Building Common Ground: How Facilitators Bridge Between Diverging Groups in Multi-Stakeholder Dialogue

Abstract

The effectiveness of multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) in tackling grand social and environmental challenges depends on productive dialogue among diverse parties. Facilitating such dialogue in turn entails building common ground in form of joint knowledge, beliefs, and suppositions. To explore how such common ground can be built, we study the role of different facilitators and their strategies for bridging the perspectives of competing stakeholder groups in two contrasting MSIs. The German Partnership for Sustainable Textiles was launched in an initially hostile communicative environment, whereas the Fossil Free Sweden Initiative proceeded in a fertile communicative environment. We trace how the facilitators in these initiatives achieved common ground through three bridging strategies—communicative integration, temporal calibration, and process alignment—adapted to the communicative environments of these MSIs. In hostile communicative environments, facilitators achieve common ground by steering diverging stakeholder groups towards ‘reconciling’ their different language registers, knowledge bases, and meaning systems to ‘meet in the middle’ on points of agreement and shared interests. In fertile communicative environments characterised by greater mutual trust, facilitators can steer interactants to ‘strategically appropriate’ to the language, knowledge, and meaning system of a particular stakeholder group to win this group’s support. Our analysis contributes to a better understanding of how productive multi-stakeholder dialogue can be facilitated.

Introduction

Private organisations are increasingly involved in the governance and regulation of grand societal challenges, often through participation in multi-stakeholder initiatives (Crane et al., 2019; Kobrin, 2008). Defined as entities that work “with multiple stakeholders (usually business and civil society, along with others, including governments, universities, and/or investors) to solve a business and human rights problem that no actor can solve alone” (Baumann-Pauly et al., 2017, p 772; van Huijstee et al., 2011), MSIs are set up with the aim of tackling governance gaps through productive dialogue between stakeholders to arrive at joint agreements on rules that all actors involved can voluntarily commit to follow. The proliferation of MSIs has attracted growing attention from scholars across disciplines, especially regarding their legitimacy, efficacy, and impact (Grimm, 2019; de Bakker et al., 2019; Dentoni et al., 2018; Levy et al., 2016; Mena & Palazzo, 2012). Much of this scholarship has been focused on the role and quality of MSI dialogue in relation to these aspects.

Scholars have found that multi-stakeholder dialogue can range in form from “ideal deliberation” to “contestation” (Gilbert et al., 2023). While many researchers agree that finding consensus through deliberation is crucial for reaching voluntary agreements (Gilbert & Rasche, 2007; Reinecke & Ansari, 2016; Scherer & Palazzo, 2007), others have noted that productive exchanges may also ensue from “agonistic deliberation”, often referred to as contestation (Arenas et al., 2020; Dawkins, 2021; Schormair & Gilbert, 2021; van Buren et al., 2021). In either case, however, stakeholders clearly need at least a minimum level of joint understanding to engage in productive dialogue. Here we refer to such mutual understanding as ‘common ground’, defined as the “sum of […] mutual, common, or joint knowledge, beliefs, and suppositions” (Clark, 1996, p 93). For common ground to emerge in MSIs, therefore, the interactants must be able to draw from the same knowledge base, speak the same language, and share a core set of joint beliefs regarding the issue at stake. Without such common ground, stakeholders are likely to ‘talk past’ each other, using the same words while meaning something different. To date, however, scant empirical research has been conducted into the specific processes of building common ground among MSI interactants (Ferraro & Beunza, 2018).

Prior scholarship on various forms of partnerships has pointed to the role played by brokering, convening, and boundary organisations in orchestrating processes of stakeholder deliberation and contestation (Gray & Purdy, 2018; van Hille et al., 2019, 2021). These organisations are typically non-governmental or governmental agencies tasked with fostering dialogue, exchange and mutual learning among different stakeholder groups or sectors by creating communicative interfaces between participants in multi-stakeholder arrangements (Gray, 1985; Stadtler & Probst, 2012). However, less attention has been paid to the role of individual ‘facilitators’ appointed or elected by these organisations. Schormair and Gilbert (2021, p 13) propose that having “a trusted, experienced, and independent facilitator” is a “fundamental prerequisite” for managing “stakeholder value conflict” in MSIs.

Yet, we know little about the strategies employed by facilitators to ‘bridge’ the diverse perspectives, interests, and beliefs of parties within MSIs. This constitutes a significant research gap in view of the critical importance of creating such common ground and the pivotal role facilitators can play in this process. After all, these individuals are uniquely positioned to mediate multi-stakeholder dialogue and are not only tasked with listening to and taking account of all stakeholders’ perspectives but with intervening to overcome any impasses that arise in debates. As such, their actions directly affect the quality of exchange between stakeholders and can thus prove crucial in bringing stakeholders closer together or—by the same token—further polarising the parties involved. To address this gap, we explore the role and strategies of facilitators in MSIs by investigating the following research question: ‘How can MSI facilitators bridge between diverging stakeholder groups to build common ground as a basis for productive dialogue?’.

We present a comparative analysis of facilitators’ bridging strategies in two comparable but contrasting MSIs: the German Partnership for Sustainable Textiles (hereafter ‘the Textiles Partnership’) and the Fossil Free Sweden Initiative (hereafter ‘Fossil Free Sweden’). The Textiles Partnership was established in 2014 by the German Federal Minister for Economic Cooperation and Development in response to the 2013 Rana Plaza catastrophe in Bangladesh, while Fossil Free Sweden was set up by the Swedish government in mid-2015 ahead of the Paris Climate Conference. In both cases, parties with diverse perspectives eventually managed to overcome significant obstacles and reach agreement on joint action. Accordingly, our focus in this paper is on the pivotal role played by MSI facilitators in establishing the common ground that was needed to start a productive dialogue between stakeholders.

Our study contributes to the interdisciplinary field of MSI research and to the business ethics literature on deliberation and contestation by developing an empirically informed theoretical process model that demonstrates how initial impediments to common ground can be overcome. Our comparative analysis identified three interrelated bridging strategies—communicative integration, temporal calibration, and process alignment—and how their distinctive orientation was adapted to the different communicative environments in which the two MSIs were launched. Whereas the facilitator in the ‘hostile’ communicative environment of the Textiles Partnership oriented these strategies to ‘reconciling’ the diverging groups to ‘meet in the middle’, the facilitator in the ‘fertile’ environment of Fossil Free Sweden engaged in ‘strategic appropriation’ to gain the support of one group by persuading the other groups to adapt their language and argumentation to this group.

Theoretical Motivation

MSIs can be powerful tools for addressing governance gaps in the absence of national and international laws to regulate transnational issues related to the environment and human rights (Arenas et al., 2020; Bartley, 2007; Djelic & Sahlin-Andersson, 2006; Gray & Purdy, 2018; Rasche, 2012). However, while the greatest potential strength of such initiatives lies in bringing together diverse stakeholder groups to tackle issues of shared concern, often including representatives from the government, business, non-profit organisations and trade unions for example (Brenton & Slawinski, 2023; Ryan et al., 2023), this diversity also gives rise to the greatest challenge MSIs face, i.e. the challenge of enabling productive  dialogue among multiple heterogeneous stakeholders with different backgrounds and interests (Grimm & Reinecke, 2023).

Previous studies investigating how this challenge can be overcome have highlighted the role of deliberation to agree on rules governing the behaviour of all the actors involved (Ferraro & Beunza, 2018; Mena & Palazzo, 2012; Reinecke & Ansari, 2016; Soundararajan et al., 2019). Deliberation here is typically understood as the communicative process of discussing contested issues from different perspectives to arrive at a consensual position towards these issues. Such discussions are ideally based on an exchange of reasons and arguments between interactants (Carpini et al., 2004; Habermas, 1985a, 1985b; Thompson, 2008). At the core of the ideal deliberative model is the Habermasian premise that “the unforced force of the better argument” (Habermas, 1996, p 306) can induce rational actors to “arrive at a rationally motivated consensus” (Cohen, 1989, p 23). Although it is undisputed that a certain degree of consensus is ultimately required for MSI participants to agree on a joint course of action, however, research has found that allowing for disagreement in democratic deliberation can also enhance the democratic quality of an MSI (Arenas et al., 2020; Brand et al., 2020; Schormair & Gilbert, 2021; van Buren et al., 2021; Whelan, 2013). Conflict can be a positive sign of stakeholder inclusion (Dawkins, 2022), reflecting pluralism in values (Schormair & Gilbert, 2021) and interests (van Buren et al., 2021) especially in settings marked by power imbalances between actors (Brown & Dillard, 2015; Dawkins, 2015; Whelan, 2013). Thus, both deliberation and contestation may be forms of productive MSI dialogue.

However, it has reasonably been argued that stakeholders cannot even intentionally ‘agree to disagree’, let alone find consensus, if they lack common ground and awareness of each other’s perspectives (Grimm & Reinecke, 2023; Schormair & Gilbert, 2021). Accordingly, Schormair and Gilbert (2021) have proposed that multi-stakeholder dialogue should encompass a “discursive sharing process” capable of accommodating the plural value perspectives of affected stakeholders. Concurring with this proposal, we make the case that common ground is a prerequisite for any form of productive multi-stakeholder dialogue.

