The Hidden Benefits of Facilitated Dialogue

Abstract

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Chinese

Studies of alternative dispute resolution demonstrate how interest-based tradeoffs contribute to joint gains, yet facilitators do more than just broker deals between adversaries. This paper explores how facilitation supported the development of a regional wastewater plan on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Coded video records unearth the judgments stakeholders and facilitators made as they accounted for spatial scale mismatches between towns and watersheds. The findings demonstrate how facilitators supported the conceptual work of nonexpert stakeholders highlighting several tactics they used to support cross-scale reasoning. The findings allude to a new set of conversational techniques for planners and facilitators in practice.

Keywords

alternative dispute resolution environmental planning facilitation participatory planning spatial reasoning water wastewater planning and management

Introduction

There are many variants of collaborative planning, and each offers guidance for dealing with conflict and disagreement between divergent visions of the public good (Sager 2013). Communicative planning theorists argue that dialogue should be in the foreground of collaborative planning efforts (Forester 2013; Innes and Booher 2010) and planners in this tradition are not just technical experts; they design participatory processes (Bryson et al. 2013) and facilitate dialogue (Forester 2009, 2013; Quick and Sandfort 2014) to help local stakeholders compose plans and agree to workable solutions for the problems they may face.

Collaborative planning scholars have turned to alternative dispute resolution (ADR) for practical lessons to help practitioners facilitate interest-based tradeoffs, identify mutual gains, and promote collective action via dialogue and debate (Fisher and Ury 1981; Shmueli, Kaufman, and Ozawa 2008). The ADR literature focuses on the relationship between an individual’s fixed positions and their underlying interests (Susskind and Cruikshank 1987), and conflicting stakeholders begin to make compromises when they learn that their interests align with their adversaries’.

However, solutions to environmental problems that transcend jurisdictional boundaries—water quality, for instance—are also incumbent upon how well plans account for cross-scale relationships (Ostrom 2005; Walker et al. 2006). Collective action at one scale may work against the natural dynamics at a different scale (Cash et al. 2006), and therefore, dispute resolution may inadvertently foster agreements among local adversaries that exacerbate regional threats and vice versa (Johnson et al. 2012). To avoid calamity, an expanded reading of the ADR literature instructs planners and facilitators to find creative ways to reframe the discussion to encourage stakeholder groups to consider outcomes at different scales and thus subtly encourage more technically sophisticated agreements (Gray 2004; van Lieshout et al. 2011; Milz et al. 2017). However, frame analysis focuses primarily on the frames themselves while ignoring the underlying judgments with which they are composed and introduced into conversations.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a closer examination of those judgments, and it argues that the shift to robust collective action depends in part on how planners and facilitators support cross-scale, spatial judgments. The analysis, described here, focuses on the work of facilitators that is one level below framing to inspect the judgments and cognitive strategies and not the frames per se. It uses a regional wastewater planning process on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, to illustrate how facilitators can help local stakeholders address cross-scale environmental issues.

Water quality improvements have eluded the residents of the Cape for decades, and in response, the Cape Cod Commission initiated an update to their area-wide wastewater management plan, under §208 of the United States Clean Water Act. A team of professional facilitators was tasked with helping stakeholders shift away from their independent positions, which had historically failed to produce meaningful change. The Commission adopted a watershed-based approach using their forty-seven embayment watersheds to organize participatory planning workshops. Watersheds represented a rhetorical and spatial framing meant to encourage participants to consider their shared stake in the process regardless of their jurisdictional affiliation. Working within this shared conceptual space, stakeholders on the Cape adopted a cognitive strategy for spatial reasoning they referred to as “twenty-thousand feet thinking,” which they relied on throughout the process (Milz 2015). Twenty-thousand feet thinking included cross-scale shifts where participants jumped from one scale and/or level to another as they explored a problem. It also included cross-scale integration where participants made judgments and comparisons between scales and levels simultaneously.

Thus, facilitators had three options for supporting the spatial judgements of stakeholders. They could use the same two tactics as the participants, or they could use neither, excluding spatial references altogether. It was expected that facilitators would use expertly timed facilitation moves to pivot stakeholders back to watersheds—the first tactic—when they drifted back to making judgments about familiar geographic relationships. In other words, the facilitators were expected to reframe dialogue to consider watersheds instead of towns. Furthermore, it was expected that these reminders would be constant and explicit. As participants fixated on towns, facilitators would continuously redirect stakeholders to think in terms of shared watersheds.

Findings showed that the broad purpose of shifting from judgments about towns to judgments about watersheds was always a factor, yet how facilitators supported that shift was not as straightforward as controlling the narrative via well-timed scalar shifts or reframing. In some instances, the facilitators relied on the same spatial reasoning tactics as the participants. However, facilitators also abstained from using those tactics to reinforce or remind stakeholders to think about watersheds and not towns without explicitly invoking the concepts themselves. These trends were apparent in all the groups and facilitators analyzed; however, space does not permit an exhaustive description of the more than one hundred hours of planning meetings recorded during the process. A selection of illustrative examples, therefore, is described in the following. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of these observations for planning practice and pedagogy.

Background

What Is Facilitation?

Facilitation is the act of managing the social relationships and dialogue at the heart of democratic deliberation. John Forester (2009, 2013) distinguishes between facilitation, moderation, and mediation. He does so by linking the modes of disagreement (dialogue, debates, and negotiations) to the work planners do to deal with differences. Forester’s framework implies a conflict gradient. With facilitation/dialogue, disagreement may be present, but conversations have not erupted into debate requiring moderation, nor have participants encountered severe impasses that would require mediated negotiations. Therefore, facilitators, as opposed to moderators or mediators, impact conversations indirectly, affording them greater latitude in the ways they can do it because there are typically fewer demands for impartiality.

What Does Facilitation Do?

The stated goal of most facilitators is the “management of conflict” through dialogue, and expert facilitators stress the importance of preparation for achieving this end (Quick and Sandfort 2014). Disagreements are healthy if leveraged creatively, so most of the work facilitators do occurs ahead of time and involves mapping the sources of conflict (Susskind and Thomas-Lamar 1999), developing an understanding of the different personalities involved, and crafting an agenda around carefully selected interactional settings (e.g., small group work, large group discussions; Kaner 2014). Their work at this point is about properly setting a stage, defining roles, identifying the players, and outlining the various acts. However, expert facilitation is not scripted.

