Staff Members

John Folk-Williams

John Folk-Williams has designed and implemented innovative mediation and public policy consensus-building strategies in the environmental and natural resources fields since 1982. Currently, he is facilitating groundwater management, habitat conservation and flood management planning projects in the greater Sacramento region. As a managing senior mediator at the Center, he has oversight of a range of projects relating to flood control, habitat protection and development of innovative collaborative governance services. In the past, he has successfully facilitated and managed many complex multi-party cases in water resources management, national forest land management, Native American rights, water quality, air quality, environmental justice and urban revitalization. In particular, he facilitated a ten-year series of consensus-based processes on regional water management concerning the Edwards Aquifer of south-central Texas. He was the founder and co-manager of Western Network, one of the pioneering organizations devoted to natural resource dispute resolution and policy dialogue in the western states. Internationally, he has developed training programs for mediation and public involvement in the Russian Federation and carried out assessments for the use of collaborative processes relating to institutional reform of the domestic water sectors in Egypt and Jordan. He has published many studies on the use of negotiation processes in water resource disputes, Native American water rights and river basin decision-making. These studies include the three-volume survey of over 150 water-related disputes, Water in the West. A past Co-Chair of the Environmental and Public Policy Section of the Association for Conflict Resolution (formerly SPIDR) he earned his B.A., summa cum laude, at Harvard College in 1966 and completed graduate studies there in 1968.