The Need for Common Ground in MSI Dialogue

Evidence from research on stakeholder dialogues in practice confirms that interactants are often caught up in their own worlds, adhering to their own comprehension of how things work to the exclusion of other perspectives and values, with the consequence that parties remain or end up being hostile towards one another (Grimm & Reinecke, 2023; Zimmermann et al., 2021; Ferraro & Beunza, 2018, p 1190; Hardy & Maguire, 2010; Moog et al., 2015; Nicholls & Huybrechts, 2016; Reinecke & Ansari, 2016; Reinecke & Donaghey, 2021). In such contexts, stakeholder conflict cannot “be solved simply by arriving at a consensus” (Ferraro & Beunza, 2018, p 1190), as any purposeful exchange of arguments is severely impeded by the lack of a fundamental basis for stakeholders to attain a mutual understanding of each other’s perspectives. To determine how this impasse can be overcome, there is a need to unpack the conditions under which stakeholder dialogue is even possible. In particular, it is crucial to explore how common ground can be reached as a key precondition for productive dialogue.

‘Common ground’ here refers to “the set of presuppositions that actors, as a result of their ongoing sensemaking and interaction with others, take to be true—and believe their partners also take to be true” (Cornelissen & Werner, 2014, p 212). Building common ground can thus be understood as a process of creating sufficient understanding among stakeholders to increase the “sum of […] mutual, common, or joint knowledge, beliefs, and suppositions” (Clark, 1996, p 93). The concept of common ground has been mobilised to yield insights into how different parties within and outside of organisations are able to coordinate and communicate with each other effectively (Bechky, 2003; Cramton, 2001; Loewenstein et al., 2012). We conceptualise common ground as a prerequisite for all forms of productive stakeholder dialogue, ranging from deliberation to contestation. For example, in a study of dialogue surrounding climate change among a coalition of faith-based investors and automotive companies, Ferraro and Beunza (2018) found that attaining common ground among such different actors was an indispensable precondition for deliberation. However, not all stakeholders who share common ground will deliberate a consensus or reach an agreement. Sometimes common ground might only enable stakeholders to ‘agree to disagree’.

While we proceed from the premise that building common ground is crucial for bringing purpose to multi-stakeholder conversations (Clark & Brennan, 1991), for creating shared contextualised knowledge (Bechky, 2003), and for establishing a baseline that all parties can reasonably accept (Ferraro & Beunza, 2018), creating common ground is a challenging endeavour. Scholars have found that interactants need shared space and sufficient time to interact with each other repeatedly for common ground to evolve (Kellogg, 2009; Valentine & Edmondson, 2015), not least because interactants within MSIs often start off by speaking their own different ‘languages’, using different vocabulary to refer to the same issue or the same vocabulary with different meanings (Bechky, 2003; Carlile, 2002; Cramton, 2001; Cronin & Weingart, 2007; Reinecke & Ansari, 2016). The challenge of building common ground is further exacerbated by the fact that stakeholders typically do not share the same knowledge base.

To unpack how common ground can be built among different parties in MSIs, we thus need to look more closely at how differences can be overcome between interactants’ use of language, contextual knowledge, and meaning systems. This is all the more important since it remains the case that “surprisingly, very little research exists on how common ground is established” (Cornelissen & Werner, 2014, p 217). In addressing this research gap, we focus specifically on the role and strategies of individual facilitators in building common ground.

The Role of Individual Facilitators in Building Common Ground

Although scholars have studied the role of brokering and convening organisations as intermediaries between different parties (Gray, 1985), the role of individual facilitators who represent the ‘face’ of these organisations remains undertheorized (Gray & Purdy, 2018; Stadtler & Probst, 2012; van Hille et al., 2019, 2021). While all members of such organisations perform the everyday tasks of communicating with stakeholders, documenting meetings and hosting social gatherings, facilitators have a special role as they are the individuals assigned to enable conversation between stakeholders and lead dialogue towards agreement on action, including to personally intervene when discussions go astray. Crucially, facilitators are expected to assume a position of neutrality vis-à-vis different parties and interests in MSIs (Dorado & Vaz, 2003; Gray & Purdy, 2018; Schormair & Gilbert, 2021). In the case of the Bangladesh Accord set up in 2013, for instance, an ILO representative was appointed as a “neutral chair” to mediate between the stakeholder groups involved (Reinecke & Donaghey, 2015). Such neutrality is not only vital to avoid facilitators ‘representing’ certain stakeholder interests over others but also enables them to take on ‘bridging’ roles between differing positions.

Throughout the different stages of an MSI’s development, facilitators may perform bridging roles of “convenors”, “mediators” and “learning catalysts” (Stadtler & Probst, 2012, pp 37–39). The role of convening mainly entails the initial tasks of identifying and connecting the stakeholders most relevant for tackling the issue at stake, while mediating includes moderating discussions, developing a shared vision, and sustaining relationships and momentum among the interactants. In their role as ‘learning catalysts’, meanwhile, facilitators are expected to foster mutual learning (Stadtler & Probst, 2012).

While the role of individual facilitators in stakeholder dialogue has been neglected in MSI research to date, scholars have studied how individuals in other contexts can shape and maintain relationships between different stakeholders (Halevy et al., 2019; Soundararajan et al., 2018). In an early study of brokerage in restricted exchange networks, for example, Marsden (1982, p 202) found that individual brokers could have a positive influence on interactions by “facilitat[ing] transactions between other actors lacking access or trust in one another”. In the context of contemporary global supply chains, meanwhile, Reinecke et al. (2018) have identified various ‘brokering’ roles and strategies that can be used by individuals to bring stakeholders closer together, including the roles of “governance actors” (using sanctioning mechanisms), “connectors” (creating relationships), “translators” (overcoming divergent norms), and “boundary workers” (maintaining or contesting boundaries between groups). These studies concur in describing the task of brokering as an inherently challenging endeavour due to the conflicting underlying norms and values of the multiple parties involved (Marchington & Vincent, 2004; Nicholls & Huybrechts, 2016; Reinecke et al., 2018; Schormair & Gilbert, 2021). In the case of MSIs set up to tackle complex problems, indeed, such brokering or bridging can be rendered unachievable if different worldviews clash and knowledge disparities are too great to overcome (Gray & Purdy, 2018). Despite growing scholarly interest in this endeavour and preliminary suggestions for how to handle conflicts through “trust building” (Gray & Purdy, 2018, pp 85–89; Nasiritousi, & Grimm, 2022), however, we still lack more fine-grained knowledge about how to bridge the perspectives of different stakeholders in MSIs (Halevy et al., 2019).

Related research in other contexts has also investigated how boundary work by individual actors can help create, redistribute and connect spaces for deliberation (Giamporcaro et al., 2023; Marchington & Vincent, 2004; Nicholls & Huybrechts, 2016). A study by Wickert and De Bakker (2018, p 62) has explored how “sellers” can “pitch” socio-environmental issues to others within their organisations, identifying such “sellers” as highly motivated individuals who use strategies to “accumulate internal influence” through “small wins” to “establish proximity” and “adapt to worldviews”, including through efforts to understand and ‘translate’ the languages each party is speaking. While these findings are relevant to our research focus, such boundary work and issue-selling is naturally easier to achieve within single organisations where actors usually share the same organisational culture and work towards the same goals. In the context of MSIs, by contrast, conversing parties typically lack such common perspectives and basic understanding. Again, this raises the question of how MSI facilitators can bridge between multiple different stakeholder groups to build common ground.

Methods

We draw on data from a comparative case study of two MSIs to identify key similarities and differences in the processes by which the facilitators in these initiatives built common ground among stakeholder representatives with fundamentally opposing perspectives.

Research Context and Case Sampling

We selected the German Textiles Partnership and Fossil Free Sweden as comparable but contrasting cases to study how common ground was built in MSIs in different settings (see Table 1 for an overview of the MSIs’ similarities and dissimilarities). The two cases are similar in three key aspects that provided ground for comparison. First, both initiatives emerged at national level and were tasked with tackling daunting societal challenges: the Textiles Partnership was set up to tackle social sustainability issues in the form of human rights violations in global garment supply chains, while Fossil Free Sweden was set up to address environmental sustainability issues related to the global climate crisis and specifically carbon emissions. Each MSI included representatives of businesses, NGOs, trade associations, unions, standards organisations, the national government, and advisory members. In both cases, the facilitators were individuals appointed by the government.

Table 1 Overview of comparative case study set

As a second key similarity, both MSIs were characterised by conflict at the outset due to the opposing interests and worldviews of the stakeholder representatives. In each case, this initially constituted a major impediment to the emergence of common ground, particularly given the different levels of knowledge and contrasting backgrounds of the participants. Both MSIs thus suffered to a similar degree from a sector-specific lack of intersubjective understanding among diverging stakeholder representatives. While Fossil Free Sweden might have been expected to require more coordination efforts as a cross-sector initiative comprised of a larger number of actors from different stakeholder groups and sectors, both MSIs ultimately required much the same degree of coordination on the part of facilitators and convening organisations.

Third, the cases are comparable in terms of rule-setting and rule-enforcement in that the agreements they reached to act collectively on the issues at stake were translated into roadmaps and timelines. All the organisations that signed up to the MSIs subjected themselves to verification of their progress by an independent third party.

The two cases are also dissimilar in two main respects, allowing for useful contrastive analysis (Eisenhardt & Graebner, 2007). These contrasts relate to how well the conversing parties had known each other before the MSI dialogue was initiated. In the case of Fossil Free Sweden, political debate about sustainability had been ongoing for some time before the initiative was launched, meaning the stakeholder representatives in the environmental sphere already knew each other well before they were invited to join this new conversation (Nasiritousi, & Grimm, 2022). In addition, the relationship between businesses and NGOs in Sweden, despite opposing viewpoints across industries, has been characterised by closer collaboration than in Germany, where this relationship has historically been more conflictual and even hostile (Kronsell et al., 2019; Söderholm & Wihlborg, 2015). Moreover, the German Textiles Partnership was set up in a context of political urgency to address supply-chain scandals exposed by the Rana Plaza catastrophe. Unlike the Swedish case, the Textile Partnership interactants had thus only known each other from public disputes before being invited by the German Minister for Economic Cooperation and Development to discuss what Germany could do to improve conditions for textile workers.