During planning meetings, facilitators use conversational techniques to help stakeholders communicate effectively even in moments of intense disagreement (Fisher and Ury 1981; Quick and Sandfort 2014; Shmueli, Kaufman, and Ozawa 2008; Susskind and Cruikshank 1987). Facilitators make use of turns-of-phrase tactically to filter interactions between stakeholders and reorient conflict to constructive ends (e.g., “yes, and . . . ,” and “what I hear you saying is . . . ”) (Leonard and Yorton 2015). Facilitators often do so amid rapidly changing interactions, and their experience has given them an intuitive feel for conversations allowing them to reflexively respond to emerging conflict (Quick and Sandfort 2014).

How Does Facilitation Support Judgment?

The presence of trained, professional facilitators is an increasingly common and important feature of planning processes (Susskind and Hulet 2007). Stakeholders value how facilitators support the exploration of interest-based tradeoffs even in cases where on-the-ground changes are limited (Susskind, van der Wansem, and Ciccareli 2003). Yet, using conversational techniques to uncover interests answers only part of the question about how facilitators improve planning.

Framing and frame analysis have been important components of research on facilitation. Facilitators are well positioned to control dialogue by carefully constructing rhetorical frames and strategically reframing when necessary to support shifts among stakeholders. However, reframing has its limits. Barbara Gray (2004) reports on a contentious conservation planning process in northern Minnesota. Despite attempts by facilitators to reframe the community’s discussions, the various stakeholder groups never overcame their differences. Frames are important, in these settings, because of their effect on the underlying judgments made by stakeholders (Lakoff 2008, 2010), and to date, within the “framing for planning” literature, very little attention has been paid to planning judgements, let alone the relationship between framing and judgments.

Thus, attending to how facilitators support planning judgments, directly, holds promise for addressing the practical limitations reported by analysts studying the environmental gains that accompany facilitated planning activities (Susskind, van der Wansem, and Ciccareli 2003). In addition to effectively managing conflict and brokering consensus, facilitators can also help stakeholders learn about the myriad social, environmental, economic, institutional, jurisdictional, and temporal relationships at the heart of wicked problems, and subsequently, they can support the application of this new intellectual capital for composing plans (Slattery et al. 2012; Zellner and Campbell 2015).

For example, the spatial judgments planners make as they plan are often taken for granted. Indeed, spatial judgments have long held the attention of planners (Lynch 1960), but planning scholars have made scant use of spatial reasoning outside of urban design and morphology, preferring instead to offload spatial analysis onto increasingly sophisticated geographic information systems (Couclelis 1991). Fortunately, qualitative geographers have catalogued the concepts that form the backbone of spatial judgments (Golledge, Marsh, and Battersby 2008). They have arrayed these concepts on a continuum from simple (location) to complex (scale) and described how humans use these concepts to process and make sense of spatial relationships (Wakabayashi and Ishikawa 2011). Spatial reasoning draws on our innate abilities to comprehend space as well as our ability to read and understand geographical representations. Scale, according to Golledge, Marsh, and Battersby (2008), is a complicated geospatial concept, which means that its effective use in spatial reasoning also requires comprehension of simple spatial concepts like location, direction, adjacency, and cluster identification. Therefore, scale provides the kind of conceptual complexity that is fertile ground for disagreements and conflict when composing plans for environmental systems (Johnson et al. 2012; van Lieshout et al. 2012). Scale also happens to play a critical role in environmental planning processes (Gibson, Ostrom, and Ahn 2000; Ostrom 2005).

How and Why Scale Is an Important Planning Judgment?

Spatial scale mismatches occur where environmental systems and jurisdictional responsibility do not align (Cash et al. 2006; Cumming, Cumming, and Redman 2006; Gibson, Ostrom, and Ahn 2000; Lee 1993; Pelosi, Goulard, and Balent 2010), reducing the resilience of social-ecological systems (Cumming 2011). Local, small-scale competitors indifferent to each other and regional consequences deplete the aquifer (i.e., tragedy of the commons; Hardin 1968), while regional managers long for the authority needed to impose standard quotas on consumers even as they struggle to account for the ever-expanding set of factors driving water use.

Collaborative approaches to environmental management can help planners and stakeholders successfully redesign institutions governing resource use where mismatches are the norm (Innes and Booher 2010; Margerum 2011; Ostrom 1990, 2005; Poteete, Janssen, and Ostrom 2010). Institutional redesign processes are essential to addressing spatial scale mismatches because they offer opportunities to rescale on-the-ground actions, social and organizational networks, and policies (Margerum 2011; Milz 2015; Wardropper, Chang, Rissman 2015). Landscape ecologists (Wiens 1989), ecologists (Allen and Starr 1982; Levin 1992), and resilience scholars (Walker et al. 2006) have been using cross-scale perspectives to explore social and ecological systems for some time. Vervoort et al. (2012) have gone farthest, showing in some detail how environmental change agents integrated multiple scales of environmental systems as they planned. It is important to note that getting scale right, according to these authors, does not mean picking the right scale (Cohen and McCarthy 2015). Practitioners engage in a conceptual practice that considers multiple scales and the relationships between them.

Stakeholders in collaborative processes are therefore required to make judgments about spatial relationships that stretch over large geographic areas and operate across a range of resolutions—a daunting but not insurmountable cognitive challenge. Moreover, recent research suggests that facilitators can actively shape and support cross-scale planning judgments. Vervoort et al. (2012) use facilitated interviews to encourage environmental planners to describe how they used scale-based judgments to make plans for social and ecological systems. They describe how interviewees moved seamlessly between scales and across scalar levels as they retold stories from their practice. Milz et al. (2017) study how facilitation helped a water supply manager recast his local water shortages to include regional groundwater supplies. In the first, the facilitator helps planners explicate their planning judgments, and in the second, they encourage the local manager to reconsider old habits. Both require attentive facilitators actively listening and responding to the planners’ stories (Forester 2009, 2013). Rapid reflection affords the facilitators opportunities to rescale the conversation in ways that tap into the planner’s ability to think across different scales.

