The practice of providing urban parks as an integral part of community development no
longer creates public debate about the function or legal authority of local governments to make
such purchases. However, the debate continues on the ethics of local government's parkland
acquisition practices. These practices have the capability and motivation to influence the land
value of sites they wish to acquire. Local governments are responsible for determining land
use, which in turn affects land value. The limited financial means of local government to
acquire parks makes influencing land value one way of stretching the scarce resources of the
community.
The ethics practiced in the negotiations to acquire urban parkland where the land has
development potential are unique because:
1. Parkland is a public good and not a market commodity;
2. The potential for other higher land uses exists; and
3. Local government plays a dual role: one of a regulator and approving authority for
determining land use and providing community stewardship, and the other as the
corporate cost controlling agency seeking to acquire land.
These qualities create the strong possibility for ethical conflict to occur in the negotiating
process.
Building upon the Interest-Based approach to negotiations, this paper uses a set of
Prescriptive, Intuitive and Evaluative (P.I.E.) criteria that define ethical conduct, and the
dimensions of Fact, Social Consensus and Experience that defines the dimensions of interests,
to develop a General Model for Ethical Negotiations (GMEN). Conceptually, the GMEN
model is a three-sided pyramid within a sphere of negotiations. Negotiations that adhere to the
principles defining the parameters of the pyramid would be considered ethical. Negotiations
outside the pyramid are considered unethical.
Six parkland acquisition cases are discussed using the GMEN model. In this study, the
parameters establishing the criteria for passing ethical judgment are the functions of the
political economy, the policy statements of the local government, and the legislation that
delegates power and authority to local government.
The study finds that ethical conflict is inherent in parkland negotiations where the land
has development potential because of the multiple roles and dual character of local government.
This conflict is not necessarily illegal since prescriptive criteria are only one means of judging
ethics. Nor is the outcome necessarily negative to the vendor, since the public may end up with
a less attractive park agreement. However, the parameters that would require parkland
acquisition negotiations to be ethical sometimes conflict with some of the multiple roles held by
local government. Several recommendations are made that would help to reduce ethical
conflict and the imbalance in parkland negotiations.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/12219 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Schlesinger, Gerald |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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