ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the ways that facilitators, mediators, and stakeholders engaged in consensus-based collaborative processes can skillfully navigate a course that ends with the successful implementation of their agreements. It also aims to take the challenges relating to implementation and provide prescriptive advice for overcoming them. The stakeholders were easily identifiable, the issues clearly defined, the authority for implementing agreements already established by law. The chapter focuses on importance of spreading ownership among stakeholders is well documented in the case of Chattanooga, Tennessee's Vision 2000 initiative. The implementation of consensus-based agreements often hinges on whether stakeholders can translate their new shared commitments back into the work of their "everyday" organizations. Success in this regard depends on developing strategies when stakeholders are at the table that create durable agreements that can withstand challenges to implementation. The chapter builds a simple typology of consensus-based processes that shows how the challenges of implementation grow with the complexity of the issues being addressed.
