Meet the Instructors:
Lead Instructor: Scott McCreary, Ph.D.
Scott McCreary, Ph.D., is President of CONCUR Inc., based in Berkeley California with professional practice throughout the US and internationally. He serves as Senior Facilitator specializing in multiparty deliberations involving marine resources, water supply, land use, species protection and other complex natural resource management conflicts.
After earning his Master's degree in Environmental Planning at UC Berkeley and working for coastal planning organizations in DC and California, Scott earned his PhD at MIT, working with the founders of the field of public dispute resolution. He returned to California to launch CONCUR and has been designing and facilitating environmental policy processes that incorporate rigorous research and analysis ever since. In his 32 years of practice, he has facilitated multi-stakeholder policy deliberations among diverse state and federal agencies, businesses, community groups, and conservation organizations. He has taught graduate courses at UC Berkeley and Vermont Law School.
His current projects and interests include water supply, flood protection, watershed management, coastal and marine spatial planning, and climate change adaptation. He regularly teams with colleagues from private consulting firms and universities working in these fields.
Co-Instructor: Meredith Cowart
Meredith Cowart is an Associate Facilitator at CONCUR Inc. She supports all aspects of CONCUR’s negotiated processes, including facilitation, process design, project management and development of meeting summaries. She has also developed and co-lead more than a half dozen of CONCUR’s negotiation, facilitation and partnership building training courses over the past four years. She enjoys designing simulations and other course material for these trainings. Meredith has also co-authored (with Scott McCreary) articles and presentations which reflect on best practices in the field of environmental negotiation.
Her project work has included conducting a stakeholder assessment for ocean planning in American Samoa, providing facilitation and project support for desalination permitting in Southern California, providing facilitation and project support for the strategic planning around National Science Foundation funding in South Dakota and providing project support for flood risk management assessment in the San Francisco Bay Delta.
Meredith graduated with a Masters in Forestry from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies in 2011. During her time there, she concentrated on soil science and climate change. She holds a BA in Government from Wesleyan University.
Special Guest Speaker: Mike Kavanaugh
This fall Dr. Mike Kavanaugh will join our course. Dr. Kavanaugh is a Senior Principal with Geosyntec Consultants, Inc, located in Oakland, CA. He is a chemical and environmental engineer with more than 40 years of professional experience, a consulting professor in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at Stanford University, a Fellow of the Water Environment Federation and an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering.
He has a particular interest in reflecting on the linkage between his engineering training and the practice of environmental negotiation. Dr. Kavanaugh brings his perspective as a neutral technical expert on mediation and arbitration panels as well as serving as an individual facilitator, mediator, arbitrator, and court-appointed independent expert.
In his guest presentation, Dr. Kavanaugh will use first hand case studies to examine the role of technical experts in alternative dispute resolution framework of environmental disputes, the professional norms in both engineering and dispute resolution, the skills needed to navigate through competing ethical values in trade-off debates and strategies to increase the likelihood of a successful outcome.
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