Dr. Scott McCreary is the President and Managing Principal at CONCUR Inc, serving as senior facilitator and mediator. He specializes in multiparty deliberations involving water supply and quality, marine resources, land use, species protection, air quality, climate adaptation, renewable energy and other complex natural resource issues. One aspect of Scott’s practice focuses on finding effective ways to bring research and analysis into the environmental decision making process—a specialty developed in master’s work at UC Berkeley’s Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning and doctoral work at MIT and the Harvard Program on Negotiation. As a mediator, he pays close attention to process design, with the aim of producing a concrete, implementable solution at the conclusion of each project engagement. He has strong dual experience in natural science and public policy and in the full range of facilitation and mediation techniques. He also has an ongoing interest in evaluation and critical reflection on professional practice to improve the theory and practical application of Joint Fact-Finding (JFF) techniques in public policy making.
A second major focus of Scott’s practice is on bridging institutional and cultural differences in the context of public policy mediation. Important recent engagements involve working with NSF-funded consortia of research universities and other educational institutions in South and North Dakota to strengthen research in those states with a special focus on improving research competitiveness and increasing research and education opportunities for Tribal Colleges. Scott has also worked widely in complex cross-cultural settings in Hawaii, Korea, Ecuador and Trinidad, New Zealand, Israel, and Southern Africa (Angola, Namibia, and Botswana).
Building on 32 years of work as an environmental planner and 25 years of experience as a facilitator and mediator, Scott has facilitated deliberations among diverse agencies, businesses, community groups, and conservation organizations. Scott has lead over 100 projects for CONCUR, ranging from site-specific cases to federal regulations to broad policy initiatives that span multiple states and international transboundary regions. His project experience has focused on building consensus agreement on a broad range of policies, projects, and regulations. These projects include over a dozen complex JFF processes as part of his core professional practice in facilitation and mediation and another 10 to 20 projects that include a strong JFF component. The issue focus has ranged from technical feasibility of subsurface intakes for a desalination facility to air quality improvement for the Port of Oakland; from San Francisco Bay-Delta ecosystem restoration to logging impacts on water quality; and from adaptive management of the Guadalupe River flood control project to avoiding bycatch of ESA-listed species in commercial fishing. Please see CV for more specific project work.