David Fairman

David Fairman is Senior Mediator at the Consensus Building Institute and Associate Director of the MIT-Harvard Public Disputes Program. He designs and facilitates consensus building processes, coaches and trains leaders to enhance their negotiation and collaboration skills, and researches and teaches the application of negotiation and consensus building tools to challenging public issues.

For more than 30 years, David has helped stakeholders build agreement on policies and strategies in the domains of criminal justice, low-income housing, education and child welfare, national security, energy and environmental policy. He is currently working on integrating information among Michigan’s criminal justice agencies, decarbonizing the New England electric grid, engaging stakeholders in renewable energy siting in India, developing a global taskforce on inequality-related financial disclosures, and strengthening the contribution of global carbon markets to equitable development within and across countries, among other issues.

David is Senior Mediator on the rosters of the United States Environmental Protection Agency and the United States Institute for Environmental Conflict Resolution. He is a founding board member of the Alliance for Peacebuilding, founding Director of CBI’s Workable Peace program, Board member of the Sustainability Challenge Foundation, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from MIT and a B.A. from Harvard College.