A second difference between our cases relates to the individuals who facilitated the dialogue in each MSI and their links to the stakeholders. In Fossil Free Sweden, the appointed facilitator Gustav Svensson (pseudonym)¹ had previously been the head of Sweden’s largest NGO and was well known to all the stakeholders involved. His strong bonds with members of the NGO group further increased their trust in him to represent their ideas and values in the MSI. By contrast, the main facilitator of the German Textiles Partnership, Thomas Bauer (pseudonym), was a priest by training and had no personal ties to the stakeholder representatives at the outset of the MSI dialogue. Moreover, Thomas was installed as facilitator some time after the Partnership had been set up, prior to which German Minister Fred Glaser (pseudonym) had been the public face of the initiative.

Data Collection and Triangulation

We collected and subsequently triangulated interview data with data from event observations and documents. (See Table 2 for an overview of our data sources and their use in the analysis.) Altogether we conducted 67 semi-structured interviews² in two rounds, with pilot interviews held prior to follow-up interviews with key informants. The interviews ranged in duration from 15 to 80 min and were mostly conducted face-to-face, though some were held via video call. Most interviews were audio-recorded, with exceptions allowed for informants who felt uncomfortable about being recorded, in which cases we wrote up interview notes from memory.

Table 2 Overview of data sources and their use in the analysis

All interviews followed a semi-structured questionnaire we had drawn up beforehand and subsequently adjusted as our research progressed. Our initial questionnaire was designed primarily to elicit the reasons for why the organisations had decided to join these MSIs and how they perceived the quality of discussions held within these initiatives. The responses to these questions revealed significant differences in the perceptions of stakeholders about the issues at stake and how they should be addressed. Besides yielding valuable insights into the different communicative environments and the general atmosphere of interactions that prevailed in each MSI, these interviews gave us an initial sense of the struggles experienced in both cases to attain a shared understanding among stakeholder groups and of the key role played by facilitators in bringing these groups closer together. After triangulating our pilot-interview data with insights gained from our event observations, therefore, we conducted follow-up interviews with the stakeholder representatives and facilitators to inquire more closely into the bridging strategies employed by the facilitators to build common ground and how the orientation of these strategies differed in the two different contexts.

As shown in Table 2, we conducted 29 interviews with the stakeholder representatives and the facilitator of the Textiles Partnership and 38 interviews with the stakeholder representatives and facilitator of Fossil Free Sweden. A larger sample of interview data was required to reach saturation in the case of Fossil Free Sweden due to the cross-sector nature of this MSI. To select our informants for the initial round of interviews, we first screened written documents, prioritising representatives from organisations we identified as key players in the stakeholder dialogue. For our follow-up interviews we selected those informants who had referred most specifically to the role played by the facilitators. We also spoke twice with each facilitator to learn more about how they themselves perceived their roles in fostering productive multi-stakeholder dialogue.

To capture as much diversity in our sample as possible, we endeavoured to speak to representatives from organisations of all shapes and sizes. Despite the heterogeneity of these organisations, the views evinced by informants from each stakeholder group were mostly aligned. Based on this strong degree of alignment, we sub-categorise these organisations within larger stakeholder groups, referring to the “industry group” and “NGO group”, for example, as if these comprised homogenous organisations.

We triangulated our different data sources continuously throughout the process of data collection. While conducting our pilot interviews, for example, we simultaneously began observing public events connected to both MSIs, attending these either at the invitation of our informants or after finding out about the events through public announcements on the MSIs’ homepages. In total we observed four public events connected to the Textiles Partnership in and around Berlin, and ten events connected to Fossil Free Sweden in Stockholm. At these events we took notes outlining our impressions of the interactions we observed between representatives of different stakeholder groups. Together with our pilot-interview data, these observations alerted us to the tensions, contradictory arguments and conflicting interests of the stakeholder groups within each MSI, especially in the case of representatives of the industry and NGO groups. This realisation informed our questions and selection of informants for the follow-up interviews.

Attending these events further afforded us valuable opportunities to observe first-hand the bridging strategies pursued by the facilitators. From our observation of a public panel discussion related to the Textiles Partnership, for example, we noted the harsh tone of interactions between the representatives of the NGO and industry groups and how the facilitator had to sub-summarise or ‘translate’ the statements of each representative for the other to mediate their interactions. As a further advantage of attending these events and conducting our interviews simultaneously, we were able to continue adjusting our interview questions based on fieldnotes and insights from our observations. Thus, whereas the focus of these questions had initially centred on the evolution and trajectory of the MSIs and our informants’ perceptions of the atmosphere in which dialogue had proceeded in each case, we later adjusted the questions to focus on the tensions between stakeholder groups and the role of the facilitators’ strategies in helping resolve these tensions.

We also collected written documents about both cases, amassing a total of 1218 pages of text comprised of information publicly available on the MSIs’ websites, press releases and reports issued by the participating organisations. In addition to deriving a timeline of each case from these data, we used the information in these documents to inform and refine our interview questions, to read up on our informants ahead of interviews, and later to cross-check their accounts.

Data Analysis

Adopting a grounded theory approach as a strategy also suited for comparative process analysis (Langley, 1999, p 700), we iterated back and forth between our data and the literature to identify the processual and comparative elements most relevant to answer our research question (Alvesson & Kärreman, 2007; Gioia et al., 2013; Langley, 1999). Given our primary interest in how the various stakeholder representatives perceived the MSI dialogue and the role of the facilitators’ strategies, our unit of analysis is the individual.

Step 1: Mapping out Comparative Case Trajectories

In our first step of analysis we constructed a timeline of the two cases following the narrative strategy advocated by Langley (1999, p 695) for analysing process data by chronologically ordering our written documents to derive “a detailed story from the raw data”. This helped us to identify key similarities and differences in our cases, including how the MSIs were first initiated and the approaches they adopted to rule-setting and rule-enforcement. Our comparative reconstruction of the evolution of each case soon alerted us to significant differences in the trajectories of the Textiles Partnership and Fossil Free Sweden. Above all we discerned that common ground seemed to have been generated more quickly in the Swedish setting, with the MSI participants agreeing to binding roadmaps early on in the process. In the German case, by contrast, the stakeholder representatives took much longer to reach agreement on roadmaps that all parties could accept as sufficiently feasible and ambitious.

Step 2: Identifying Reasons for Participation

Intrigued by the differences in the trajectories of the two cases, we proceeded by integrating our interview transcripts into the qualitative data analysis software programme ATLAS.ti and began coding for reasons why the stakeholder representatives in each MSI had eventually agreed to commit to binding goals and rules. This second step of analysis yielded two key insights. First, we found that in both cases the agreement eventually reached was based on a ‘common understanding’ generated among the conversing parties. Second, we found that the accounts given by our interviewees were unanimous in attributing a key role to the individual facilitators and their strategies in building such essential common ground.

Step 3: Tracing the Building of Common Ground

Revisiting the literature on convening organisations in MSIs (e.g. Stadtler & Probst, 2012; van Hille et al., 2019, 2021), as well as studies from related fields focused on the role of individuals mediating between contesting groups (Reinecke et al., 2018; Wickert & De Bakker, 2018), we realised that what was most interesting in our cases and most relevant for our research question were the distinct strategies employed by the facilitators to bridge between the stakeholder groups. As we elaborate below, this novel insight addresses a significant gap in research.

Although the various roles and tasks of facilitators have been explored by scholars in general terms, the process of building common ground and the specific strategies employed by facilitators to enable this process have been overlooked in the literature to date. Whilst bearing insights from the extant literature in mind, therefore, we returned to our own data to gain a better understanding of how common ground had evolved. Closer inspection of these data yielded both general insights into the process of building common ground and more specific insights into the strategies employed by facilitators to bring stakeholder representatives together. In this third step of analysis, we understood both the building of common ground and the employment of different strategies as processual in nature. And while our cases differed significantly in terms of the communicative environments in which the facilitators operated and interacted with stakeholders, we found important similarities in the processes and the strategies by which the facilitators helped build common ground. Based on these insights we then abstracted analytical categories to account for the different ‘bridging strategies’ deployed in both cases. As a key insight from this step, we discovered that these strategies differed in orientation depending on the communicative environment that prevailed at the outset of each MSI. (Table 3 provides an overview of the key theoretical constructs of our study with empirical examples).

Table 3 Key constructs and empirical examples

Findings

Our findings document the role of individual facilitators in establishing common ground among conflicting stakeholder groups in the context of two different national MSIs. In presenting these findings, we elaborate on the overall process of building common ground between stakeholder groups while simultaneously comparing how individual facilitators enabled this process within their different MSI contexts.

Below we first outline the distinct communicative environments that prevailed in the national contexts of the two MSIs prior to their initiation. We then highlight the main context-related impediments to reaching common ground in each initiative before elucidating the three bridging strategies employed by the facilitators to overcome these impediments. We further show how the facilitators’ orientation of these strategies was determined by the particular communicative environments prevailing in each case.