Findings from these two papers suggest that facilitation can contribute to improved planning judgments even without the presence of overt conflict and prompted the present investigation into how facilitation supports spatial planning judgments. The findings describe how participants conceived of differences in spatial scale as they crafted a water quality improvement plan on Cape Cod. They also detail the contributions professional facilitators made in enhancing participant understanding of the consequences of proposed plan improvements taking multiple scales into account.

Case Description

The US Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) designated Cape Cod’s freshwater aquifers as a sole source aquifer in 1982 (Cumbler 2014), meaning that groundwater is the only source for drinking water on the Cape. Comprised of several aquifer lenses, hydrologists further subdivided these lenses into fifty-three sub-watersheds, the vast majority of which discharge into the Cape’s coastal estuaries. The subterranean watersheds are the common water source and shared effluent sink for the Cape’s residents, and unfortunately, the collective assimilative capacity of that sink has been breached. Excess nitrogen has created eutrophic conditions in ponds and estuaries resulting in die-offs of aquatic flora and fauna (Valiela 2013).

Once a low-intensity resort destination, the Cape has witnessed rapid suburbanization over the past thirty years. Despite losing permanent residents, growth continues, along with its status as a vacation destination (Cumbler 2014). Residents and visitors to its fifteen towns generate increasing amounts of untreated effluent carrying nitrogen from the center of the Cape toward the coast. Water quality, in other words, may continue to degrade.

The flow of effluent and the jurisdictional responsibility for local water quality do not align in three ways. First, embayment watersheds and town boundaries do not align. Second, individual septic systems, which account for approximately 80 percent of the nitrogen pollution, are spread unevenly across the Cape. Septic systems are built according to standards set by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and subject to the management whims of individual property owners. Finally, several communities operate and maintain centralized sewage treatment facilities, but these only serve high-density areas. Therefore, wastewater management is split between different jurisdictional entities, individual property owners, and wastewater management districts. Meanwhile, effluent flows through and beyond the authority and responsibility of any individual entity, so the problem truly transcends straightforward discussions about jurisdictional hierarchies.

The Cape Cod Commission, the area’s regional planning authority, was directed to prepare an area-wide wastewater management plan under §208 of the US Clean Water Act to resolve the effluent discharge problem (Kimmell 2013). The regional planners and stakeholders did not set out to impose new rules or standards but embarked on an inclusive planning process asking local officials, residents, and planners to construct the plan collectively. Moreover, they sought a plan that was responsive to the spatial scale mismatches between the hydrologic and geographic landscapes rather than creating new jurisdictional authorities or granting new power to existing entities (Cape Cod Commission 2013).

The §208 update process engaged a body of regional stakeholders in a series of participatory workshops held between September 2013 and May 2014. Fifteen different planning groups met three times each for a total of forty-five participatory planning meetings. Participants were arranged within embayment watersheds instead of the traditional town and hamlet geography of the Cape, even though most participants represented a specific jurisdiction. Thus, participation was logically aligned with the flow of the resource. Participatory workshops were typically four hours in length and included between fifteen and fifty participants. Meeting participants included local stakeholders, technical specialists, planning staff from the Commission, professional facilitators, and members of the public.

The Commission retained a team of professional mediators to facilitate meeting dialogue, but their work was not limited to meetings. Between meetings, facilitators worked with the Commission staff to craft meeting agendas and respond directly to feedback from the stakeholders. Four facilitators were used throughout the process and were assisted by scribes during the meetings, who documented the conversations in real time.

Methods

How participants form spatial judgments involves more conceptual work than our common sense presumes and happens too quickly in the flow of conversation to be adequately captured by observational notes (Hoch et al. 2015; Milz 2015; Milz et al. 2017; Radinsky et al. 2017). Moreover, post hoc reflections captured from participants via first-person interviews may not reflect pristine reflections either (Suchman 1987). Capturing subtle differences in conversations matters for making sense of both the stakeholder discourse as well as the environmental interactions and imagined consequences of plans. Therefore, participatory interaction analysis (PIA) is used to review video recordings of planning meetings. Taking methodological cues from the learning sciences, PIA dissects planning talk, in situ, to show how participants consider relationships that crossed between watersheds and towns. Radinsky et al. (2017) describe in detail the methodological underpinnings of this approach to data analysis and offer additional examples. The methods, outlined here, are designed to deal with a much larger data set and used to systematically identify short deliberative moments (e.g., four to ten minutes) for transcription and coding from within four hour–long, participatory planning meetings.

Data Collection

Data analyzed in this paper were drawn from a larger study on spatial planning judgments and participatory planning on Cape Cod (Milz 2015). This larger data set included nearly 108 hours of audio/video recordings of stakeholder workshops. Examples presented in this paper were systematically selected using a structured video coding protocol to provide evidence for the different ways that facilitators supported spatial planning judgments.

Analytical Framework

An analytical framework drawing on hierarchy theory (Allen and Starr 1982) and recent research by Vervoort et al. (2012), Milz et al. (2017), and Radinsky et al. (2017) was used to code meeting dialogue. This framework distinguishes among three conceptual categories describing environmental systems: (1) dimensions, (2) scales, and (3) levels:

Dimensions refer to any aspect of an environmental system, for example, space, time, power, authority, and so on.

Scales reference the order among functional relationships within a dimension; for example, spatial relationships can be arranged in a geographic hierarchy.

Levels assign units to each scale; for example, a geographic spatial scale might include local, regional, and global levels.

Elsewhere, I describe how discourse on the Cape integrated four different dimensions, six scales, and thirty-one scalar levels (Milz 2015). This paper excludes three dimensions—time, jurisdiction, and institutions—and their associated scales and levels. Thus, data analyzed in this paper only include the spatial dimension and two associated spatial scales—geographic and hydrologic. These scales represent two different ways to geospatially structure the Cape and were chosen to draw explicit attention to how facilitation supports spatial judgments about mismatches. For example, participants may conceive of wastewater management as geographically hyperlocal, for example, at home, and thus determine treatment is too costly relative to the marginal benefit at that level because they miss the connection to the aggregate impact as it spreads throughout the sub-watershed, that is, the hydrologic spatial scale.

