Dialogue in Pursuit of Development - Are you looking for one of ...

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‘sure’ of how to deliver it; ‘development’ after all is now a university degree
complete with masters and doctorates and journals, not forgetting laptops
and international business travel. Evaluation, the art of attributing value, has
become a precise and independent instrument for measuring the return on
international effort and terms like competence and commitment are often
used to describe the collective capacity of whole populations to absorb ‘important’
lessons for change.
There is nothing wrong with trying to develop knowledge and with trying
to find our way around problems; indeed, the two go very much together.
But there does seem to be something not quite right when knowledge
begins to be presented with the kind of certainty that neither expects,
recognizes or respects the collective ability to doubt. Doubting is about
being able to call into question, about expressing concern and being unsure;
about mistrust and being undecided; about not being convinced. Not being
convinced does not mean that people are ‘unknowledgeable’ or ‘pathologically
resistant to change’; rather it just means that there are other arguments
in circulation, other versions and places from where people can talk. We are
not ‘not convinced’ because we are nowhere and waiting to be persuaded
into being somewhere; rather we are ‘not convinced’ because where we are,
the versions that are circulating and within which we find ourselves are
other ones.
Thus, my starting point for thinking about dialogue or conversation is
social or, better still, inter-social; certainly not individual or interpersonal.
When two people meet to converse, they have available to them all the
other conversations and potential conversations in which they have found
themselves, separately or together, and within which they can position themselves
along with a vast variety of known and unknown others. When people
coming from a variety of different settings meet to converse, so the
variety grows and grows. Increasingly in aid relationships there is concern to
broaden the number of different voices present in the discussion of what
has taken or might take, place and there are even special techniques for
doing so (Cornwall, 2000). But this is of little avail if the root conversation
does not allow for disagreement or debate and if such broadening is seen as
simply one more stage in project implementation. Dialogue does not happen
because two or more people open their mouths, making sounds and
gestures, but because people seek to ‘con-verse’ and are able to find themselves
in the same talk, moving through time and space, sometimes present
and sometimes not. To seek to connect with the various implicated others
in a way that is open in terms of results is to seek dialogue; for in the ‘conversing’
anything can happen. The alternative is monologue, in all its varieties
and forms. Finding each other in talk, finding the ‘con-verse’, can imply
working within and across existing repertoires or building new ones and it
is the second that, almost by definition, characterizes the search for dialogue
in the development arena.