The rise of multi-party processes in which people with quite different ties to a region, natural resource-related industry, or environmental issue work collaboratively to hammer out mutually acceptable agreements is arguably one of the biggest shifts in environmental management over the past twenty-five years. This chapter engages in some sensemaking around this diverse and evolving phenomenon in two ways. First, an approach to designing collaborative natural resource-related discourse with a particularly strong theoretical foundation (Collaborative Learning) is presented to illustrate how theory is manifest in practice. Second a recent best practices/common features list is examined through the perspectives of four social science theorists: Max Weber, Pierre Bourdieu, Niklas Luhmann, and Muzafer Sherif. The practical recommendations that emerge from this list is largely consistent with the larger social and communicative dynamics articulated by these theorists.

The first chapter concentrates on the period around 1800, laying the groundwork by examining the concepts of sentimentality, the code of Romantic love, Bildung, interpretation, and the appeal of Greek antiquity as an analogue to the history and formation of the self. Beginning from Winckelmann’s erotic classicism it draws on the writings of Friedrich August Wolf, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Friedrich Schlegel, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and Johann Georg Herder, together with insights from recent literary, historical, and sociological work on the discursive codification of emotions and of closeness in that period.