It’s About Time: Understanding How Negotiators Manage Socio-Temporal Conflicts in Sustainability Negotiations

The transformation to sustainability is one of our society’s greatest challenges, requiring large-scale, coordinated, collaborative efforts among interdependent individuals, groups, organizations, and nations. Managing sustainability challenges involves navigating complex conflicts of interests, where social conflicts between different stakeholders’ interests are intertwined with temporal conflicts between the interests of the present and the future. Reconciling these socio-temporal conflicts requires collective decision-making through negotiation processes. In the context of sustainability, such negotiations often involve a wide range of stakeholders, including direct decision-makers at the table, represented interest groups behind the table, and external parties beyond the table who are not formally represented in negotiations. If successful, negotiations can facilitate mutually beneficial solutions that integrate the present and future interests of all stakeholders, thereby contributing to the transformation to sustainability. Although interwoven socio-temporal conflicts are prevalent in many real-world negotiation contexts, previous research has mostly studied social and temporal conflicts in isolation. This dissertation aims to investigate socio-temporal conflicts in sustainability negotiations, with the goal of understanding how negotiators manage the complex interplay of social and temporal interests among various stakeholders. Specifically, in a series of five theoretical and empirical research articles, we first theorize on the relevance of socio-temporal conflicts in sustainability contexts and analyze associated psychological challenges that influence negotiators’ mindsets (Article 1). Subsequently, three empirical lines of studies operationalize socio-temporal conflicts at the negotiation table (Articles 2 and 3) and behind the table (Article 4), investigating negotiators’ concrete trade-off behaviors and negotiation outcomes. Finally, we address socio-temporal negotiations involving external parties beyond the table (Article 5) and propose a process-oriented model of sustainability negotiations that provides a foundation for future empirical research on socio-temporal conflicts beyond the table and points directions for further study on sustainability negotiations. Overall, our empirical findings show that negotiators tend to handle socio-temporal conflicts in a biased and myopic manner. Specifically, their immediate social conflicts at the negotiation table take precedence over all other dimensions (i.e., the temporal dimension) and levels (i.e., conflicts involving stakeholders behind or beyond the table) of socio-temporal conflicts. As a result, negotiators systematically disregard or even exploit their own and others’ future interests, opting for short-term conflict settlements rather than pursuing superior long-term agreements. Insights from our theoretical articles contribute to a deeper understanding negotiators’ decision-making processes and offer starting points for altering these processes to foster more holistic sustainability agreements. I conclude by discussing the contributions and implications of this dissertation and proposing areas for future research.