“Provent” is included in the dictionaries to mean “provant”, or food, and is a term no longer in use. “Pro” has the connotation, moving ahead of, as in progress. Provent is reinvented for our purposes as a means of distinguishing decision making processes aimed at merely preventing problems by coercive means, such as police in the streets, from those that seek to eliminate the causes of conflict by looking ahead and dealing with their sources. In this article it is argued that there is a logical extension of conflict resolution processes to proventive decision making at all social levels, including the political.
