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The Challenge of Dialogue for Practitioners:
Risking the Unexpected
Naoki Suzuki 1
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Introduction
Dialogue in international development is challenging for both donors and
recipients. While dialogue obviously involves listening and speaking, can a
donor really listen to a recipient, comprehend the message, and act on it?
And can a recipient really speak truthfully to a donor, without inhibition?
Both donor and recipient may appear fully capable of listening and speaking.
However, if listening2 requires donors to change their plans, and if speaking
out causes recipients to risk their funding, can the parties still maintain
meaningful dialogue?
This paper attempts to describe the challenges, constraints and opportunities
of dialogue from the practitioners’ viewpoint. Practitioners in international
development are the ones who normally work under an implementing
agency and make most of the direct contacts with all concerned
parties to coordinate all necessary tasks. Thus, they play a critical role in
facilitating dialogue between donors and recipients.
This paper starts by presenting contextual challenges to donor-recipient
dialogue, including conflicts between stakeholders, inequalities in donorrecipient
relationships, and development discourse in general. The paper
then analyzes a critical event in a project funded by Japan International Cooperation
Agency (JICA) to identify five important issues on dialogue. The
case suggests that risk taking is required for a donor to establish effective
donor-recipient dialogue.
The second half of the paper is devoted to describing and analyzing a
research project in which I participated. Although it is different from development
projects, this case can exemplify the nature of interactions between
a donor and a recipient in government-funded development projects, and
1 Naoki Suzuki (Japan) holds a PhD in City and Regional Planning from Cornell University in
1996. At present he is Associate Professor in Global Community Studies at Seisen University,
Japan. He started his career as a member of Japan Overseas Co-operation Volunteers (JOCV)
working as a secondary school teacher in Malawi and in Ethiopia as the country director directing
relief and development projects. He was a Researcher at the Foundation for Advanced Studies on
International Development (FASID) until 2001. He has been interested in progressive actions of
development practitioners who work in the face of conflicting interests among stakeholders.
2 Forester (1989) clearly distinguishes listening from hearing. Listening involves both speaker and
listener as subjects rather than objects, while hearing involves an object. Listening requires care that
creates a sense of mutuality.