The Role of MSI Facilitators in Hostile versus Fertile Communicative Environments

The contrasting communicative environments of the German Textiles Partnership and Fossil Free Sweden reflect how relations between businesses and NGOs have historically tended to be more conflictual in Germany and more collaborative in Sweden (Kronsell et al., 2019; Söderholm & Wihlborg, 2015). These distinct tendencies were confirmed in our interview data and in our observations of interactions between NGO and business representatives in the two MSIs. Accordingly, we identify the communicative environment that prevailed at the outset of the Textiles Partnership as ‘hostile’ and the environment in Fossil Free Sweden as ‘fertile’.

A ‘Hostile’ Communicative Environment in the German Textiles Partnership

The historically conflictual relations between businesses and NGOs in Germany were perpetuated within the Textiles Partnership, manifesting in strong blame orientation regarding the specific issue at stake, high levels of distrust among conversing parties, and an adversarial communication culture.

First, the blame-orientation that initially characterised multi-stakeholder dialogue in the Textiles Partnership was linked to the fact that the MSI was set up in April 2014 as a direct response to the 2013 Rana Plaza catastrophe. In this context, the NGO and industry groups began by engaging in mutual accusations and disputes over responsibility for the catastrophe and for taking action to prevent a “second Rana Plaza” (NGO4 DE).

Second, our informants emphasised the deep distrust they had held for each other at the outset of the Textiles Partnership, extending this distrust to the convening organisation itself and the initial facilitator, Fred Glaser. According to one industry group representative (IND2 DE), “we had great mistrust in the people involved”. Prior to meeting each other face-to-face in the Textiles Partnership, interactions between these stakeholder group representatives had only taken place in public debates characterised by aggressive campaigning on the part of NGOs and defensive rebuttals from companies. This mutual suspicion was reflected in the early MSI dialogue in accusations by the NGO representatives that the industry group was attempting to “water down” the initial agreement and simply did “not want it [improve the issues]” (NGO3 DE). And while the NGO representatives were convinced that the industry group’s refusal to commit to this agreement was not a matter of their not ‘being able to [change their practices]’ but rather a matter of lack of ‘will’, the industry representatives were convinced that the individuals who had joined the MSI dialogue on behalf of the NGO group had little knowledge of how businesses work and the realities faced by managers. For example, one industry representative (IND8 DE) dismissed the NGO’s ambitious goals with open contempt, saying “The NGOs’ idea that you can catapult a country 250 years forward in one year is such an absurdly naive ahistorical notion”.

Third, the mutual distrust and blame-orientation among the parties in the Textiles Partnership ensured that conversations were initially characterised by an adversarial communication culture, with informants recalling “hours of exchanging heated arguments” and “worst arguing” (IND8 DE). As numerous interviewees confirmed, the “tone was very rough” (IND13 DE) in these early meetings, with the feuding representatives of industry and NGOs hurling accusations at one another. Moreover, the role of the initial facilitator in this context was described as having been “counter-productive”, with one informant recalling that Fred Glaser had particularly in the beginning made accusations that were at times unsubstantiated and offending to those making an effort (IND12 DE). Indeed, despite Glaser’s political status, he evidently failed to generate a shared understanding among the interactants, with the first six months of debate ending in deadlock in October 2014 when the industry representatives refused to sign up to the ambitious time- and quantity goals proposed in the first version of the Textiles Partnership agreement, i.e. Action Plan 1.0.

To avoid the MSI from failing altogether, a revised agreement (Action Plan 2.0) was drafted throughout the following months, resulting in what many participants considered a much less ambitious and “soft-washed” (IND13 DE) or “watered down” version with no fixed time or quantity goals. Although Glaser’s ‘success’ in attaining the industry group’s agreement to this second version in June 2015 was arguably “the result of effective lobbying” (IND13 DE), our interview data confirm he made little headway in building common ground between the parties in his time as facilitator. In particular, we find no evidence of efforts to overcome impediments to dialogue by addressing the disparities in language registers, knowledge bases, and meaning systems of interactants.

A ‘Fertile’ Communicative Environment in Fossil Free Sweden

Unlike the German case, Fossil Free Sweden was initiated in a national context characterised by collaborative relations between businesses and NGOs. In the specific context of the climate change debate, moreover, the conversing parties had forged connections and mutual trust prior to the MSI’s initiation. In this ‘fertile’ communicative environment, the communication culture in Fossil Free Sweden was notably more consensus-driven than the communication culture in the Textiles Partnership.

First, the vision-based orientation of the interactants in this MSI was related to the fact that Fossil Free Sweden had been set up by the government to encourage private and public organisations from all sectors to invest in making Sweden “the first fossil-free welfare nation in the world” (DOC1 SE). The timing of the launch of this initiative in mid-2015 ahead of the December 2015 UN Climate Change Conference in Paris further reflected the wish of governmental representatives to claim a visionary leadership position at the Conference.

Second, a high degree of pre-existing trust was evident among the interacting parties in Fossil Free Sweden based on their having known each other for decades prior to the initiative. In addition to the historically collaborative relations between businesses and NGOs in Sweden, familiarity and trust among the MSI participants had been fostered by the relatively small number of parties involved in the country’s climate change debate. As one informant remarked (NGO9 SE), “the good thing about Sweden is we’re so few people [laughs], so there’s only a little pond of people working on issues connected to the environment […] We know each other”.

Third, the consensus-driven communication culture in Fossil Free Sweden again reflected the national context of this MSI and the general culture of focussing on commonalities and avoiding conflictual topics in interactions. As one interviewee explained, seeking consensus “is a typical Swedish identity thing” (GOV6 SE). All interactants in Fossil Free Sweden felt that it was important “to be first in this environmental movement and we’re proud to be in that position [...] we’re keen to say we’ve achieved consensus because we know these small achievements of consensus are very very helpful” (GOV6 SE).

Notwithstanding this fertile communicative environment, the stakeholder groups in Fossil Free Sweden “still had conflicts” (GOV6 SE). At the outset of the dialogue, for example, the representatives of these groups differed considerably in their opinions regarding the most effective actions to take to tackle the climate crisis. Despite mutual trust, there was initially no common ground vis-à-vis the issue at stake among the different parties.

The Role of Facilitators’ Bridging Strategies in Overcoming Initial Impediments to Building Common Ground

In both MSIs, the initial lack of shared knowledge bases, meaning systems, and language registers among the stakeholder representatives led to conflicts when the initiatives were first set up. Even though the initiatives were launched in very different communicative environments, this lack of mutual understanding proved an impediment to building common ground as a precondition for agreeing on what action to take. Over time, however, the MSI facilitators managed to navigate and overcome these initial conflicts and impediments by bridging between the diverging stakeholder groups through strategies specifically adapted to the communicative environments prevailing in each MSI.

Below we outline the impediments to common ground in each case in more detail, starting with the Textiles Partnership, before discussing the process whereby common ground was built through the facilitators’ bridging strategies. In this account we show how the contrasting communicative environments of the two MSIs determined the different orientation of these strategies, with the facilitator of the Textiles Partnership pursuing ‘reconciliation’ while the facilitator in Fossil Free Sweden pursued ‘strategic appropriation’. By ‘reconciliation’ we refer to how the hostile groups in the Textiles Partnership were steered away from their initially entrenched standpoints towards meeting one another in the middle through the development of shared language, knowledge, and meaning that intertwined the logic and values of the diverging groups. By ‘strategic appropriation’ we refer to how the NGO group in Fossil Free Sweden was steered to move closer to the language, knowledge, and meaning system of the industry group.

Impediments to Common Ground in the German Textiles Partnership

Following the failure of Action Plan 1.0 to gain agreement from the industry group and the disappointment of NGOs in the “watered down” Action Plan 2.0, Fred Glaser was replaced in summer 2015 by a new facilitator, Thomas Bauer, a state employee appointed to save the Partnership. Joining the MSI dialogue mid-process, Thomas was exposed to a hostile communicative environment and ongoing conflicts between interacting parties. As a priest by training who “grew up in a Protestant milieu” that he described as “a discursive environment” (GOV2 DE), the new facilitator was skilled at listening to and mediating between heterogeneous groups of people with diverse views. As such, he quickly realised that the main impediments stalling progress ensued from the differing backgrounds of the stakeholder representatives, as reflected in their disparate language registers, knowledge bases, and meaning systems.

By carefully listening to what all the interactants said regarding the issue at stake and how it should be tackled, Thomas soon realised that productive dialogue was hindered by the very different language registers used by the diverging groups. As one NGO informant observed of this period, even though everyone around the table was speaking German, “they weren’t speaking the same language” (NGO1 DE). Thomas incisively summed up this situation as follows:

Each group has their own language. They come from a different background. The industry, NGOs, unions – they all speak a different language. They have certain key words they use, sentence structures, pictures they draw [in their idiomatic expressions]. These are all different. (GOV2 DE)

These differences in language were in turn tied to disparities in the respective knowledge bases of the interactants. Such disparities came to the fore whenever controversial topics arose, especially when the parties were trying to find solutions to the issue at stake. According to one informant (GOV3 DE), “communication [did] not work” because the industry representatives drew on their managerial realities while the NGO representatives drew on values and norms, with the consequence that both parties “spoke past” one another. This observation is amply confirmed by our data, with a clear example arising in the context of a discussion about what could be done to address the fact that Bangladeshi workers were still not guaranteed a living wage. In this discussion a member of the NGO group (NGO4 DE) argued that “for me it’s ultimately about human rights, and well, then it might cost more […] then the T-shirt might no longer be 2.99 Euros but 3.99 Euros instead [and companies will have to pay for that]”. To this assertion, a member of the industry group (IND3 DE) retorted that “even if I gave them [the factory owner] 20 cents more per piece it wouldn’t do any good […] the factory owner would say ‘Great that my customer is so stupid and pays another 20 cents on top, but I don’t pass it on [to the workers].’”. Thus, whereas the industry representatives spoke a language related to commercial realities based on their business education and managerial professions, the argument advanced by NGO representatives was driven by normative language and their knowledge of civil society-related matters, societal values, and norms. As such, the representatives of the different groups at this time were merely “talking past each other, they were not really listening to each other” (IND4 DE).

