We identify here various kinds of failure conditions and robustness issues that arise in context-aware pervasive computing applications. Such conditions are related to failures in an application’s interactions with ambient services, failures in resource discovery and binding, and invalidation of context conditions during the execution of an application task. In this paper we present an exception handling model for integrating forward error recovery mechanisms in the designs of such applications. This model is integrated in a role-based framework and supported by a programming environment for construction of such applications.