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

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forum. The final hurdle for approval was the executive director of FASID.
Because he had to be accountable to MOFA, the funder of the project, he
obviously took the change of the research plan seriously. Bypassing my immediate
superior, he made a direct request to me to explain the change.
Our forum was scheduled to take place just before the Kyushu-Okinawa
Summit in 2000. As the host country of the Summit, the government of
Japan, especially MOFA, was sensitive to any Okinawa-related activities.
Although our forum was planned in Ishigaki, which is 400 km away from
the main island Okinawa where the Summit would be held, MOFA wanted
to keep my project under their control.
When I had initially proposed IIRP to MOFA through FASID’s administration,
the administration expressed interest in integrating IIRP into other
Summit-related events to demonstrate FASID’s loyalty to MOFA. Knowing
the strong feeling among the Ishigaki islanders that they did not want to
be on display to serve the interests of outsiders, I had protected the project
by saying that it was a research project, not an event, and therefore not
suitable for inclusion in the Summit. Now, my request to host a forum
appeared to contradict my earlier characterization of the project as strictly a
research project. This made the executive director deeply sceptical about
my attitude and performance.
I introduced the concept of Participatory Action Research (Whyte et al,
1991; Greenwood and Levin, 1998) in hopes of convincing him that we
could best learn about the issues and problems of Ishigaki through two-way
interactions with the islanders rather than by observing and interviewing
them. I argued that, as we were requesting their co-operation, we should
also grant their request, even if it involved a change in our research plan.
Before the executive director questioned me, I had already contacted several
key participants and asked them to set aside several days for the forum.
Though the executive director criticized this contact as ‘overstepping the
mark’, it contributed to his decision to grant reluctant approval for the forum.
The impact of hosting a forum: mutuality and confrontation
With a budget from FASID, Ishigaki’s leaders took the initiative to prepare
the forum, and the study group helped and supported them. Recognizing
that self-reliance is a major development issue for small islands like Ishigaki,
we decided to make the theme of the forum Self-Reliance of Islands and
NGOs. Our interests were to understand the roles that NGOs as outsiders
can play in helping islands achieve self-reliance in the face of marginalizing
forces from outside that deprive islands of economic, political and social
autonomy.
We invited four NGO practitioners from abroad as guests to share their
experiences as well. We shared the challenges islands face vis-à-vis a number