These disparities in language and knowledge were further manifested in differences between the interactants’ meaning systems. At the outset of the process, representatives from the industry group brought forward a ‘business case’ argument justifying their concerns to engage in joint action. As one representative (IND7 DE) explained: “Of course, for any given initiative [we] conduct a cost–benefit-analysis at first and consider what this [participation] will do or not do for us”. Such reasoning indicates the extent to which the industry group felt their participation in the MSI and commitment to its rules had to be tied to financial benefits. By contrast, the representatives from the NGO group used a normative language register manifested in the ‘moral case’ they advanced in support of their arguments. The difference in meaning system became evident, for example, in the claim of one informant (NGO3 DE) that the companies did not “want it [improve the issues]”. For the NGO representatives what mattered most was doing the “right thing”, and they frequently evinced their frustrations by accusing the industry group of not wanting to engage in any action incurring costs or loss of profit.

Building Common Ground in the German Textiles Partnership by Means of ‘Reconciliation’

Remarkably, facilitator Thomas Bauer did eventually manage to establish common ground among the stakeholder representatives. From June 2015 onwards, the parties gradually developed a shared understanding that paved the way for agreement on significant adjustments to Action Plan 2.0. Through prolonged debate mediated by the new facilitator, ambitious measures were added to this action plan, including fixed time and quantity goals such as the demand for “businesses [to] increase the amount of cotton they use which is produced in line with the Textiles Partnerships standards by 70%” by the end of 2025 (DOC41 DE). As our analysis will show, this achievement is attributable to the bridging strategies employed by the facilitator to overcome previous impediments to finding common ground. Specifically adapted to the hostile communicative environment that facilitator Thomas encountered on joining the MSI dialogue, these strategies directly addressed the disparities between the interactants’ language registers, knowledge bases, and meaning systems that had hitherto stymied dialogue.

The effectiveness of the facilitator’s strategy can be seen in the language and reasoning later used by industry group representatives to justify their agreement to the inclusion of quantifiable and binding measures in the revised Action Plan 2.0, some of which they had initially rejected as too costly. For example, one representative (IND8 DE) justified the industry group’s continued participation in the partnership (which was just as “costly” as before) on the grounds of their moral responsibility to do so: “The economic logic argues against it [participating in the MSI] […] You can only explain it if you say there’s an ethical and moral benefit, meaning something beyond economic logic”.

In parallel, the NGO group also developed a stronger sense of the commercial realities faced by the industry group. Shifting from their initial demand that timelines be the same for each and every member of the partnership, the NGO group now agreed to company-specific timelines in the adjusted action plan. This was possible because the NGO representatives had moved away from their strict ‘moral case’ argumentation to include business case aspects in their reasoning, while the industry group moved from their business case argument closer towards a moral case. Below we show how this breakthrough was ultimately achieved by the facilitator’s adept tackling of the impediments that had previously prevented the building of common ground in this initially hostile environment and his strategy of ‘reconciling’ the antagonistic parties.

As a first step, in his efforts to bridge the different language registers, knowledge bases, and meaning systems of the interactants, Thomas employed a strategy of communicative integration through language reconciliation. This aimed at developing a joint language that everyone involved would understand. In this endeavour, Thomas regarded his neutral stance as an advantage enabling him to reconcile the language used by opposing camps: “Since I’m not part of any group really, I’m able to translate between groups” (GOV2 DE). As an example, Thomas described to us a meeting in which he had managed to overcome an impasse by reconciling language between an NGO representative and an industry group representative, both of whom were known for aggressively defending their ‘sides’. Tanja, the NGO representative, was an experienced campaigner, while Sebastian, informally regarded as the leader of the industry group, was an equally fierce negotiator from a powerful trade association, described by one informant in his group as “extremely experienced […] I mean, he conducts collective bargaining for our association, so yes, he knows his stuff” (IND6 DE). In the vignette below we summarise the account Thomas gave of the “moment of reconciliation” he had helped bring about between these parties with details omitted for the purpose of confidentiality.

Vignette 1 (GOV2 DE) So then I said “I’ve heard now from Tanja that she said the following […]—I interpret now for the gentlemen of the industry group so they also hear what has been said—that what Tanja said was meant like [this]. And Sebastian has said this […] in his own odd and wonderful way, sometimes a little bit choleric and trying to get to the core of things, which makes us all sometimes startle. But in reality, he just wanted to say [this]”. Then people laugh because of course I had caricatured Sebastian a little bit, which I also did with others. But I did it in a funny and kind way so that Sebastian didn’t feel belittled in any way. I translate so that Sebastian knows what I said is on point and that I’ve understood what he meant—just in a way so the other group representatives also understand it. What I’m doing here [in this dialogue] is interpreting and translating the respective opinions of the parties. The need for translation was much higher in the beginning but got less and less as people started to break out of their speech patterns—or maybe because both groups signalled to listen to each other. Anyway, eventually it became more and more smooth.

What Thomas did in this meeting was to listen to each side and to translate the mostly past-oriented narratives of the involved parties, going back and forth between interactants to advance the accumulation of joint knowledge among the groups and bring the two groups closer together through ‘reconciling’ their different language registers. By “interpreting” for each group what the other had said, Thomas helped create a common language and managed to get the groups to “break out of their initial speech patterns”. He also explicitly encouraged the stakeholder representatives to “listen to others and not jump right away on certain key words and end up in the trench” (GOV2 DE). As a result of these efforts, the representatives not only began to listen and respond to the arguments brought forward by their counterparts but also to let go of their initial language registers and argumentation patterns.

In addition to these efforts to reconcile the normative and commercial language of the NGO and industry groups and thus enable them to understand each other’s arguments, Thomas also engaged in what we term temporal calibration through temporal reconciliation. Specifically oriented to the hostile communicative environment in the Textiles Partnership, this bridging strategy aimed at overcoming impediments to mutual understanding arising from the backward-looking and blame-oriented narratives on which the participants based their arguments and instilling instead a shared sense of urgency for action in the here and now. As we have seen, discussions in the Textiles Partnership had been dominated from the outset by arguments over who was responsible for the Rana Plaza catastrophe, how it could have been prevented, and what should be done to prevent another such tragedy. In these arguments, as Thomas observed, industry representatives drew heavily on ‘commercial realities’ in refuting accusations regarding the role of German companies in the tragedy. Many claimed that they could not have done more to prevent the factory collapse, arguing it was not the task of businesses to act but down to “the government, [which] doesn’t take on its responsibility [to regulate]” (IND1 DE). Unsurprisingly, the NGO representatives had a very different interpretation of who was responsible for the catastrophe, primarily blaming the industry group:

Whenever I hear about workers’ rights violations [such as Rana Plaza], the very first question I ask is always “Who [which fashion brand] has produced in this factory?” And that’s always been the most important thing ever since I started working for [NGO X]—to find evidence that [ABC] companies were producing there. This has always meant that some people who work for us on the ground have searched through the rubble, or I don’t know where, to see if they can find any labels [of these brands]. (NGO7 DE)

Observing how these adversarial conversations unfolded, Thomas identified such orientation to the past as a major impediment to building common ground for productive dialogue. On this basis, he set out to disrupt the habitual ways in which the two main diverging parties made sense of what had happened, focusing his mediating efforts on getting the interactants to learn from each other’s argumentation. Thereby he recalibrated their temporal focus towards the present and the future through reconciliation. For facilitator Thomas it was crucial that all parties would stop dwelling on the past and work instead towards developing a more future-oriented and proactive narrative of how businesses could operate without harming the textile workers in their supply chains.

To support the interactants in moving dialogue forward, Thomas also engaged in process alignment through process reconciliation aimed at having the parties moderate their respective demands and ‘meet in the middle’, solving each problem encountered by negotiating a “lowest common denominator” as a baseline they could all agree on and scale up thereafter:

I tried to make it clear that both sides have a lot in common – that it’s an economic interest as well as an ethical interest. The industry has an economic interest in making progress on the issue; [I told them] that it’s perhaps even economically worthwhile to be more sustainable. And on the other hand, to the NGOs I said “If you don’t take the whole industry with you then you’ll remain stuck, so let’s work together.”. (GOV2 DE)

This approach to process alignment by means of emphasising areas of agreement and shared interest, combined with conveying the arguments of each group to the other proved key to the success of building common ground. As Thomas recalled, however, this endeavour was especially challenging because the gap between the stakeholder groups was initially so great:

I tried to break down the walls that were there. You wouldn’t believe how it was between Tanja [NGO representative] and Sebastian [industry representative] and what kind of ‘steel walls’ there were – twenty metres high! […] And I tried to break them down. (GOV 8 DE)

Dismantling these “steel walls” was only possible, Thomas realised, if the hostile parties were willing to shift from their entrenched positions. As one of the industry representatives recalled (IND9 DE): “[if someone] follows very hard lines, possibly also an ideological one—which in any case cannot be negotiated—then you can’t make any progress, then you can’t work with them, then finding consensus will not happen”. It was on this basis, then, that Thomas pushed for the interactants to proceed in dialogue by identifying and establishing a shared baseline that could later be scaled up as the basis for sufficient common ground to break the impasse. Establishing a baseline from which to move forward was crucial for all parties involved to “work towards a common goal, even when coming from different standpoints initially” (GOV1 DE). The way in which Thomas supported this process is captured in the following recollection by a participant in the dialogue:

If we can’t find consensus on a concrete topic, we increase the level of abstraction until we find the lowest common denominator and we reach consensus […] Thomas usually speaks about commonalities like “This is the minimum that we all can agree on, right?” He moves to a topic where everyone listens to each other and raises basic issues that no one can say “no” to. It’s like if I asked somebody “Are you pro child labour?” Nobody would answer this question with “yes”. So he asks questions that everyone can only answer with a clear “yes” or “no” and via this technique he’s able to get everyone on board. (GOV5 DE)

As this description suggests, this reconciling strategy entailed identifying general positions on which everyone could agree in principle and then ‘scaling up’ from this consensual basis to enable the interactants to move forward collectively. Thomas supported process alignment by actively engaging with and ‘reconciling’ the existing standpoints of the hostile groups to help them find commonalities in their worldviews and forge a new shared understanding as a basis for making progress towards joint action.

