Washington's Department of Ecology; and Tribal leaders including Billy Frank Jr., a Native American environmental leader and advocate for treaty rights.
“I was surrounded by heroes,” Kern said. “These were incredibly smart people. They were talented people. They were brave.”
The bravery he witnessed didn’t necessarily fit traditional definitions. It wasn’t about confronting the opposition. It was about standing up to your own side. Kern pointed to Frank as one of his most influential role models.
“Ruckelshaus called him the Northwest Nelson Mandela. That sounds like you are overstating it, but you are not,” he said.
Frank led a grassroots campaign in the 1960s and 1970s to secure fishing rights on the Nisqually River and won a court ruling in U.S. v. Washington in 1974 that upheld the rights of 20 Indian Tribes to co-manage salmon resources they had reserved in treaties signed in the 1850s and Tribal rights to 50% of the harvestable salmon. However, the victory didn’t solve the problem, and salmon stocks were still endangered by many factors. Frank spent the second half of his career collaborating with the very interests he had battled for decades in court to secure the stock.
“Anybody can fight the good fight and come back to their people and say, ‘Well, I really told them.’ But then you haven’t moved the needle on anything. You have haven’t made anything better,” Kern noted.
The experience taught him that collaboration hinges on one important question: Do you want to be right or do you want to be effective?
At UW, Kern led workshops on open decision-making for the largest environmental restoration project in human history at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation where plutonium for Cold War-era nuclear weapons was produced.
While at the Ruckelshaus Center, Kern helped address a 20-year stalemate between counties, agricultural interests, environmental groups, and Tribes over how to protect environmentally critical areas on farmland — a fight that had cycled through courts, citizen initiatives, and failed legislation — by guiding a team that brokered a landmark agreement voluntarily adopted by 27 of Washington’s 39 counties.
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None of it, he is quick to note, happened because the parties suddenly decided to get along.
“All of these people were reaching beyond traditional boundaries and saying, ‘Let’s find a way where I hold true to my values and the needs of my people, but I also find out what your people need. And then we can find a solution,’” he said.
Universities are uniquely positioned to lead collaborative work, Kern emphasized. Unlike government agencies, which are perceived as stakeholders with their own interests, or private firms, which carry their own credibility challenges, universities can convene parties who would refuse to sit down with anyone else. They bring independent research, academic freedom, and perhaps most importantly, students, whose presence tends to make even the most combative participants behave better.
He draws hope from ongoing intergenerational dialogue that pairs seasoned environmental leaders with emerging ones.
“In a world that is telling us that so much is hopeless and that it’s all about partisanship and conflict — there are these opportunities to be more, do more, have the sum be more than the parts, and be collaborative leaders. And that doesn’t mean we’re not staunch advocates for outcomes. It actually means we’re going to get somewhere,” Kern said.
