ABSTRACT
Collective governance is more in the territory of mediation or conciliation than conventional development theory. The main achievement at first is to get willingness to sit around the same table and agree on points of consensus and related actions. Even with the most brilliant governance entrepreneurial skills, it is bound to be difficult to gain backing, or even to see the potential for shifting the consensus. The key is not necessarily to focus on the most important point of contention. Instead it is about how to find and move the point of consensus from the narrow to the meaningful—iteration by iteration with no clear roadmap or time-frame. Civil society organizations represent a diverse set of interests, from narrow single-issue campaign groups to global policy advocacy. Finding the right starting point appears to have been the key design question for many collective governance efforts before and since Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative.
