ABSTRACT
Gordon Sloan introduces people to both the complexity of regional land-use planning and the opportunities of managing and enabling multiparty problem-solving processes. Sloan shows how initially plausible, even seductive, presumptions, of "either-or" or "whether or not" might give way to a creative search for "how" options might take shape. There was a lot of integration that went on in terms of organizing participation away from the table. People spent months doing that before the table even convened — about four months in a preparation and pre-table assessment phase. Each sector was very differently organized. But it was important, once the mediation got underway, that each sector was able to convince each other sector of its accountability. Each had to be able to show that. Each had to be able to show its accountability for decisions that it might make and its accountability up and down the chain.
