Danya Rumore, director of the Environmental Dispute Resolution Program at the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law, was selected for the 2018 Rob Williams Award for Emerging Environment and Public Policy Leaders from the Association for Conflict Resolution Environment and Public Policy Section.
Rumore received the award at a conference in Arlington,Virginia. The Rob Williams Award for Emerging Environment and Public Policy Leaders was established in 2010 in recognition of Rob Williams’ commitment and contributions to the field of environmental and public policy dispute resolution and the professional development of its practitioners. (Williams died in 2009). The award is designed to honor an emerging practitioner who demonstrates the promise to exercise outstanding leadership in the field of environmental conflict resolution.
Rumore holds a joint appointment as a research assistant professor at the College of Law and in the Department of City and Metropolitan Planning at the U’s College of Architecture and Planning. She teaches courses in negotiation and dispute resolution at the law school and is a research affiliate of the University’s Ecological Planning Center and Global Change and Sustainability Center.
Rumore was instrumental in helping to build the Environmental Dispute Resolution (EDR) Program at the College of Law, which is housed in the Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources and the Environment.
The program, established in February 2012, uses a multi-pronged approach to promote collaboration, mediation, and other alternative dispute resolution processes as a means to address contemporary environmental and natural resource conflicts in the Mountain West.
Rumore holds the role of director of the EDR program, following the retirement of program founder and law professor Michele Straube in August 2017.
The program has worked with and mentored multiple graduate students from the College of Law, the City and Metropolitan Planning Department, and the Environmental Humanities Program at the University of Utah. Each year, it hosts the Utah Program on Collaboration, a three-part effort aimed at cultivating and enhancing a culture of collaboration throughout Utah. The Program on Collaboration was kicked off in November 2015 with a full-day Forum on Collaboration that engaged high-level state and federal natural resource and environmental agency leaders in exploring opportunities and challenges for collaboration in Utah. The program also hosts semi-annual Dialogues on Collaboration in partnership with The Langdon Group and other partners, including two in the 2016-17 year: one on “Working with Tribes: What Can Collaboration Bring to the Table?” and one on “Fostering Productive Dialogue in Divided Times.” The third part of the program, the Short Course on Effective Natural Resources Collaboration, is an annual professional training program teaching the art and science of collaborative problem solving.
“We are proud of the recognition Professor Rumore received in Washington D.C. as a result of her leadership, initiative and work toward improving collaborative efforts between community stakeholders involved in public policy issues,” said Robert Keiter, Director of the Wallace Stegner Center at the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law. “The work of the EDR program is essential to carrying out part of the College of Law’s mission, which is to serve as a broader resource to the community on legal issues.”
The EDR program also facilitates the EDR Blog, posting bi-weekly blogs featuring a diversity of guest authors and topics related to environmental dispute resolution and collaboration.
Rumore has provided facilitation for several ongoing efforts, including collaborative regional planning efforts around Zion National Park, Utah, and in Bonner County, Idaho. She serves on the steering committee for the national University Network on Collaborative Governance and the University of Utah’s Global Change and Sustainability Center.