Scaling up from a common baseline was key to process alignment in the hostile communicative environment that initially prevailed in the Textiles Partnership and had led to deadlocks. In this context of distrust, a step-by-step approach might have led to renewed entrenchment, since many participants took attitude that “if someone comes along and says ‘Well, you have to do something!’ then I too would say ‘Well, you go ahead first.’” (GOV3 DE). By adopting a scalable approach to reach agreement on action, Thomas effectively avoided stand-offs by steering the parties away from mutual accusations to focus on what they could all agree on rather than their points of disagreement.

Impediments to Common Ground in Fossil Free Sweden

Although the communicative environment in Fossil Free Sweden was more fertile than in the Textiles Partnership, the facilitator of this MSI, Gustav Svensson, also had to overcome conflict between parties to build sufficient common ground to make progress. Despite a history of more collaborative relations between businesses and NGOs in Sweden and a shared vision among stakeholders of leading the way on action to tackle climate change, progress was significantly hampered in this MSI at first by a lack of clarity about which actions to take. As in the Textiles Partnership, the facilitator’s task of building common ground was also inherently challenging due to the different backgrounds of the stakeholder representatives and the consequent disparities between their respective language registers, knowledge bases, and meaning systems.

Again, these disparities and impediments to dialogue were most self-evident in the different language registers used by the representatives of the NGO group and the industry group. Whereas the NGO representatives drew on normative terminology in arguing that companies’ actions were “bad for the animals and the plants” (NGO9 SE), for example, the industry group representatives drew on practical commercial vocabulary to argue against any proposed changes to practices they deemed essential for their business activities (IND2 SE), claiming they could not move any faster than they already were (GOV6 SE).

These incompatibilities in language register were reflected in differences in the respective knowledge bases of the interactants. Indeed, our informants emphasised how these different levels of knowledge impeded progress: “You have different levels of knowledge, different levels on where you stand from the beginning. It’s hard […] We need to be in line with one another […]” (GOV5 SE). Such awareness did not stop the parties talking past one another, however, with NGO representatives accusing companies of “not doing enough” (NGO9 SE) while the industry group representatives argued back that changing operations would endanger their organisation’s survival and harm “our customers” (IND3 SE).

The different meaning systems of the interactants in Fossil Free Sweden, meanwhile, were manifest in the different arguments advanced by the diverging groups at this time. Thus, whereas the industry group representatives mobilised a ‘business case’ rationale for continuing to do whatever they deemed “essential to our business” (IND2 SE), the NGO group representatives mobilised the ‘moral case’ for change, arguing that companies had an ethical duty not to continue with “business as usual” because “you [companies] are going to destroy the planet if you continue the way you operate now” (NGO9 SE). Thus, while the NGO group initially insisted that participation in Fossil Free Sweden was a moral imperative, the industry group based their rationale on the business case.

Building Common Ground in Fossil Free Sweden by Means of ‘Strategic Appropriation’

Despite the conflicts and impediments that initially hampered progress in Fossil Free Sweden, facilitator Gustav Svensson managed to establish common ground and reach agreement on ambitious roadmaps only a few months into the MSI dialogue. These roadmaps contained measurable time and quantity goals, including a commitment for example by the concrete industry to “reach half the climate impact within five years” and by the heating sector to “be completely fossil fuel free in 2030 and, in addition, to be climate-positive in 2045” (DOC2 SE).

We also identified the three main bridging strategies to overcome the disparities in the language registers, knowledge bases, and meaning systems of the interactants. However, facilitator Gustav oriented these strategies to a more fertile communicative environment, further drawing on the trust placed in him by the NGO group as former head of a Swedish NGO himself. Rather than seeking to ‘reconcile’ the parties and achieve ‘middle ground’ by building common ground on both moral and business principles as the basis for action, Gustav sought instead to build common ground by persuading the NGO group to shift away from their moral case argument and instead ‘appropriate’ to key aspects of the industry group’s language, knowledge, and meaning systems, including their business case logic, for the sake of reaching shared goals. Such ‘strategic appropriation’ was arguably necessary because the industry representatives would only be convinced to participate in the MSI if it was something that would eventually ‘pay off’ for them.

Like facilitator Thomas, Gustav listened carefully to the arguments of each group in the dialogue and soon realised that a major impediment to finding common ground arose from the gulf between the industry group’s use of a business logic and commercial language and the NGO group’s use of normative language in making the case for climate action. As a first step in overcoming this impediment to building common ground, therefore, Gustav achieved communicative integration by engaging in strategic appropriation of language, emphasising the business case for action on climate change.

Like his counterpart in the Textiles Partnership, Gustav saw himself as a neutral mediator:

It’s difficult to see which side we [the MSI’s convening organisation] are on. We are between them [the industry and NGO group] and helping them […] That’s also one of the success factors – that we’re just in-between. (GOV6 SE)

But since he could already rely on the trust of the NGO group, Gustav focused on appropriating the narrative to the group he most needed to get on board with the initiative, i.e. the industry group. By picking up on and adapting to the language used by the business representatives, he sought to gain their buy-in and “work with businesses in a very strategic way” (NGO9 SE). Appropriating a business case logic, for example, he emphasised the financial benefits of committing to climate action. NGO representatives trusted that this approach would succeed because Gustav knew that “what can get measured gets done” (NGO9 SE). Thus, what ultimately ensured the success of this strategy was that Gustav’s strong standing with the NGO group representatives meant that he was able to persuade them to follow his lead by adapting their own language to the language of the industry group. As one NGO representative recalled:

We changed our narrative […] When we started to use their language, to look at the financial side and move away from our original argument […] then the businesses understood […] You have to speak numbers. I mean, it’s okay. I mean, too bad they [businesses] don’t are about the cute animals and the plants. Well, and if they don’t, let’s talk business. That’s fine. (NGO9 SE)

As Gustav had hoped and intended, the industry group representatives quickly picked up on and positively responded to the future-oriented and business-case-based narrative communicated by himself and increasingly by NGO representatives. This is evident in the language used by the industry group to justify their participation in Fossil Free Sweden, which soon reflected and integrated Gustav’s argument that acting on climate change would bring competitive advantages:

The transition to fossil-free transport is essential to our business. Becoming climate positive by 2040 is about showing leadership and cooperation, and accelerating sustainability efforts. We need it, the world needs it, and our customers want it. (IND2 SE)

As Gustav acknowledged, this strategy depended on the fertile communicative environment in which the debate took place, especially the trust placed in him by the NGO group. Without such trust, ‘appropriating’ to the industry groups’ language would have risked losing the NGO group and widening the gap between them and the industry group:

I have the benefit that I come from a green movement myself, and I think they [the NGO group representatives] know […] that I’m part of the green movement today still. I think it’s still okay, because the leaders of WWF, for example, and the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation [the two biggest and most influential NGOs in Sweden] – they’re supporting what I’m doing (GOV6 SE).

This trust was evident from our interviews with NGO group representatives, many of whom evinced confidence that Gustav’s strategic appropriation to the industry group’s language was in their interests:

We know Gustav. I mean he’s a fantastic networker and […] we know he’s doing the right thing. (NGO9 SE)

We all know each other […] I personally know Gustav from way back […] You should know that basically when we decided to give our support to the initiative [Fossil Free Sweden] it certainly had to do with these people [who are part of the convening organisation], who we have confidence in or have trust in basically. We know these people since way back, so it is easier to support those initiatives. (NGO8 SE)

Gustav also engaged in temporal calibration through strategic temporal appropriation. For the facilitators in both MSIs, instilling a sense of urgency and sustaining momentum among the participants was a major challenge. Unlike the Textiles Partnership where facilitator Thomas needed to divert the interactants from preoccupation with a past event (the Rana Plaza catastrophe), however, Fossil Free Sweden's facilitator Gustav faced the very different challenge of creating a shared sense of urgency in a context in which some of the participants claimed “nothing” had yet happened as a consequence of climate change. Indeed, although early consequences of climate change were already visible at the time Fossil Free Sweden was launched in mid-2015, multiple different interpretations and contradictory reports continued to circulate based on projection and speculation, exacerbating uncertainties about what action should be taken.