Other dimensions and associated scales were excluded in this paper to specifically focus on spatial scale mismatches as opposed to scalar mismatches more generally (Cash et al. 2006; Vervoort et al. 2012). In the following examples, participants made references to the excluded dimensions, but the codes were removed to keep the emphasis on spatial judgments only.

There are many cross-scale relationships to be aware of as well. For instance, there are many points of overlap between the jurisdictional scale, which refers to power and authority (Cash et al. 2006), and the geographic spatial scale, but the presence of cross-scale relationships, which are distinct from cross-level relationships, does not mean that they are the same scale. Readers are encouraged to read Milz (2015) for a more exhaustive analysis of these additional dimensions and cross-scale relationships.

Individual levels of the scales used in this paper are described in Table 1. Transcribed and coded dialogue showed how and when stakeholder groups adopted fixed scalar viewpoints or how their judgments incorporated different scales and associated levels. Special attention was also paid to how facilitators contributed to stakeholder judgments about spatial complexity and scale by coding dialogue for “facilitation moves.”

Table 1.

Scalar-Level Codes Used for Discourse Analysis, Including Operational Definitions and Examples.

Scale	Level/Layer	Definition	Example
Hydrologic
	Global	References to the entire global hydrological system	Sea level rise
	Continental River Basin	References to major river systems and basins	Mississippi Basin
	Regional River Basin	References to major regional river systems and basins	Watersheds
	Watershed	References to generic and/or specific watersheds	Three Bays
	Sub-watershed	References to generic and/or specific sub-watersheds	Pamet River
	Estuary/pond	References to downstream receiving bodies	Pleasant Bay
Geographic
	Regional	References to features seen at >25 miles in altitude	Cape Cod
	Subregional	References to features seen at >20,000 feet in altitude	Mid Cape
	Local	References to features seen at >5,000 feet in altitude	Villages
	Neighborhood	References to features seen at >500 feet in altitude	Subdivisions
	Hyperlocal	References to features seen at <500 feet in altitude	Homes, parcels

Data Analysis

Short deliberative moments (about four to ten minutes in length) were identified and selected by systematically reviewing audio and video data using an iterative, nested coding process. The deliberative moments referred to as idea units (van Es 2009; Radinsky et al. 2017) were transcribed into individual speaking turns (as in your turn vs. my turn to talk; Milz 2015; Radinsky et al. 2017; Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974), and an individual’s speaking turn was decomposed into turn construction units, which might include entire sentences or incomplete phrases. Codes for geographic and hydrologic scale levels (Table 1) were then applied using MaxQDA version 11.2 to each turn construction unit that included a reference to that scalar level. Figure 1 includes screen captures of each step in the coding process.

Figure 1.

Data analysis steps. (1) Episodes are coded for idea units, and (2) idea units are coded for dimensions. (3) Selected idea units are transcribed. (4) Transcribed idea units are coded for scalar levels.

The transcribed and coded idea units were visualized as “codelines.” Turn construction units were numbered sequentially and arrayed along the x-axis. Turns were labeled across the top using each speaker’s pseudonym and are separated by dashed lines. The code legend on the y-axis identified scales (differentiated by fill patterns) and levels (differentiated by fill densities). Codes associated with each turn construction unit were then displayed using filled boxes in each column. Conversations can be read by scanning the codelines from left to right.

For example, in Figure 2, Melissa talks first, and her turn contains nine turn construction units (one through nine). Henry’s turn follows, and his turn includes twenty-one turn construction units (ten through thirty). The filled rectangle above the eleventh turn construction unit denotes that Henry referred to the “local” geographic spatial scale level during his turn in the conversation. Additionally, codelines are paired with tables of transcribed conversations so readers can inspect the talk alongside the figures. The numbered turn construction units in the tables correspond with those on the x-axis of the codeline diagrams.

Figure 2.

Melissa and Henry discuss using area-wide plans for sustaining local-level collective action.

Interpretation

Features and patterns of the coded discourse were annotated on each codeline and compared to the transcribed dialogue. The form and evolution of participants’ spatial judgments were noted as facilitators intervened. This format clearly displays the simultaneous cross-scale and cross-level shifts, the cross-scale and cross-level integration, and how these change across the sequence of turns and/or turn construction units. Visually mapping the variation in coded differences provided a powerful analog for grasping the complexity of spatial references in planning conversations. Lettered annotations are included parenthetically in text to direct readers to specific elements in the codelines.

Findings

As discussed previously, facilitation moves could include shifts across scales and levels, integrate scales and levels, or abstain from referencing any scales or levels. Facilitators were expected to rely predominately on cross-scale shifts to realign judgments around watersheds, but no dominant tendencies were observed. Facilitators used shifts across scales and levels to remind the stakeholders to think in terms of watersheds (e.g., “I hear you talking about towns, but remember we are here to talk about watersheds”). They also restated the thoughts of stakeholders by including references to multiple levels simultaneously wherein a facilitator summarized and, perhaps more concretely, articulated a stakeholder’s argument. Finally, in some instances, facilitators refrained completely from referencing the spatial dimension in their facilitation move. This type showed up as a blank area under a facilitator’s turn on a codeline.

Space does not permit a detailed description of every conversation analyzed, but the examples included here highlight how facilitators generally supported the spatial judgments on the Cape. The following examples are organized around the efforts of two different facilitators, referred to pseudonymously as Grace and Melissa.

Example 1: Sustaining Engagement

This first example represents a moment when a facilitator refrained from referencing either spatial scale. The short exchange is reproduced in Figure 2 and Table 2, and it was selected to illustrate the findings of this research and provide the readers an opportunity to review a simple example first, before moving on to the more complicated codeline diagrams that follow.

Table 2.

Melissa Calls on Henry to Link Organizational Engagement to Institutional Actions.

