Negotiating the Law of the Sea: (Harvard Economic Studies)

The Law of the Sea (LOS) treaty resulted from some of the most complicated multilateral negotiations ever conducted. Difficult bargaining produced a remarkably sophisticated agreement on the financial aspects of deep ocean mining and on the financing of a new international mining entity. This book analyzes those negotiations along with the abrupt U.S. rejection of their results. Building from this episode, it derives important and subtle general rules and propositions for reaching superior, sustainable agreements in complex bargaining situations. James Sebenius shows how agreements were possible among the parties because and not in spite of differences in their values, expectations, and attitudes toward time and risk. He shows how linking separately intractable issues can generate a zone of possible agreement. He analyzes the extensive role of a computer model in the LOS talks. Finally, he argues that in many negotiations neither the issues nor the parties are fixed and develops analytic techniques that predict how the addition or deletion of either issues or parties may affect the process of reaching agreement.

Table of Contents:
Introduction PART ONE: AGREEMENT IN THE SMALL, DISAGREEMENT IN THE LARGE: FINANCIAL ARRANGEMENTS AND THE LAW OF THE SEA CONFERENCE I. Background: Of Nodules, Navies, and Negotiation 1. Setting the Stage 2. Whence the Law of the Sea Conference? 3. Conference Organization and Procedures 4. Financial Arrangements in the Seabed Regime of the LOS Treaty 5. Summary II: Course of the Financial Negotiations 6. Themes in the Chronology 7. The 1977 New York Session 8. The 1978 Geneva Session 9. The 1978 New York Session 10. The 1979 Geneva Session 11. The 1979 New York Session and Beyond 12. Appendix 1: The Detailed Financial Arrangements Proposals 13. Appendix 2: Description of the MIT Model III: Elements of Agreement 14. Diverse Factors in Agreement 15. Use of an Outside Model 16. Agreement as the Result of Differences 17. Combining Issues 18. Summary IV: Disagreement in the Large: Explanation and Evaluation 19. A Framework for Negotiation Analysis 20. Evolution of the U.S. Negotiating Strategy 21. The Shape of the Final LOS Treaty 22. The Central Trade: Navigation and Nodules 23. What Happened? Explaining the Reagan Decision 24. Evaluating the Decision to Reject the Treaty 25. Summary and Conclusions PART TWO: AGREEMENT IN NEGOTIATION: GENERAL PROPOSTITONS V: Differences and Joint Gains 26. Beyond Common Ground for Negotiation 27. Elements of a Differences Orientation 28. More Formal Difference Analysis VI: Negotiation Arithmetic: Adding and Subtracting Issues and Parties 29. A Common Point of Departure 30. Adding and Subtracting Issues 31. Adding and Subtracting Parties 32. Summary and Conclusions Notes Bibliography Index

About the Author :
James K. Sebenius is Assistant Professor of Public Policy, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.

Review :
Contains new insights about U.S. policy toward the Law of the Sea. The author’s careful generalizations from the LOS case should be of great value to scholars and policymakers makers interested in negotiating international regimes. Many books carefully chronicle important real negotiations; others analyze elegant abstractions of the bargaining process. Negotiating the Law of the Sea ingeniously fuses both traditions, combining analytic rigor with Sebenius’s first-hand experience at these mammoth talks. The resulting study makes brilliant contributions to the art and science of negotiation with lessons for the lay person and specialist alike.