While the NGO group representatives needed no convincing of the pressing need for climate action, it was crucial for Gustav to instil a similar sense of urgency among the industry group participants. Given the absence of any major trigger event in the past as a reference point and source of motivation for this group to act, he thus decided to emphasise the solution- and outcome-oriented aspects and benefits of climate action, drawing on future predictions to argue the case for companies to commit to ambitious goals and rules:

It’s best to try and find a solution […] and not to see things as problems […] Of course there are small obstacles on the way, but we’re supposed to jump over them and focus on an attitude that ‘We can do this!’. (GOV5 SE)

In this way, Gustav made strategic use of the uncertain and intangible future temporal orientation of the climate crisis to emphasise that investing in the climate was good for business, adapting his argumentation to the industry’s present-tense business case argument:

I argue we could build a better society […] I don’t talk about sharing a burden. I talk about sharing benefits […] My claim is that [through tackling climate change] we [Sweden] are going to develop a country that creates more jobs, more welfare, less noise, better cars, and so on. (GOV6 SE)

Such future- and solution-oriented argumentation gained the confidence of interactants from all sides in Fossil Free Sweden:

Gustav is like a Samaritan […] He’s a collaborator—always happy and optimistic, but also very right and strong in his messaging so […] people understand, and it doesn’t matter if it’s businesses or NGOs or whoever that’s involved in the environmental sphere […] we all think that Gustav is about, um, optimistic change and he’s trying to, you know, he’s a solution-oriented person […] so people from all segments trust him. (NGO9 SE)

[Fossil Free Sweden] is also very much centred on the possibilities, focusing on the opportunities rather than on the hurdles and difficulties, which is always more fun to listen to and maybe more effective. I think that strategy is effective. (IND1 SE)

In addition to stressing future benefits of climate action over present costs, Gustav further sought to enlist the support of the industry group by achieving process alignment through strategic process appropriation. Recognising that a radical approach with ambitious temporal targets could dissuade the industry group from investing in climate action, he adapted to their preference for a gradual step-by-step process:

If we’re too radical it’s just sort of a show. But if we go into these relations, difficult relations, and do a step-by-step solution […] that makes it easier. [We] focus on the short perspective. Because if you talk about the long perspective there are so many assumptions and so many things that it’s very difficult to say how exactly it’ll be solved. If we discuss that all the time, we won’t do anything about the situation just now. (GOV6 SE)

Knowing that any goals considered unrealistic by the industry group would hinder progress in reaching agreement, Gustav coaxed the industry group to focus on achievable short-term goals:

We can take three, four steps together and then we have a conflict, you can say. Then we start with these steps that we can take together, and then we can talk during the time about other conflicts that we haven’t solved yet. We can see that now we change from fossil refineries to bio refineries, then businesses say ‘Yes, that’s a good step. We accept that.’ But then they say ‘We haven’t so many forests and we can’t use so much of the land to produce biomass.’ Then I say ‘Yes, I know that. How can we solve that?’ We take it [this matter of debate] later […] So, we can separate this discussion now so we get this transition and then talk more about consumption later. (GOV6 SE)

Applying this business-oriented principle of achievable short-term goals to all the multi-stakeholder discussions he mediated, facilitator Gustav limited discussions to only one aspect of the complex issue at stake at a time. Through this move, he appropriated the preferred process of the industry to gain more commitments from them in the long-run. Like the other bridging strategies he employed, the success of this approach in confining discussion to single aspects can be attributed to the NGOs’ trust and the consensus-driven communication culture that prevailed in Sweden and the fertile communicative environment for dialogue in Fossil Free Sweden.

Discussion and Conclusion

Theoretical Development: A Process Model of Building Common Ground

In this section, we present an empirically grounded theoretical model of the process of building common ground among diverging stakeholder groups. Based on our comparative case analysis of two contrasting MSIs, this model incorporates insights that extend current knowledge and understanding of the strategies facilitators can use to build common ground among diverging stakeholders to generate productive MSI dialogue. Figure 1 depicts the general theoretical process model that highlights the bridging strategies for building common ground, while Fig. 2 visualises the two distinctive orientations of the bridging strategies employed by the facilitators in our cases, adapted to the communicative environments prevailing in these contexts.

Fig. 1

A process model of building common ground

Fig. 2

Pathways for bridging strategies depending on the communicative environment

Our process model (Fig. 1) highlights the core challenges facilitators face when navigating dialogues in any MSI irrespective of the communicative environment in which the initiative is embedded. These challenges constitute major impediments to the emergence of common ground and arise from the different backgrounds of stakeholder groups, manifesting in different language registers, knowledge bases, and meaning systems. Our model then depicts the three bridging strategies facilitators can employ to overcome these impediments: (1) communicative integration to develop a common language, knowledge base, and meaning system, (2) temporal calibration of the parties’ temporal focus towards the issue at stake, and (3) process alignment to find an effective way forward.

Figure 2 visualises the two different pathways that these bridging strategies can take depending on whether the communicative environment of an MSI dialogue is more or less hostile or fertile. Here, we define the character of a communicative environment in terms of (1) the orientation of the interactants towards the issue at stake, (2) the level of mutual trust among the actors, including the facilitator, and (3) the communication culture.

Figure 2 shows how facilitators faced with hostile communicative environments can orient three bridging strategies aimed at reconciling diverging stakeholder groups by steering them away from their initial standpoints towards ‘meeting in the middle’ through: (1) communicative integration through language reconciliation, aimed at co-creating a shared language by ‘translating’ between parties and by steering them away from exclusive language registers that reflect and accentuate the differences in their backgrounds and knowledge bases; (2) temporal calibration through temporal reconciliation, aimed at steering the temporal orientation of interactants towards a focus on the need for present action on the issue at stake; and (3) process alignment through process reconciliation, aimed at attaining shared agreement among hostile parties on the lowest common denominator as a baseline from which to move dialogue forward by gradually ‘scaling up’ points of agreement.

In fertile communicative environments, by contrast, where the prevailing communication culture is consensus-driven, where interactants have a vision-based orientation to the issue at stake, and where trust already exists in the facilitator and perhaps even among the conversing parties, facilitators can adopt an approach of strategic appropriation. Rather than steering interactants to ‘meet in the middle’ via ‘reconciliation’, this approach leverages existing trust to convince a single stakeholder group to placate another stakeholder group by appropriating that group’s language, knowledge base, and meaning system.

Figure 2 highlights three bridging strategies aimed at strategic appropriation adopted by the facilitator in the fertile communicative environment of Fossil Free Sweden: (1) communicative integration through strategic language appropriation, aimed at transcending differences between stakeholders’ language registers, knowledge bases, and meaning systems by strategically adapting to the logic and language of one particular group (the industry group in the case of Fossil Free Sweden); (2) temporal calibration through strategic temporal appropriation, aimed at adapting to the temporal orientation of a particular stakeholder group (e.g. emphasising the future benefits of climate action over present costs to win the support of the industry group in Fossil Free Sweden); and (3) process alignment through strategic process appropriation, aimed at adapting problem-solving processes in an MSI dialogue to the preferences of a single stakeholder group (e.g. in the Swedish case by accepting moving forward step-by-step aligned with the industry group’s preference for a gradualist approach).

Theoretical Implications: Contributions to the Literature on MSIs and Facilitators

Our findings and analysis evidence and elucidate how individual facilitators can build common ground among interactants in MSIs by employing different bridging strategies according to the context of the initiative and the issue at stake. Although the role of facilitators and their tasks in convening MSI dialogues have gained increasing attention in the literature (Gray & Purdy, 2018; Schormair & Gilbert, 2021; van Hille et al., 2019, 2021), our study addresses the lack of more in-depth theoretical knowledge about how facilitators operate in different communicative environments and the strategies they can use to overcome impediments to building common ground. Our findings have several theoretical implications.

To begin with, studies in adjacent fields have highlighted the challenges that can arise in the context of intra-organisational collaboration more generally from language registers (Bechky, 2003), different knowledge bases (Bechky, 2003; Clark, 1996), and meaning systems of interactants (Contrafatto, 2014; Nicholls & Huybrechts, 2016; van Bommel, et al., 2023). We extend this literature by demonstrating how these factors affect dialogue in MSIs among multiple stakeholder groups with conflicting interests and backgrounds (Soundararajan et al., 2019). By mobilising the notion of “common ground” (Clark, 1996; Cornelissen & Werner, 2014), we further contribute to a better understanding of how people can co-create meaning in stakeholder dialogues as a precondition for deliberation and contestation (Ferraro & Beunza, 2018; Schormair & Gilbert, 2021).

Our identification and analysis of impediments to building common ground in MSIs resonates with and extends insights from previous studies, including Bechky’s (2003) argument that knowledge-sharing can be impeded by disparities in the language used by different stakeholders, Schuessler, and colleagues’ (2023) challenges of integrating different rationales, as well as Reinecke and Ansari’s (2015) finding that dialogue can be impeded when stakeholders attach different meanings to a certain vocabulary (e.g. what constitutes ‘fair’). By explaining how such impediments to multi-stakeholder dialogue ensue from a lack of common ground, we highlight the need for interactants in MSIs to be able to identify and acknowledge each other’s meaning systems. As the first contribution of our study, therefore, we inform the literature on MSIs by identifying core sources of initial impediments to building common ground. This contribution is significant because such impediments must be mitigated to create the deliberative capacity for MSIs necessary for addressing social and environmental challenges.