Speaker	Turn Construction Unit	Statement
Melissa (F):	1	Henry, can you just,
	2	I’m sorry {inaudible},
	3	can you say a little bit more about what how to you know um it’s for {~} be able to imagine
	4	you have a project or you have a plan,
	5	you develop it
	6	you engage people,
	7	but once it’s done, it’s sort of done.
	8	Can you just say a little bit more about how you would envision rather than having it be episodic,
	9	what would make it possible to keep people engaged over time?
Henry:	10	Well . . .
	11	. . . say in Mayberry . . .
	12	. . . you would start,
	13	and I think it’s water over the dam right now,
	14	but an inlet expansion project.
	15	It’s clearly a nutrient reduction opportunity,
	16	with federal funding and so on.
	17	That ought to be a part of, that’s an easy, so start there.
	18	So what’s the next one in that watershed
	19	or in an adjacent watershed.
	20	Alright, go to the 208 Plan and say,
	21	we’ve gotta take the biggest bite out of Hayden Bay,
	22	so what’s next with Hayden Bay?
	23	And that would mean Mayberry would work through its advisory committee
	24	and then work [inaudible] watershed advisory committee to get something appropriate there whether it’s a target
	25	and it would be targeted.
	26	It would involve a formal modification to Mayberry’s CWMP,
	27	but it would be scheduled
	28	and the public hearing process associated with any one of them would turn into a process to talk about the process, publicly.
	29	So it’s not episodic.
	30	It’s part of a continuing, call it, twenty-year process of staying involved, staying engaged.

Melissa’s facilitation move consists of nine turn construction units, and in it, she asks a stakeholder, Henry, to clarify a point he had just made about collaborative governance. Melissa’s move includes no references to either spatial scale (A, in Figure 2) because she distills her move to a question only of future cooperation. Instead of trying to rephrase Henry’s statement using well-practiced conversational techniques, “what I hear you saying is . . . ,” Melissa prompts Henry with a simple question. Had she summarized Henry’s previous statement, her turn would have included references to both the watershed and geographic spatial scales as she did so. Her move leaves the deliberative space open for Henry’s assessment instead.

Reading or hearing Henry’s response masks the complicated architecture of references to different spatial scales and scalar levels. Henry’s turn is composed of references to both the watershed and geographic spatial scales, and he refers to six different levels across both scales (hydrologic: estuary/pond, watershed, and regional river basin; geographic: hyperlocal, local, and regional). The combination of these spatial references across his entire turn is interesting by itself because it illustrates how stakeholders can in fact think across different scales and levels without an explicit call or direction from the facilitator. Henry uses both tactics of twenty-thousand feet thinking to do so. He starts by describing local actions and shifts across scales to discuss hyperlocal actions within an estuary (B)—a specific inlet-widening project. He then bridges action at the smallest hydrologic scale to a discussion about regional and watershed-wide collective action (C). Thus, Henry, in his turn, describes how the §208 update could be used as a tool to both bridge the spatial scale mismatches between towns and watersheds and to strategically link ad hoc actions.

The dynamic in the Markham Sub-Regional Group leading up to this moment was open and cooperative. The stakeholders engaged in constructive dialogue throughout the three-meeting sequence. During that time, they considered various models of collaborative governance and evaluated how well each fit the spatial relationships in their area. Though short, this was an important moment because it allowed the rest of the group to hear how coordinated action was a realistic possibility and could be enabled by the new plan. Many had come to view the §208 plan as an additional jurisdictional burden and not an opportunity for positive change. Resolving mismatches, in other words, did not always require rescaling policy or the creation of a new jurisdictional authority at an “appropriate geographic scale.” Instead, the group could envision pathways for future action via reimagined geographic relationships, especially if they learned to engage in the kinds of cross-scale planning judgments as Henry did here.

Example 2: A Sacrificial Watershed

This second example is a much longer conversation that occurs between six different individuals. This conversation, reproduced in Figures 3 and 4 and Tables 3 and 4, includes two different facilitation moves. In the first (A), the facilitator, Grace, shifts the conversation from the hyperlocal level of the geographic spatial scale to the watershed level of the hydrologic spatial scale. Thus, her first move demonstrates how facilitators use cross-scale and cross-level shifts to encourage stakeholders to think about watersheds. The second (E) occurs at the end of the example and resembles Melissa’s move in the previous example as Grace refrains from referencing either of the spatial scales.

Figure 3.

Grace encourages stakeholders to consider solutions working together in a watershed.

Figure 4.

Grace responds to Brady’s objection.

Table 3.

Grace Uses a Facilitation Move to Address Brady’s Objection.

Speaker	Turn Construction Unit	Statement
Grace (F):	1	So, thinking about incentives.
	2	If you do wanna incentivize sort of homeowner-level action as we heard,
	3	there’s probably limits depending on how much nitrogen you need to take out.
	4	But we probably want a package of solutions, right?
	5	And so as Rita said, the seven-step approach sort of looks at what can you do?
	6	What’s the low hanging fruit?
Harold:	7	[inaudible]
Grace (F):	8	. . . that said what we’ve heard from some people . . . just because it’s higher up on those numbers doesn’t necessarily mean it’s less money.
	9	So as we heard, if it’s forty thousand dollars to retrofit your house to put in your composting toilet.
	10	Right and that’s I don’t know how many toilets, bathrooms that is, right?
	11	The fact is just because it’s higher up on that list doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s gonna be more cost-effective.
Rita:	12	[inaudible]
Grace (F):	13	. . . yah.
	14	So we’ve heard the funding, affordability all those things are issues.
	15	Other themes other sort of priorities you think we should really take into account as you’re evaluating this set of options here in this watershed.
Brady:	16	Validate the mathematic validity of the calculations.
Grace (F):	17	Of what?
Brady:	18	Of the sewer, of the septic loading.
	19	. . . have not been mathematically validated.
	20	We need a sensitivity analysis.
Rita:	21	. . . we’re getting into MEP . . .
Grace (F):	22	. . . we got that already.
Grace (F):	23	We’re not gonna go there right now.
Harold:	24	How ’bout a framework that would enable comparison of local cluster treatment that discharges to a leaching field in a watershed.
	25	And the comparison of that alternative with another alternate which includes transport costs to a wastewater treatment facility in an adjoining town that would include the cost of transport.
	26	And the shared treatment costs in the adjacent town.
Grace (F):	27	So is this, I mean I think the general idea of boy it’d be helpful to see some comparisons of these different alternatives in a small scale or a watershed scale . . .
Brady:	28	. . . inshed/outshed . . .
Grace (F):	29	. . . right of inshed versus outshed sort of solutions.
Grace (F):	30	Is that sort of your suggestion.

Table 4.

Grace Uses a Facilitation Move to Address Brady’s Objection (Continued).

