  Conflict transformation and management are complex decision processes with
extremely high stakes at hand and could greatly benefit from formal approaches
to decision support. For this purpose we develop a general framework about how
to use problem structuring methods for such purposes. More precisely we show
how to transform cognitive maps to value trees in order to promote a more
design-oriented approach to decision support aiming at constructing innovative
solutions for conflict management purposes. We show that our findings have a
much wider validity since they allow to move from a descriptive representation
of a problem situation to a more prescriptive one using formal procedures and
models.