To clarify, we do not claim that common ground necessarily leads to a harmonious relationship between stakeholders but rather conceptualise common ground as the basis for deliberation (Giamporcaro et al., 2023; Gilbert & Rasche, 2007; Scherer & Palazzo, 2007) and stakeholder dialogue more generally (Schormair & Gilbert, 2021), including contestation (Brand et al., 2020; Dawkins, 2022; Whelan, 2013). This is because a minimum of shared understanding is required as a precondition not only for deliberation but also for contestation between stakeholders. It could be objected that a unified language might suppress diverse perspectives (Laasonen et al., 2012). We agree and are in line with proponents of contestation that stakeholders should not be silenced and that an adversarial relationship between actors can be helpful to ensure the democratic quality of MSIs (Arenas et al., 2020; Brand et al., 2020). We believe this view is compatible with our model because we argue that common ground is necessary even for stakeholders to ‘agree to disagree’. In sum, our study mobilises insights from the literature on common ground to fertilise and inform the literature on MSIs regarding how deliberation can be fostered.

Our second contribution is to highlight the role of individual facilitators in bridging between diverging stakeholder groups (Gray & Purdy, 2018; Stadtler & Probst, 2012; van Hille et al., 2019, 2021). Whereas previous studies have discussed the role and tasks of convening organisations (Stadtler & Probst, 2012) and highlighted the role of facilitators in more general terms (Schormair & Gilbert, 2021), we address the need for a more detailed understanding of the processes and strategies employed by MSI facilitators as individuals and their convening organisations to foster productive dialogue among diverging stakeholder groups. In particular, our study identifies and zooms in on three ‘bridging strategies’ that facilitators can employ to overcome initial impediments and generate common ground.

The first bridging strategy we identify is ‘communicative integration’. This strategy was employed by both of the facilitators in our two cases as a way of transcending the different language registers, knowledge bases, and meaning systems of the diverging stakeholder groups, either by ‘reconciling’ these differences or by ‘strategically appropriating’ to the language and logic of a particular group. Our emphasis on the need for such communicative integration chimes with previous research that has highlighted the importance of establishing a joint knowledge base and language as well as intersubjectivity (Gillespie & Cornish, 2010) to enable mutual understanding for productive exchange between diverse parties.

The second strategy we identify, ‘temporal calibration’, was used by the facilitators in our two cases to create a shared sense of present-day urgency and momentum among different stakeholders for tackling the issues at stake. Temporal calibration may entail efforts by the facilitator to re-orient the interactants away from a blame-oriented focus on the past, as in the German Textiles Partnership, or to steer interactants towards a focus on the future benefits of present-day actions, as in Fossil Free Sweden. Put simply, calibrating the temporal focus is about ensuring that stakeholders consider not only their short-term goals but also their long-term interests in the future (Bridoux & Stoelhorst, 2022; Gray & Purdy, 2018). Our analysis of the Fossil Free Sweden case shows how the facilitator won the support of the industry group in part by strategically ‘appropriating’ to the (future) temporality of climate change and the uncertainties surrounding this unfolding issue to make the ‘business case’ for climate action as a present-day investment opportunity.

The third strategy, ‘process alignment’, established a joint approach to problem-solving. While previous research has highlighted that actors can become “locked in” by their different “preconceived ideas about how the problem should be solved” (Gray & Purdy, 2018, p 85), our findings demonstrate that facilitators may be able to prevent such deadlock by carefully considering how to move forward in the prevailing communicative environment of an MSI dialogue. A step-by-step approach to problem-solving proved effective for gaining the support of the industry group in Fossil Free Sweden, while in the Textiles Partnership the facilitator opted to seek agreement on a common denominator that could later be scaled up in line with his strategy of reconciling the hostile parties.

Regarding the role of facilitators in employing these strategies, our study highlights the need for facilitators to adopt a ‘birds-eye view’ on the different worldviews and conflicting interests of the parties in MSI dialogues. Only by listening closely from a neutral position can facilitators assess the sources of impediments to common ground and progress in dialogue, including any differences in language registers that may hinder mutual understanding. As we have shown, such initial awareness and knowledge is crucial for facilitators to decide upon the most effective set of bridging strategies in a given context. Notably, our emphasis on the need for facilitators to remain neutral rather than pushing their own agendas contrasts with previous findings advanced in the literature, including van Hille et al.’s (2019) conclusion that convening organisations can successfully pursue their own goals. In both our cases it was especially important for the facilitators to remain ‘in-between chairs’, we argue, not only to retain the trust of all parties but also to adapt their approaches to the specific communicative environment prevailing in each MSI. In sum, our study demonstrates that a neutral stance is essential for facilitators to create common ground between parties with conflicting perspectives.

The third main contribution of our study relates to the importance of recognising the particular communicative environment in an MSI. Introducing the notion of ‘communicative environment’ enables us to identify the communicative conditions under which certain bridging strategies are most likely to generate common ground between conflicting parties. By drawing on two comparable but contrasting cases, we demonstrate how the facilitator adapted the three bridging strategies to the type of communicative environment prevailing at the outset.

Our findings may appear surprising in this regard. While one may expect appropriation dominating in a hostile environment versus reconciliation in a fertile environment, we found the opposite. Building common ground in a ‘hostile’ communicative environment is more likely to require a ‘reconciliatory’ approach aimed at steering opposing stakeholder groups towards ‘meeting in the middle’ by developing a joint language, knowledge, and meaning systems (Gray & Purdy, 2018). This is because strategic appropriation without sufficient trust amongst stakeholders might only inflame pre-existing conflictual positions. In contrast, in a ‘fertile’ communicative environment, facilitators can build common ground through ‘strategic appropriation’, i.e. by steering committed parties towards adopting the language, knowledge, and meaning systems of the key group that needs to be won over for the sake of reaching shared goals. This approach resonates with Wickert and De Bakker’s (2018) notion of “issue-selling” within organisations through efforts aimed at “establishing proximity” and overcoming different “worldviews”. Through strategic appropriation and evoking the business case logic, facilitators can successfully “sell” collaboration to the industry as something that would be in their interest. This successfully bridges between the meaning systems of industry representatives arguing according to a business case logic and NGO representatives arguing for a moral case (Wickert & De Bakker, 2018). However, in line with studies that have emphasised the importance of “trust building” among stakeholders in MSIs (Gray & Purdy, 2018), we add evidence-based nuance by showing how the ‘strategic appropriation’ of and adaption to a particular group’s language, knowledge and meaning systems depends on other groups trusting the facilitator and each other to uphold agreements on goals despite apparent concessions. For example, if the facilitator in Fossil Free Sweden had not enjoyed the trust of NGO representatives, his strategy of ‘step-by-step’ negotiations to win over the industry group would have risked losing the support of the NGO stakeholder group.

Our analysis further engages with insights and concerns from studies that have highlighted the importance of a ‘communication culture’ in MSIs and highlighted how different communication cultures can shape multi-stakeholder dialogue. For example Kaplan and Lohmeyer (2021, p 261) found that the way in which German NGOs approached MSI discussions was strongly influenced by their wariness of power imbalances in such initiatives and their fears that agreements reached in MSIs could serve to weaken governmental regulation of the issues at stake or serve as a way to avoid such regulation, noting that “civil and labour actors proved highly critical about the institutional implications of the rise of CSR governance and [were] aware of the need to join forces to counter this trend”. While acknowledging that such imbalances are structural, our study contributes to this debate by demonstrating that entrenched positions and hostilities between parties in MSI dialogues can in fact be overcome through the efforts of skilled facilitators to build common ground, especially if they have the trust of the interactants.

As a final observation on different communicative environments in MSIs, our comparative case study highlights how the temporal orientation of different parties to act on the issue at stake may be backward-looking and built on mutual accusations (triggered by catastrophic events as in the Textiles Partnership) or vision-based and forward-looking (focused on future climate change as in Fossil Free Sweden). The task of the facilitator is to calibrate such orientation to action in the present. Steering interactants in dialogue away from mutual accusations about past events, as in the Textile Partnership, towards a present or future-based orientation can help overcome entrenched positions as a crucial step in focusing on addressing structural injustices (Young, 2010). Similarly, as the future is uncertain, calibrating the temporal focus towards an opportunity is needed to promote actions in the present. On this basis, we propose that ‘temporal calibration’ can be a key strategy for facilitators in their efforts to guide divergent stakeholders to taking on different forms of responsibility.

Boundary Conditions and Future Avenues for Research

Our study has three important boundary conditions. First, our insights are based on two MSIs that are in many ways comparable but also differ significantly in key respects, including the issues they were set up to be addressed and the national contexts in which they are embedded. While there are sound reasons for comparing and contrasting these cases to address our research question, future research could usefully seek to capture the evolution of stakeholder dialogue in a wider range of initiatives in different settings and communicative environments to examine how these factors shape facilitators’ bridging strategies and their distinctive orientations.

Second, with this study, we did not set out to assess the capacity of MSIs to tackle grand challenges but to explore how common ground was built between the diverging stakeholder groups to overcome impediments to dialogue in the first place. In doing so, we primarily relied on interpreting the perspectives of the stakeholders we interviewed and their assessments of the quality and progress of multi-stakeholder dialogue. Future research into MSI dialogue from a more normative standpoint could provide important additional insights, e.g. by applying criteria for assessing the effectiveness of engaging in deliberation.

Third, the focus of our study was not on the personal traits of facilitators but the strategies that facilitators can use to build common ground. While the apt selection and successful deployment of bridging strategies certainly requires strong capabilities in communication and mediation, each facilitator also brings distinctive personal traits and different communication styles that may influence bridging strategies and orientations. Future research could focus on the specific personal traits and communication styles of different facilitators to explore the influence of these individual characteristics and attributes on bridging between stakeholder groups.