Fostering negotiation skills in land and forest agreements

Editor's note: The authors have made slides available here.

In the early 2000s, rising global demand for food, biofuels, and carbon storage sharply increased pressure on land. As early as 2003, the FAO estimated that 120 million hectares – roughly twice the size of France – would be needed for food production alone, with demand further amplified by expected subsidies for biofuels and climate mitigation. This demand has been concentrated in developing countries, particularly in Africa and Latin America, which became major targets for large-scale land and resource investments. Liberia, for example, ranks among the top 20 destination countries for such investments (Nolte et al. 2016).

In principle, external investment in land and timber offers substantial opportunities: higher productivity, integration into markets, formal employment, and increased public revenues. In practice, however, outcomes have often fallen far short of these promises. A World Bank report cautions that “instead of generating sustainable benefits, [many land investments] contributed to asset loss and left local people worse off than they would have been without the investment” (Deininger and Byerlee 2011). Similar concerns arise in small-scale logging. In Liberia, negotiations between rural communities and informal logging operators frequently generate conflict, and a majority of community members surveyed view it unfavourably, questioning whether royalty payments compensate for deforestation and social costs (USAID 2017). An explanation for these outcomes is weak bargaining capacity at the community level: as the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food argues, “strengthening negotiation capacity is vital. Local communities must also be empowered” (Laishley 2009).

The problem in Liberia, and in many similar contexts, is that these negotiations occur but leave these communities worse off. For example, agribusiness and timber deals are routinely struck, yet some of these agreements leave communities worse off than if no deal had been reached. Evidence from negotiation simulations designed to mirror the choices faced by rural Liberian leaders illustrates why. Among leaders who did not receive any training in negotiation, nearly half of participants (47%) never reached a deal that exceeded their outside option, and more than one-quarter (27%) agreed to deals that, on average, paid them less than what they would have received by walking away.

These outcomes do not reflect bargaining deadlock or strategic holdout: participants almost never rejected or delayed agreements that clearly dominated their outside option. Instead, the pattern points to common negotiation mistakes among untrained negotiators. Leaders often approach negotiations as a win–lose contest, focusing narrowly on price, and they prioritise reaching an agreement over evaluating whether any agreement is preferable to no agreement at all.

Negotiation training to reduce forest exploitation

In recent work (Christensen, Hartman, Samii, and Toppeta 2025), we evaluate whether negotiation training can improve outcomes for rural communities in Liberia. We implemented a 12-hour training in interest-based negotiation with leaders from 120 communities negotiating over land and forest resource deals. The curriculum emphasised three core skills: (i) focusing on underlying interests to uncover positive-sum (‘win–win’) agreements, (ii) preparing effectively by assessing one’s best alternative to a negotiated agreement (BATNA), and (iii) maintaining constructive relationships with negotiating counterparts (Fisher and Ury 1981). Interest-based negotiation trainings have been shown to be successful in improving conflict resolution (Blattman et al. 2014, Hartman et al. 2021) and educational outcomes (Ashraf et al. 2020).

If successful, this approach helps trainees avoid the two mistakes that characterised negotiations. First, by shifting attention away from adversarial, zero-sum bargaining over a single dimension (typically price), interest-based negotiation equips negotiators to pursue agreements that better advance both parties’ interests. Second, by foregrounding the counterfactual – the outcome if no deal is reached – negotiators avoid cognitive biases that lead them to accept deals that are worse than walking away.

Negotiation training improves agreements around land and forest

Six months after the training, we find evidence that participants retained and applied the negotiation skills they learned. In follow-up surveys and lab-in-the-field negotiation simulations, trained leaders show substantial improvements in both knowledge and behaviour. Trainees are 20% more likely to correctly define interest-based negotiation and recognise that negotiations can generate win–win outcomes.

These gains translate into materially better negotiation outcomes. In three incentivised simulations modelled on land and logging deals, trained leaders are 27% more likely to reach a beneficial agreement, and the total surplus generated increases by $2.74, a 42% improvement relative to the control group. 

Importantly, these behavioural changes extend beyond the laboratory. In treatment communities, we observe greater engagement in forest management and reductions in external forest use, such as logging, without a decline in the benefits communities receive from natural resource investments. A back-of-the-envelope calculation implies that the training preserved roughly 600 trees in the six months following the intervention. Taken together, the results suggest that trained leaders demand more from outside investors, leading to fewer agreements overall, but ones that generate higher value for their communities.

Finding win–win agreements and walking away from bad deals

To understand why the training improves negotiation outcomes, we examine two potential mechanisms:

1. Interest-based negotiation may increase leaders’ capacity to identify a wider set of mutually beneficial agreements by encouraging them to look beyond price and consider multiple dimensions of a deal.
2. It may improve leaders’ appraisal of their outside option, reducing the risk that they accept agreements that are worse than walking away.

Which mechanism matters has important implications for the design of negotiation training programmes.

We combine evidence on what leaders say they know with evidence from how they negotiate in practice. We find that the training primarily works by expanding leaders’ capacity to identify higher-value agreements. While the training increased knowledge related to both mechanisms, only improvements in identifying possible deals explain the gains in negotiation outcomes. By contrast, although trainees learned how to think about their alternatives to reaching an agreement, they did not systematically apply this knowledge when deciding whether to accept a deal. 

Evidence from how leaders negotiate in practice points in the same direction: the intervention increased leaders’ ability to generate better deals, but did not improve their assessment of outside options. Together, these results suggest that the training improves leaders’ capacity to identify higher-value agreements, without altering how they evaluate their outside options. 

Policy implications

This study shows that negotiation training can meaningfully improve outcomes for rural communities facing high-stakes land and resource negotiations. The positive effects we document are primarily driven by an increased capacity to identify beneficial, positive-sum agreements, rather than by improvements in how leaders evaluate whether to accept a deal at all. While trainees become better at finding higher-value agreements, we do not find evidence that the training improves their appraisal of outside options. 

These findings have two important implications for policy. First, they demonstrate that an interest-based negotiation training can be effective even in settings with limited institutional capacity. Second, the results also highlight a clear direction for improvement. Future negotiation training should place greater emphasis on recognising when no agreement is preferable to a bad one, reinforcing that while win–win agreements are possible, not all deals are worth making. Doing so may help communities not only secure better terms when they negotiate, but also avoid agreements that may undermine their long-run welfare.

References

Ashraf, N, N Bau, C Low, and K McGinn (2020), “Negotiating a better future: How interpersonal skills facilitate intergenerational investment,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 135(2): 1095–1151.

Blattman, C, A Hartman, and R A Blair (2014), “How to promote order and property rights under weak rule of law? An experiment in changing dispute resolution behavior through community education,” American Political Science Review, 108(1): 100–120.

Christensen, D, A Hartman, C Samii, and A Toppeta (2025), “Interest-based negotiation over natural resources: Experimental evidence from Liberia,” Journal of the European Economic Association, jvaf047.

Deininger, K, and D Byerlee (2011), "Rising global interest in farmland: Can it yield sustainable and equitable benefits?"

Fisher, R, and W Ury (1981), Getting to yes: Negotiating agreement without giving in, Houghton Mifflin.

Hartman, A, R A Blair, and C Blattman (2021), “Engineering informal institutions: Long-run impacts of alternative dispute resolution on violence and property rights in Liberia,” Journal of Politics, 83(1): 381–389.

Laishley, R (2009), “Is Africa’s land up for grabs?” United Nations.

Nolte, K, W Chamberlain, and M Giger (2016), International land deals for agriculture: Fresh insights from the land matrix, Bern Open Publishing.

USAID (2017), "Liberia: Domestic timber value chain analysis."