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Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) and the Ministry of Finance (MOF)
come to doubt JICA’s ability and discredit its work. In the worst case, JICA
could suffer a budget cut or personnel changes. The indefinite waiting period
was risky for JICA as an institution as well as for the individual JICA
staff members who coordinated the project. Ishikawa apparently convinced
JICA staff as well as his own team members to support his strategy.
Ishikawa’s stance of waiting for the Vietnamese team to take the initiative
set his team apart from the project managers’ position. With this action,
he expressed his commitment to the Vietnamese team. He demonstrated
consideration for the Vietnamese team’s need for reflection, and thus encouraged
dialogue with them. He did not impose his ideas on them but
respected them as the owners of the project’s efforts. His team maintained
an advisory position and encouraged the Vietnamese team to make its own
judgments and decisions. Waiting was an act of voluntarily giving up the
authoritative position that Ishikawa’s team could have kept if they had
wanted. Ishikawa deliberately put himself in a risky position, but waiting
played a role in developing mutuality between the two teams as a tangible
form of dialogue.
From this example of waiting, several lessons for dialogue can be drawn.
First, dialogue involves a specific action in a given situation. Although dialogue
is an abstract term, putting it into practice requires taking concrete
action. While donors can welcome dialogue so long as it stays at a conceptual
level, they tend to adopt a defensive stance once it entails specific action
— such as waiting, in Ishikawa’s case.
Second, actual dialogue takes different forms in different situations. In
Ishikawa’s case, waiting was a relevant form of dialogue. But this does not
mean that waiting always works as dialogue. A practitioner, thus, needs to
examine a given situation carefully and deliberately in order to determine
the proper action for promoting dialogue (Forester, 1999; Suzuki, 2001 b).
Third, actual dialogue takes place between persons. While we can refer to
dialogue to explain donor-recipient relationships generally, dialogue in action
occurs only between individuals — e.g., between Ishikawa representing
the Japanese side and Nguyen Quang Thai representing the Vietnamese
side. Persons can speak and listen but governments or development organizations
obviously cannot. When we examine how dialogue occurs, we need
to take a close look at how individuals who represent institutions of both
types interact.
Fourth, dialogue involves taking risks. For a representative of the donor
side such as Ishikawa, it is a major challenge to take recipients’ concerns
seriously, and critically evaluate and change initial plans, schedules, decisions,
budgets, visions, etc. At the same time, it is a challenge for a recipient’s
representative to put aside his fears of upsetting a donor and speak honestly
to the donor about his concerns. Without risk-taking on both sides take,
dialogue can hardly occur.