Speaker	Turn Construction Unit	Statement
Tricia:	31	But I think part of what Harold is discussing is . . .
	32	and that I’m not sure is necessarily addressed here . . .
	33	is the option of taking my town’s effluent and sending it
	34	or my town’s sewage and sending it to your town versus having my town’s sewage and addressing it in my town.
	35	Is the some of the economics of regional solutions and cross-town transport.
Brady:	36	Where are you gonna dump the effluent?
Tricia:	37	Well not even that.
	38	It’s where are you going to,
	39	are you going to treat it,
	40	are you going to build a treatment plant for yourself,
	41	or are you gonna take advantage of a treatment plant somewhere else?
Brady:	42	What are you gonna do with the effluent [points at speaker and recrosses arms]?
Tricia:	43	Actually I’m sending it to the other town . . .
Brady:	44	. . . I know . . .
Katie:	45	. . . or bringing it back . . .
Grace (F):	46	. . . so again so . . .
Katie:	47	. . . bring it back to your own town . . .
Grace (F):	48	. . . sort of thinking about the inter-municipal opportunities and tradeoffs.
Tricia:	49	Yah and actually in truth the inter-municipal opportunities exist for a number of the technologies
Tricia:	50	And I think that’s an important consideration.
Brady:	51	[We’re not gonna] be willing to sacrifice our watershed.
Tricia:	52	That’s part of the discussion.
Grace (F):	53	Again can we please, please I’m asking people to try and let’s not be divisive.
	54	Let’s not just say things that we know are divisive to be divisive.
	55	We really wanna take this, the point of this opportunity to be together is to be constructive.
	56	If we wanna fight and argue there are lots of forums, right

The conversation contains three other components. First, following Grace’s prompt, Harold integrates the hydrologic and geographic spatial scales (B). He refers to three geographic scale levels and the watershed level, drawing them together into one turn. Harold asks the group to consider how different neighborhoods might join together across towns to promote more economical wastewater management. Combining different scales is especially powerful here because it encourages the group to consider their interdependence and opens opportunities for collective action that do not depend on one jurisdictional entity. Grace and Brady, in reply to Harold, cross between scales to encourage the group to consider the tradeoffs associated with Harold’s recommended approach.

Second, Tricia moves the conversation away from discussing watersheds (C). Her turns, shown in Figure 4, include only references to the geographic spatial scale, and they contain simultaneous references to the local and subregional geographic scale levels. Tricia has retreated back into parochial thinking to discuss agreements between towns to share wastewater collection services and redistribute waste to reduce management costs. Tricia summarizes this as a back-and-forth exchange of effluent between my town and your town and shifts away from the hydrologic scale in the process.

The third component of this conversation (D), prior to Grace’s second facilitation move, includes a cross-scale shift by Brady. He reminds the group, albeit aggressively, that regional approaches are not always sensitive to local needs. Unfortunately, the aggressive nature of Brady’s turns is not conveyed well in either the codelines or transcriptions. He reacts to Tricia’s claims about tradeoffs in a way—forcefully pointing at her across the table—that forces her to accept responsibility for an action that impacts others. His protests draw the conversation down to the local geographic scale from the regional/subregional, and he then claims ownership of the watershed and accuses Tricia of trying to sacrifice his watershed for the purpose of saving money, “We’re [not gonna be willing] to sacrifice our watershed.” He moves the conversation back toward watersheds and away from towns. While his protests reflect a shift in how the group thought about the flow of water on the Cape, that is, keep the natural flow of water in mind, his tone is not appreciated.

Thus, Grace responds to the aggressive nature of Brady’s objections (E), and instead of challenging Brady and cementing his status as a victim, Grace engages in “a-spatial damage” control. She refrains from referencing either spatial scale and reclaims the deliberative space by separating it from the focus of their deliberations. Her final facilitation move attempts to repair relations by depersonalizing the spatial frame and appealing to “other forums,” where stakeholders are free to sling mud.

Both of Grace’s facilitation moves work to support the ongoing cross-scale deliberations within the group in different ways. The first works by relying on one of the tactics used by stakeholders to consider cross-scale and cross-level relationships. The second does not include references to either spatial scale in order to manage a moment of conflict. After Grace’s final facilitation move, the group returns to evaluating the various solutions armed with the knowledge that they can consider the complex relationships and disagree without relying on insults or slights.

Example 3: Your Blue-Collar Watershed

The third and final example, reproduced in Figures 5 and 6 and Tables 5 and 6, is essentially an extended facilitation move. In this case, Melissa sets up a longer brainstorming exercise in which she wants to use one of the sub-watersheds within the group’s larger planning area as an example. The first part of her move (A) references only the watershed and sub-watershed hydrologic scale levels, and then she uses a subtle shift to the geographic scale (B) to defer to the local expertise of the group: “So you . . . tell me because I don’t live here.”

Figure 5.

Melissa setting up a thought experiment using a sub-watershed.

Figure 6.

Stakeholder group members select a sub-watershed for a thought experiment.

Table 5.

Melissa Creates a Thought Experiment Using an Example Watershed.

Speaker	Turn Construction Unit	Statement
Melissa (F):	1	So actually, let me say something about that because . . . this is where, this is sort of the thought exercise that we want to encourage you to go through.
	2	Think about the fact that in our next meeting in December what the Commission intends to bring back to you is say okay, here you have three of these sub-watersheds basically.
	3	You’ve got Markers Bay, Loose River, and Skiff Creek.
	4	And they want to bring back scenarios, hopefully more than two for each, at least two for each, to say this combination of approaches we think could work for Markers Bay.
	5	And then we also think this other combination of approaches could work for Skiff Creek,
	6	and this one could work for Loose River,
	7	and so the question is, well you know you’re, I mean you were just bringing up, how do you design those scenarios, right?
	8	What are the criteria that you’re using?
	9	What are you trying to achieve?
	10	There are lots of different things that you could try to do with any given scenario.
	11	So let’s just take Skiff Creek for example.
	12	You say okay, in Skiff Creek what we want to achieve is a specific nitro, we wanna meet our goal of reducing nitrogen.
	13	We know that’s the goal,
	14	But we could do it in the most cost-effective way.
	15	We could do it in a way that we consider to be the most environmentally friendly
	16	We could do it in a way that is most publicly acceptable.
	17	We could do it in a way, you know there are different kinds of criteria . . .
Dave:	18	. . . the most incremental . . .
Melissa (F):	19	. . . the most incremental, or in a way that over time allows us to ease our way into it exactly.
	20	So there are different kinds of things that you would use . . . to guide the design of the scenario
	21	And since they’re going to bring back at least two scenarios per watershed.
	22	The question to you guys is what types of criteria would you want them to use?
	23	What types of scenarios would you want to see?
	24	And so let’s just do this as a thought exercise, with just one of these sub-watersheds.
	25	And so you guys tell me because I don’t live here, I don’t know which of the three of these would be the easiest or hardest to do as a thought experiment.
	26	Which of those three do you think we could run through that [inaudible]?
John:	27	Let’s do Loose River.

