Trust, Conflict Resolution and Sustainability: A Common Thread
By: Fiona Wright – CTFutures, Principal Strategist & Design Lead
How could an overarching framework for global sustainability constraints support regional conflict resolution work? How might it help identify common needs, threats, and goals that could support groups in deep conflict find common ground? As Artemis II sends back new images of our one single planet amidst what feels like constantly escalating social conflict, I am prompted to reflect on this.
These are questions I had the opportunity to explore in 2007 as part of my work towards earning my Masters in Strategic Leadership toward Sustainability. I collaborated with Michal Bitterman (from Israel) and Viviana Lopez (from Colombia); both women from areas with high levels of intercultural conflict, where relationship building is often undone as fast as it takes place, and where there is very real ecological degradation taking place, largely fuelled by war and social instability. Together we worked to unpack the links between trust, conflict resolution, and sustainable development through our thesis research process.
When we were researching strategic sustainable development and its relation to conflict resolution, one finding stood out clearly in the expert feedback we gathered: the biggest barriers to resolution weren’t a shortage of proposed solutions. They were political agendas, mistrust between actors, and a lack of shared language. Parties in conflict often couldn’t agree on what a “good outcome” even looked like.
Backcasting works because it disarms the present.
One of our central propositions was that backcasting; envisioning a successful future and asking “what did we need to do today to get there?”, is a particularly powerful tool in situations where the present is too politically charged to agree on. When parties in conflict are mired in grievances about current conditions, inviting them to imagine a shared future can sometimes break the impasse.
Our thesis argued that sustainability could serve as what researchers call a “superordinate goal”, a goal so compelling to everyone in the room that it creates the conditions for cooperation even between adversaries. The idea is that unsustainability is, ultimately, everyone’s problem. No single actor caused it, and no single actor can solve it.
When the challenge is genuinely systemic, like finding peace in conflict areas, spanning multiple sectors, geographies, or governance levels, the design of the process matters as much as the quality of the analysis. Who’s in the room? Whose knowledge is treated as legitimate? How is the conversation structured so that people aren’t just defending their current position but genuinely exploring new possibilities together?
Sensemaking before strategy.
One of the quieter lessons from the thesis research was the importance of what the conflict resolution field calls “conflict mapping”, which is taking time to understand the system before proposing interventions. Who are the relevant actors? What are the underlying drivers? What narratives are shaping how people understand the situation? Without that grounding, even well-intentioned interventions can miss the mark or inadvertently entrench the very dynamics they’re trying to shift.
“if you don’t know where you are going, any road will do”
The Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development (FSSD) takes a constraints-based approach to understanding the minimum specs for ecological and social sustainability: it is much simpler to know what NOT to do, than what TO do. Knowing the rules releases our nervous systems from the stress of worrying so much about unintended negative consequences, and sparks our creativity for what we can do within the canvas of our resources.
The FSSD offers exactly what conflict resolution processes often lack: a shared systems perspective, a principled definition of success, and a backcasting methodology that lets diverse actors work backward from a common vision rather than arguing forward from incompatible starting points.
The thread that holds.
I’m sometimes asked what a thesis about conflict resolution has to do with sustainability consulting and multi-actor stakeholder engagement.
The honest answer is: everything.
In an era of information overload, the bottleneck is rarely data. It’s interpretation, and in this case, the capacity to make meaning from messy, contradictory signals in ways that can guide action. That’s a skill set that transfers across domains, and one that CTFutures brings to every engagement.
The challenges CTFutures works on such as how to integrate ESG meaningfully into company operations, how to build multi-sector coalitions around key areas of economic importance to Canada, how to support organizations in making sense of complexity and acting strategically within it, are not fundamentally different from the challenge my thesis addressed. They are all, at their core, about how human systems can navigate toward a more just and sustainable future when no single actor has the authority, the information, or the resources to do it alone.
The FSSD is still the most rigorous and useful framework I’ve encountered for that work. And the conviction that collaborative process design is not a soft add-on but a core competency for systems change, and that’s something I’ve carried for the last 20 years.
Some bridges, it turns out, are built to last.
Fiona Wright is the Principal Strategist & Design Lead at CTFutures, a subsidiary of Lansdowne Consulting. CTFutures works with organizations across private, public, and non-market sectors to make sense of the sustainability challenge and make progress on complex problems that require collaboration. CTFutures’ services include Sustainability Assessments, Multi-Actor Solutions Labs, Sensemaking Inquiries, and Team Jump Start.
Learn more at ctfutures.ca.
For further, in-depth reading on this subject:
The peer-reviewed research paper was published in the Journal of Industrial Ecology in 2009.
The original thesis, A Bridge To Peace: Strategic Sustainable Development as an Approach to Conflict Resolution was published in 2007.
