Abstract

This chapter explores the challenges of facilitators' roles in collaborative processes and the ways in which researchers can learn from such facilitators' experiences. By examining a rich practice story detailing a facilitator's collaborative work, the chapter focuses upon facilitators' professional expertise, their concerns about inefficiency, and the complexities of convening, guiding, and intervening. Forester also highlights the challenges for researchers to define and explain collaborative approaches, which often do not fit traditional labels of facilitation, collaboration, or dispute resolution. He challenges researchers to do a better job of exploring grounded accounts of collaborative work by practitioners to help readers better understand the complexities of collaborative efforts. Forester argues that researchers and practitioners alike must think carefully about the challenges of building relationships, framing contentious issues, responding to participants' demands, and understanding the processes of dialogue, debate, and negotiation—along with the corresponding intervening roles that each of these three processes require.