Traveler There is No Path, the Path is Made by Negotiating: The Story of the Abraham Path, a Decade and a Half of Negotiations, and Lessons Learned

ABSTRACT

The Abraham Path Initiative (API) has substantially reduced its close-in support of path-building work on the ground. The paths in Palestine, Jordan, and Egypt are run, as they should be, by local partners. It was always part of the strategy to pull back once the Path was established and local communities were shepherding it. These trails have gained in popularity thanks to a newfound tourism industry centered around walking and hiking as well as to a great deal of publicity related to the Path. While in the early years. International travelers predominated in using the Path, many local hiking groups later emerged and were very active along different parts of the Path prior to the Covid pandemic. What were the keys to progress toward that UTA? They can be summed up by seeing the Path through the prism of a very long-term negotiation campaign. Within that campaign, two steps were particularly essential--first, carefully thinking about negotiation sequencing at the outset and revisiting it frequently as the Path developed, and second, taking an iterative approach that harnessed people's learnings and forced them to constantly adapt to the situation that presented itself.