Thread by @Usherwood

Right, let's tackle this again, because BATNAs is tricky

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https://twitter.com/Sime0nStylites/status/1033969268310921216

For those of you who've managed to avoid BATNAs so far, a) congratulations and b) this is a key concept from negotiation theory

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In essence, it's the idea that you need to have an understanding of what you achieve should you be unable to negotiate an agreement, so that you can make sure you don't sell yourself short.

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It should emerge as part of your planning for negotiations, as you map out the terrain, discern your objectives, assign values to things and evaulate your options

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From that, three highly-relevant points emerge about BATNAs and where we are in Brexit.

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First

There's always a BATNA

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A negotiation is always optional (if it's not, then it's not a negotiation), so there's definitionally always a non-negotiation path

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Note, that this doesn't mean either the negotiation or the non-negotiation alternatives are good, just that there are outcomes that are relatively better or worst (hence the Best in BATNA can still be super-rubbish)

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So in @Sime0nStylites' thread, no-deal can be very poor, but it's still a BATNA, meaning the floor on what a deal can achieve can be set very low (because it'll be better than no-deal)

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(I'd even go further and argue that Brexit is a negative sum negotiation, so all outcomes are worse than the status quo ante, but that's another thing)

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Second

HMG's contingency notices aren't a true BATNA

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Here, we're focusing on the NA of BATNA: Negotiated Agreement.

As you read the notices, you'll see that they suggest the alternative to a WA will be the pursuit of negotiations with the EU on critical systems

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In theoretical terms (and probably political ones too), it doesn't make sense to argue the alternative to a negotiation is a negotiation

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The reason is simply that negotiations are about the interaction of two or more parties, so no one party controls what happens.

Thus your BATNA should be based solely on what you can control unilaterally

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Yes, HMG can ask for emergency negotiations post-no-deal, but it can't assure those will succeed, nor guarantee a timeframe (important if relying on stockpiles on the interim)

So for the notices to map out actions for a BATNA, they'd need to say what happens then

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Thirdly

The notices cannot form a BATNA by themselves, even if they did address the previous point

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A BATNA is grounded, as I noted above, in an evaluation of objectives and options, measured against some (ideally objective) benchmarks

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That's easy when you're negotiating the price of a house, because you have one major variable (cost) and readily-available benchmarks (price of equivalent properties in the location)

It's harder for political negotiations

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Brexit looks particularly hard, as it's a novel political action; there's no political consensus about objectives; and benchmarks are poorly-defined

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However, HMG did do some modelling of options with its impact assessments, although these were mostly sectoral and rather sketchy (as we saw when they finally had to be released)

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The issue, however, is as much that those assessments are not explicitly mapped onto the contingency notices (not publicly, at least), so the capacity to judge if the latter constitute the genuine BATNA is highly limited

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So, in sum:

There's always a BATNA (but it doesn't have to look good)
We're still not clear what the UK's BATNA looks like

/end