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

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the 1970s, which were attacked and defeated by the Bretton Woods institutions,
had the same cornerstones as the present New Development Agenda.
The time of no-dialogue is also over. She defines the main stakeholders in
the development dialogue, the main issues and the effectiveness of different
instruments for dialogue.
Peter Spink draws dialogue experiences from working close to the grassroot
level to explore possibilities for local action in poverty reduction in
Brazil. He describes in detail the process and the debate leading up to identification
of major blocks to dialogue. The article also analyses the blocks
built up through evaluation by looking at the various understandings of
what evaluation was at the Sida headquarters at the beginning of the 90s.
Naoki Suzuki’s paper consists of two parts. The first presents major difficulties
of dialogue in development, exemplified through the JICA project
‘Ishikawa’. It defines five major lessons for dialogue. The second part describes
and discusses the challenges in the dialogue for a practitioner and is
based on a donor-funded research project. The lessons learnt in the first part
are successfully put to use in this project.
Project and programme dialogue
Louk de la Rive Box and Marja-Lisa Swantz both give examples from the
dialogue, or lack thereof, between scientists and policy makers on the one
hand and traditional knowledge bearers on the other. They point to the fact
that there is a great deal of knowledge in most countries possessed by the
people who are supposed to carry development further. However, they stress
that it is very difficult to draw upon and disseminate this knowledge.
Thomas Hammarberg gives his views on whether or not a dialogue on
human rights is possible and, if so, what the prerequisites for a true dialogue
are and what it should look like. From his experience with the EU-China
dialogue on human rights he also discusses if and when such a dialogue
should take the form of secret discussions.
Lone Lindholt reflects on the role of international human rights instruments
in the aid and development dialogue. She analyses the body of human
rights conventions discussing the strengths and weaknesses of, respectively,
global, regional and national legislation, in relation to the development
dialogue, and illustrates this by a number of cases.
Patrick Molutsi and Martin Ängeby summarise the experiences of dialoguing
in the field of democratic development of the International Institute for
Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA). The experiences are based on
practical exposure when trying to apply a dialogue and participatory methodology
in the field. The contribution contains experiences from four case
studies from Guatemala, Indonesia, Nepal and Nigeria and reflects on some
of the difficulties, challenges and lessons learnt during the first five years of
field operations conducted under IDEA’s Capacity Programme.