Until recently Michele Ferenz was Senior Associate at the Consensus Building Institute, a not-for-profit organization that provides mediation and dispute system design services to public and private clients worldwide, where she works as a mediator, facilitator trainer and dispute systems designer and carried program management responsibility for several ongoing negotiation and mediation projects.

One key area of her activity is the development and implementation of consensus processes in Israel and the Palestinian Territories. She served on the management team of the Joint Environmental Mediation Service (JEMS), a Jerusalem-based center for training and intervention in environmental disputes in Israeli and Palestinian communities. She has written on civil society and institutional aspects of environmental management in the Middle East, and conducted negotiation trainings for Israeli and Palestinian national-level policy-makers.

A second area of specialization is in issues related to international governance. Ms. Ferenz authored a comprehensive evaluation report of the multistakeholder process instituted by the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development (UNCSD). She also served as the project manager of the Global Forum on Trade, Environment and Development (GFTED), an ongoing global facilitated multistakeholder dialogue on themes derived from the WTO’s Doha Development Round.

Previously, Ms. Ferenz was a contributor and editor of the case studies section of the Consensus Building Handbook (SAGE 1999), a comprehensive reference guide on consensus building. Prior to graduate school and the Consensus Building Institute, she worked in Rome, Italy as she worked as an assistant producer, researcher and reporter for CBS News, The New York Times, and The International Herald Tribune.

Michele Ferenz graduated magna cum laude from Brown University with a B.A. in Political Science and holds a Masters in Environmental Policy from Harvard. Currently, Ms. Ferenz is completing her doctoral studies at MIT in economic development and natural resource management, with a focus on civil society participation in global governance of key sustainable development issues.

Recent publications include:

Matz, D. and Ferenz, M. (2005), “Consensus Building Processes in Society and Genetically Modified Organisms: The Concept and Practice of Multistakeholder Processes,” Chapter 2 in Omamo, S.W., and von Grebmer, K. (Eds.), Biotechnology, Agriculture and Food Security in Southern Africa. Washington, D.C.: IFPRI Publications, pp. 37-70.

Ferenz, M. (2004) Book Review on Banuri, T. and Najam, A. (Eds.), Civic Entrepreneurship: A Civil Society Perspective on Sustainable Development, Vol.1 – A Global Synthesis. In Ecological Economics Vol. 48: 143-147.

Susskind, L. E., Fuller B.W., Ferenz, M. and Fairman, D. (2003). “Multistakeholder Dialogues at the Global Scale.” International Negotiation 8: 45-76.

Ferenz, M. (2002). Multistakeholder Dialogues: Learning from the UNCSD Experience, United Nations Department Of Economic and Social Affairs, Preparatory Committee III (for WSSD), Background Paper No. 4.

Ferenz, M. and Susskind, L. (2001), “Negotiating with Nature: The Next Round,” UNESCO Courier (October), 37-38.

Susskind, L. and Ferenz, M. (2001). “Good Offices” in a War-Weary World: A Review of the Practice and
Promise of Track One and a Half Diplomacy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Law School, Program on Negotiation.
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