Civil Society, Development & Aid, Global, Global Geopolitics, Headlines, Human Rights

POLITICS: The Talking Cure

Ernst-Jan Pfauth

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 29 2007 (IPS) - From human rights to climate change and HIV/AIDS, the many challenges the world is facing call not only for technical solutions, but also for greater human interaction.

And addressing these problems means dealing with the root causes through democratic dialogues among governments, traditional leaders and ordinary citizens, say experts on conflict resolution, who released a lengthy book this week that offers practical advice to help steer such discussions.

“Dialogues always bridge the gap of distrust and division,” said Rebecca Grynspan, U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) regional director for Latin America and the Caribbean, one of the groups that helped write the new “Handbook on Democratic Dialogue”.

UNDP’s Democratic Governance Practice project helps countries build up their electoral and legislative systems, strengthen the judiciary and promote the rule of law.

“These practices take care of structure and authority in a country,” Grynspan told IPS. “Yet democratic dialogue is also an essential element. It creates active citizenship.”

When asked whether or not democratic governance, as described by UNDP, should be a condition for development aid, Grynspan was cautious.

“Democratic governance is hard to describe. Of course, aid can be handled in a political way, but there are no perfect countries. Yet people are suffering and need help, whether the governance is democratic or not.”

“Donor countries have the right to check whether the aid will get to its goal. For that reason, money must be processed in a transparent and accountable way,” she said.

So what exactly do “democratic dialogues” consist of, and why are they important?

The handbook notes that “[deeper] societal change calls for the capacity to frame alternative choices and, ultimately, to make tough decisions, often requiring significant trade-offs. This is deliberation.”

“It involves carefully weighing competing options and making choices, such as the choice between policies that favour economic development and those that protect the environment, or the choice to sacrifice certain civil liberties in the interest of public security, or vice versa.”

This kind of decision-making is ideally the outcome of dialogue, a separate, more open-ended process that involves bringing together many different voices and perspectives to talk about issues from water management to land disputes.

The authors also see an important difference between dialogue and formal negotiations, with the former being “more dynamic, more fluid, and more experimental”, according to UNDP practitioner Sayed Aqa. It is “a much broader concept than negotiations. Dialogue and mechanisms and processes for it must exist before, during and after a conflict.”

Some examples of successful dialogues that led to consensus include the creation of the Galapagos National Park in 2005, which had initially pitted environmental groups against private sector interests, and assisting Argentina in reaching a set of agreements after the terrible political and economic crises the country had gone through.

Other countries that received help in bridging gaps are Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua. “We see an increasing need for our expertise and support”, Grynspan said.

Ebrahim Ismail Ebrahim, foreign policy coordinator with the African National Congress of South Africa, also stressed the importance of dialogue in ending Apartheid in his country.

Max Hernandez, secretary of the Peruvian National Accord, a consensus-building vision for Peru’s long-term development focusing on democracy and rule of law, equity and social justice, said that participants in such talks should not avoid deep differences that have to be faced.

“You should let enough conflict into a dialogue to achieve a positive result – participants should not be conflict avoiders,” Hernandez said.

However, he also noted that “people prefer debates, which are all about winning and not listening to each other. Secondly, democratic governments in certain parts of the world – for example, in Latin America – have more and more become rulers instead of representatives of the citizens.”

“Thirdly,” Hernandez said, “every group has basic assumptions and is prejudiced. This emotional agenda sometimes gets in the way of dialogue.”

The publication of the handbook is the result of a joint effort by four institutions: the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA), the Organisation of American States, the Canadian International Development Agency and UNDP.

It presents a range of practical tools and methods to organise a dialogue in the right way – even down to how the various parties at the table should be seated. But it concedes that there is no cookie-cutter answer to resolving conflicts, some of which have built for years or even decades.

“Dialogue is an eminently human exercise, highly sensitive to the needs and priorities defined by local realities, to the nuances of language and the intricacies of collective memory,” the authors note. “Dialogue is always about the needs and priorities of real people in real situations.”