Fostering Dialogue and Collaborative Actions

We encourage diversity of participation in dialogues, to widen the circles of engagement and to enable all to have opportunities to engage.

Fostering Dialogue and Collaborative Actions

For many years, we have advocated for and supported multi-stakeholder dialogue as a valuable approach for engaging actors to resolve complex challenges and accelerate systems transformations. Our experience has been that dialogues offer opportunities to explore specific issues in discrete situations to help co-create meaningful narratives with shared direction; to develop transformation pathways and accompany transformation processes; to help maintain functioning interfaces between different, sometimes competing institutions, sectors, and disciplines, and to coordinate collective responses to challenges, threats and opportunities.

Our approach to designing, curating, facilitating and mentoring collaborative processes and sharing know-how on dialogues is adapted to partners’ needs with an emphasis on creating space for dialogues to be locally owned and situation-specific. We encourage diversity of participation in dialogues, to widen the circles of engagement and to enable all to have opportunities to engage despite asymmetries in their relative power, positions and expertise. This means carefully designing dialogue events and processes that encourage dialogue participants to actively listen to, and explore synergies, and options for value-adding, collective action with those who they do not normally have the opportunity to meet.

Framing & Design

Defining the objectives of the dialogue process
Developing a preliminary wireframe and timeline of key elements
Support in socialisation with key partners Preparation for the next phase.
Preparation for the next phase.

Dialogue Delivery

Tools & Resources

Short-term but high-impact activities related to dialogues include:

Curation and facilitation of a dialogue event by David Nabarro and/or other experienced 4SD dialogue curator/facilitator.
Training for key roles to prepare and run a dialogue event (convenor, curator, facilitator).
Accompaniment of a synthesis from a dialogue process – pointing at strategic inputs and ways to identify shifts and innovations surfaced by the dialogues.

Core Principles of our Dialogues

Be Respectful
Respect for one another is a foundation for genuine dialogue. Participants in the dialogues are expected to listen to each other and be open to the co-existence of divergent points of view.
Recognise Complexity

Dialogues promote a systemic approach by involving multiple stakeholders to identify actions across the system together with potential synergies and trade-offs.
Embrace Multi-stakeholder Inclusivity

Dialogues are inclusive and strive to showcase as many voices as possible, capturing diverse cultural, professional and gender specific perspectives.
Complement the Work of Others
Dialogues build-on and add-value to existing policy processes and initiatives.
Build Trust

Dialogues are curated and facilitated in a way which creates a “safe space” and promotes trust, encouraging mutual respect. The conclusions emerging from dialogues are not attributed to single individuals.

Our objectives

We endeavour to work with partners on dialogue processes that facilitate highly inclusive and participatory conversation and debate, amongst groups of diverse participants who would not usually have the chance to interact. We encourage dialogues that enable the surfacing of tensions in a managed way, equipping those leading dialogue events with skills needed to feel comfortable with navigating dissent, and helping participants find ways to move forward together, articulated in a shared and collectively-owned pathway – a pathway that sets out priorities for action, and means of implementation.