Table 6.

Melissa Creates a Thought Experiment Using an Example Watershed (Continued).

Speaker	Turn Construction Unit	Statement
Melissa (F):	28	Loose River?
George:	29	Uh no.
	30	Loose River involves two municipalities.
	31	Skiff Creek is all within the [inaudible] boundary.
Melissa (F):	32	Okay
John:	33	And Markers Bay already has a treatment plant so that’s maybe too easy as an option
George:	34	Well Markers Bay is also [inaudible] percent of seasonality than Loose River.
Melissa (F):	35	Okay so Skiff Creek [inaudible] scenario
George:	36	Skiff Creek is your blue-collar watershed.
George:	37	We’ll put it that way, on Cape Cod, if you’re comparing the three.
Melissa (F):	38	What do you guys think?
	39	Should we just try this with Skiff Creek?
	40	What we’re going to do, sorry let me be clear about what we’re gonna do.
	41	First of all well think about okay in Skiff Creek what are the criteria that we would want to guide the development of one of two or three different scenarios.
	42	We can call one scenario, the cost-effective scenario.
	43	We can call one the implementa-, or the incremental scenario, whatever we say.
	44	And then what we’ll ask you to do is think about what are the pros and cons of any of the approaches we’ve discussed today.
	45	So someone would say,
	46	and I don’t know so forgive me if this makes no sense,
	47	but in Skiff Creek if we were doing an incremental approach, I would say that we should look at PRBs,
	48	and the pros of looking at that would be this,
	49	and the cons would be this.
	50	That’s the thought exercise I want us to go through together.
	51	Okay so let’s say we’ve chosen Skiff Creek,
	52	Let’s think about what are,
	53	let’s think about two or three different types of scenarios you would want.
	54	What types of scenarios would you want?

George and John deliberate over the best choice for Melissa’s experiment. George’s recommendation includes references to both spatial scales, while John only references the hydrologic spatial scale. The cross-scale references represent George’s efforts to provide a rationale for preferring one sub-watershed over the others. The first reason integrates the town and watershed spatial scale levels (B). George notes that Loose River is shared between two towns and that “Skiff Creek is all within [one town’s] boundary.” His second reason (C) places Skiff Creek within the wider hydrologic landscape on the Cape. His reference to the regional levels on both the hydrologic and geographic scales was indicative of his attempts to make the case that Skiff Creek generally represented the entire Cape.

Unfortunately, George’s choice and the judgments supporting it ignore spatial scale mismatches and suggest that cross-scale reasoning may sometimes lead away from a better consideration of cross-scale environmental relationships. Moreover, the majority of the Cape’s sub-watersheds are shared between two or more towns, so Skiff Creek is not typical, as George suggests.

Melissa does not challenge George. Instead, she simply echoes George’s recommendation (D), and she concludes this passage by further explaining the purpose of the exercise. By selecting and naming a specific watershed, she gives the group a common spatial reference and concrete example with which they are familiar. Choosing Skiff Creek allows the group to focus explicitly on the hydrologic complexities, freeing the group from the social and political constraints mismatches introduce. They can imagine how the different treatment options fit the flow of water within this specific area and avoid discussions regarding their political feasibility.

However, the political realities associated with spatial scale mismatches reemerge at the conclusion of this thought experiment. Another participant notes that most watersheds require cross-town cooperation, which made their imagined approach for Skiff Creek infeasible in the remaining two watersheds in their area. In response, Melissa punts. She notes that questions of jurisdictional and institutional coordination would be taken up in later meetings.

Discussion

Activating Tacit Knowledge

The purpose of this paper was to show how facilitators supported spatial planning judgments, and the findings highlight the subtle ways highly skilled facilitators work and are likely the result of how facilitators are trained. Quick and Sandfort (2014) describe two forms of training. The first is explicit and technical; facilitators learn the nuts and bolts of running meetings. The second is practical. Facilitators learn the feel of a conversation through experience. Practical wisdom, knowing what to say and when, comes with experience and reflection, learning, in other words, through situated, practical inquiry (Suchman 1987). However, this tacit, ongoing learning is often hidden inside the mind of the learner, leaving outside observers to make assumptions about the actions taken by the facilitator. By coding facilitator and stakeholder discourse, the previous examples visualize the tacit activation of local expertise by two highly skilled and experienced facilitators. The codelines show what the facilitators did and when, and it is not a drumbeat of constant intervention and confrontation.

The subtle work of Melissa and Grace may reflect their decades of experience in dealing with disagreements and public deliberations. They have learned how to avoid heavy-handed direction, knowing that through subtle cues, they can guide participants to use their own implicit expertise. Melissa’s deference about which watershed to select in example three is a good illustration. She takes a risk by declaring herself an outsider, and a local stakeholder offers a solution, for example, pick my watershed, however ill-conceived in hydrologic terms. She could have reframed the conversation to shift across scales and force the group to dig into the underlying mismatch problem. Instead, she creates a simple thought experiment to focus on the salient relationships between the proposed actions and the flow of water. This gives the group the opportunity to make judgments that fit the proposed solutions—a question of geography—to the watershed—a question of hydrology, and she potentially equips the stakeholders with judgements they could carry into discussions about other watersheds that include spatial scale mismatches. Thus, in the first example, Melissa recognizes and calls out just that kind of judgment when she asks Henry to describe an approach to ongoing collaboration. She supports the same kinds of judgments using two different tactics, and both work within the same rhetorical landscape of watersheds and towns.

