Action & change challenge
The US National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation has just released a report on democratic governance. The action and change challenge is of particular interest:
More and more people are coming to realize that addressing the major challenges of our time is dependent on our ability to collectively move to a new level of thinking about those challenges, and that dialogic and deliberative processes help people make this leap. Yet we continually struggle with how best to link dialogue and deliberation with action and change, and with the misperception that dialogue and deliberation are “just talk.”
You can download the full report here, or download a 3-page overview here.
Sandy Heierbacher, author of the report, also highlights a couple of promising frameworks.
Maggie Herzig’s “Virtuous and Vicious Cycles” model is presented, which acknowledges the systemic and cyclical nature of dialogue and deliberation (as opposed to a linear progression of steps or stages). And Philip Thomas’ integral theory of dialogue seeks to reconcile the seemingly incompatible views of dialogue he came across while working on the Handbook on Dialogue published by the United Nations Program on Development and its partners. Thomas interviewed some practitioners who felt, for example, that personal transformation among dialogue participants was a critical outcome to emphasize in the Handbook, while others he interviewed wanted to de-emphasize and even eliminate such concepts from the book and focus primarily on political processes and outcomes.
Viv McWaters
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