ABSTRACT
Chapter 14 explores an oddity of everyday politics that can easily pass unnoticed when doing participatory stakeholder analysis, a behaviour that poses as a riddle in much of Western social philosophy: the fact that people may take stands that go against their own interests. To address this issue, the authors present two complementary tools. Lessons and Values helps people better manage a problem by becoming aware of the moral values they hold and applying the lessons learned from other successful actions that are consistent with those values. Apart from being practical, the tool has theoretical underpinnings of its own. The basic inspiration is a mix of pragmatism, positive psychology, Kantian ethics and Gandhian philosophy. Values, Interests, Positions (VIP) is slightly different in that it invites participants to reflect on their actions in relation to both the interests and the values they hold in a given situation. The tool comes with a detailed story of local conflict over the control of timber in the Chiquitania region of Bolivia. Contrary to the Harvard model of interest-based negotiation, it assumes that cognitive-instrumental reasoning and moral-practical communication are both part of how people solve problems in their daily lives.