Without interviewing the facilitators, I cannot attribute intent to the choices made by either Grace or Melissa. However, describing the intent of facilitators is not the purpose of this paper and according to Suchman (1987) may even provide a false sense of certainty regarding their actions. Instead, interactions between meeting participants are dissected to analyze their judgments and open them up for inspection. Future work that includes pre-/post-interviews of facilitators and participants may establish a link between the intent of the facilitators and outcomes in terms of changes in planning judgments.

Teaching the Craft of Facilitating Public Discourse

The pedagogical implications of this paper’s methodological approach cannot be understated. Mastering the tacit skills demonstrated by Grace and Melissa requires ongoing practice. Planning students learn the theories supporting community engagement, they learn process design, but the practical experience needed to effectively engage with stakeholders is often offloaded by planning programs onto internship experiences. Moreover, studio and capstone courses focus primarily on plan-making, leaving students to learn facilitation on the job, which presents substantial risks in highly politicized settings. The lucky few may have the opportunity to attend and/or facilitate a small number of planning meetings, but most planning students graduate having had little experience running planning meetings or facilitating stakeholder discourse. They also have limited space to reflect on their practical experiences to connect them to their formal classroom training.

A handful of pedagogical strategies are better suited to helping students make this connection. John Forester has used transcribed interviews of practitioners in the classroom to great effect (Forester 1999). Hearing how practitioners applied theory allowed his students to connect the course concepts to their future practice. Role-playing games have also been used in courses on negotiation and dispute resolution. These simulations immerse students in nearly authentic conditions and allow them to try out different conversational techniques and strategies. However, role-playing games come with a safety net because they lack the high stakes of professional settings.

Results stemming from participatory interaction analysis offer a third option, which may pair well with role-playing games and practitioner stories. Short video clips from the meetings on the Cape and elsewhere have been useful for demonstrating facilitation techniques and planning conversations in the classroom. The videos are chosen purposefully to align with specific teaching outcomes and lesson plans. For instance, when discussing conflict management, students can watch the exchange between Grace, Brady, and Tricia and reflect on Grace’s approach to managing that moment of conflict. Students can consider how they would have responded to Brady’s statement. Class discussions can then focus on the implications of the different options proposed by the students. Videos of planning meetings are analogous to cadavers used in anatomy labs. They can be dissected, frame-by-frame, in class.

Properly curated and managed, students can be shown multiple videos in a single class meeting. Thus, they can “experience” far more planning meetings than they do in traditional pedagogical settings. Moreover, videos can be stopped, rewound, and replayed multiple times, so students can review a single event many times and be directed to attend to different features. The examples here can be used to show students how facilitators support cross-scale reasoning or how the stakeholders themselves make spatial judgments to align policy changes with the flow of water on the Cape. Many municipalities are now streaming public meetings online—on their own websites or streaming services such as Youtube.com—providing a nearly endless supply of material to use in the classroom.

Supporting Institutional Rescaling

The Commission explicitly adopted a watershed approach for the §208 update to draw attention to the cross-scale complexities of the water quality issues plaguing the Cape. For their part, the professional facilitators understood the challenges of this approach. Interviews conducted by the facilitation team before the start of the §208 update reported a general consensus that the Cape lacked the institutional mechanisms for governing wastewater at different scales. By supporting cross-scale reasoning among the stakeholders, the facilitators helped develop a plan that was better suited to the Cape’s unique geographic and institutional relationships.

Grace and Melissa did similar work on the Cape. Grace prompted the stakeholders to think about the solutions packaged together within each watershed. Her suggestion, in the second example, opened the door for conflict, but it also allowed the group to consider tradeoffs that only existed when they considered acting collectively. Melissa crafted a thought experiment for precisely the same purpose. She wanted to give the group an opportunity to identify a specific set of actions that addressed the geographic and hydrologic complexities of the region. The imaginative play afforded the stakeholders opportunities to consider the various geographic relationships lurking behind increased nitrogen loads. They learned to apply cross-scale cognitive strategies through practical inquiry on an ongoing basis, and Grace and Melissa helped them along the way.

Conclusion

The findings presented here are limited in that without interviewing facilitators—as noted previously—their intent is not clear. For example, was Melissa’s thought experiment preplanned, or was it a spontaneous response to the flow of the conversation in the Skiff Creek Working Group meeting? This research cannot answer this question or others like it. Unfortunately, research that might provide these answers comes at the cost of losing the authenticity of the planning activity. Planning, as specialized form of situated cognition, happens “in the wild” (Hutchins 1995); therefore, how facilitator and stakeholder judgments play off each other may be a difficult question to answer by reviewing planning meetings alone. However, the observations of Grace and Melissa suggest that future research is warranted.

Facilitators on the Cape supported the application of cognitive strategies aimed at considering the Cape’s cross-scale relationships. Rather than relying on spatial judgments that ignored the mismatches, the Cape’s plan actively considered the problem and potential solutions working across multiple scales. Spatial scale mismatches are obvious in environmental planning, but in actuality, similar mismatches exist in many planning domains. Therefore, understanding how facilitators can help stakeholders shift away from their prior commitments to action at one scale over another should be of note to planners working in a variety of contexts.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the four anonymous reviewers of this manuscript for their time and thoughtful comments, and I would like to thank the residents of Cape Cod and staff at the Cape Cod Commission for letting me observe their process. I would especially like to thank the team of facilitators for allowing me to observe and analyze their work. I would also like to thank Charles J. Hoch, Moira Zellner, Joshua R. Radinsky, and Carissa Slotterback for their advice and feedback on early drafts of this paper.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was funded in part by the National Science Foundation’s Office of Cyberinfrastructure’s Training, Education, Advancement, and Mentoring program (grant number OCI-1135572), the National Science Foundation’s Integrative Graduate Education Research and Traineeship Program in Landscape Ecological and Anthropogenic Processes (LEAP) at the University of Illinois at Chicago (grant number 0549245), and a pre-doctoral fellowship from the Institute of Environmental Science and Policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

ORCID iD

Dan Milz

Author Biography

Dan Milz is a visiting assistant professor of environmental planning and civic engagement in the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. His research focuses on water resource planning and management. In particular, he studies how communities use plans and policies to develop sustainable and resilient water resource systems.

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