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Contents

Chapter 7: Facilitation Goals & Strategies

Introduction

Introduction

As we briefly highlighted in Chapter 5, skilled facilitation and strategies are pivotal to your ability to make the most of stakeholder engagement initiatives. Because facilitation plays such a central role in your success, we have developed this section to provide you with a more in-depth exploration of the goals, principles, core values, and strategies of effective facilitation.

In many ways, it’s appropriate to think of facilitation as the locus of where all our engagement process goals, principles, attributes, and indeed the process model itself all come together. Simply put, without skilled facilitation (and facilitators), the best designed processes and plans will almost certainly fall short of their potential.

Taken together, effective facilitation creates the foundations upon which engagement initiatives can develop a community-led approach (Chapter 3), incorporate engagement principles (Chapter 4), integrate the critical process attributes (Chapter 5), and implement your process model (Chapter 6).

Grounded in the literature and practice of effective facilitation, and the lessons learned in the W4g project, this chapter provides an overview of some of the most important concepts and guidelines engagement practitioners will want to consider.

Check out the additional resources section in this Chapter for guides and other useful information. 

Tools & worksheets

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Additional resources

Putting the “Public” Back in Public Values Research: Designing Participation to Identify and Respond to Values

Nabatchi T (2012) Putting the “Public” Back in Public Values Research: Designing Participation to Identify and Respond to Values. Public Administration Review, Vol. 72, Iss. 5, pp. 699–708.

Abstract: Th is article seeks to put the “public” back in public values research by theorizing about the potential of direct citizen participation to assist with identifying and understanding public values. Specifically, the article explores eight participatory design elements and offers nine propositions about how those elements are likely to affect the ability of administrators to identify and understand public values with regard to a policy conflict. The article concludes with a brief discussion about potential directions for future research.

Water4Ag Ground Rules

A set of sample ground rules from one Water for Agriculture project. Each group is unique and can come up with its own ground rules and sometimes it is helpful to begin a brainstorming session with a few seeds.

Guide to Facilitating Dialogue

“Dialogue facilitators do not need to be experts on the topic being discussed. Good facilitators help establish a safe environment where participants can discuss complex and often emotionally-charged issues. Facilitators also help participants understand that the dialogue is a learning experience and not a forum for participants to voice their opinions without listening to others’.”