ABSTRACT
No one has done more than Larry Susskind to demonstrate the promise of mediation, facilitative leadership, and consensus building for governance and planning in the face of conflict. For more than 40 years Susskind has worked not only with local organizations to resolve housing, land-use, and transportation disputes, but with international organizations to address global environmental issues — more recently, for example, challenges of water diplomacy. In Arlington at that time people did not have an "outside professor" problem. The citizen involvement committee's main job was the environmental impact assessment, which had to be done under federal and state law for that project. The assessment rested on the choice of alternatives that the various people involved would consider. Bringing people into a process, giving people a feeling of participation, and then not empowering them to have any say was the problem with citizen participation; it did not really promise a person anything.
