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  • INSPIRED: Where policy meets dialogue
  • Who is this website for?
    • Civil society and domestic stakeholders
    • Development practitioners and EU representatives
    • Government officials
  • Guide
    • What is INSPIRED?
    • Why does INSPIRED make a difference?
      • A three-tier approach
    • How does INSPIRED work in practice?
      • A dialogue process in three phases
        • Collective Assessment Phase
          • The Participatory Policy Analysis (PPA)
        • Consensus Building Phase
          • The Roadmap for Reform
            • Balancing priorities and trade-offs
            • Considering the policy cycle
            • Structure
            • Types of Roadmaps for Reform
            • Unlocking the black box of “political will”
        • Monitoring and Donor Alignment Phase
          • Monitoring the recommendations of the Roadmap for Reforms
          • Ensuring the alignment of donor support to the priorities outlined in the Roadmap
          • The Policy Network Strategy
            • The Joint Analysis of the Policy Network
            • The network graph
            • The exercise of strategic foresight
      • Measuring progress: The Integrated Support Framework (ISF)
    • Who is involved?
      • The Donor(s)
        • Opening the space for dialogue‌
        • Building incentives through conditionality
        • Providing actors with access to decision-makers
        • Promoting the adoption of international standards
        • Bringing in experiences and good practices to feed deliberation
      • The Partner Government
        • Appointing the right person(s)
        • Providing access to government data
        • Coordinating the participation of the concerned public actors
        • Honouring the commitments collectively agreed through dialogue
        • Allocating resources for the implementation of the roadmap
      • The Dialogue Host
        • Convening the key stakeholders
        • Facilitating the dialogue sessions
        • Promoting knowledge-sharing among stakeholders
        • Coordinating the division of labour
        • Acting as the main hub of the resulting policy network
        • Reporting and keeping track of the collective progress
      • The Stakeholders
        • Civil Society Organisations
        • Political parties
        • Public administration
        • Parliaments
        • Media
        • Social agents
        • National Human Rights institutions
        • Academia
        • Democracy support organisations
    • What change can INSPIRED bring?
      • Types of change
      • Harvesting INSPIRED outcomes
  • The INSPIRED Toolkit
    • Results-orientation
    • Three categories
    • The tools
      • 1. Scoping the policy landscape
      • 2. Determining the stage of the policy cycle
      • 3. Stakeholder mapping
      • 4. Set-up and follow-up of indicators
      • 5. Deliberation around evaluative criteria
      • 6. Joint Research
      • 7. Workshops and focus groups
      • 8. Public events & campaigning
      • 9. Bilateral meetings
      • 10. Working groups
      • 11. High-level missions
      • 12. Workshops on multi-party dialogue
      • 13. Study visits
      • 14. Online consultations
      • 15. Grant schemes
      • 16. Training courses
      • 17. Coaching
      • 18. Network mapping
      • 19. International Peer to Peer support
  • Resources
    • Library
      • Policy dialogue: General
      • Policy analysis for dialogue facilitation
      • Dialogue stakeholders
      • Trust-building
      • Policy dialogue in thematic policies
      • EU democracy support
    • Track record
    • Contact us
  • LEGAL NOTICE
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On this page
  1. Guide
  2. Who is involved?
  3. The Dialogue Host

Convening the key stakeholders

First and foremost, the INSPIRED Dialogue Host needs to deploy a strong convening power to bring the key stakeholders to the dialogue. This convening power can result from their professional networks, their technical reputation, their previous track record in the policy domain and their workers’ personal ability to make every stakeholder feel that their voices will count. The importance of the human factor in a dialogue process cannot be overstated: although people are invited as representatives of their respective organisations, they are still human beings that relate to each other on a personal basis. Affinities and animosities, convictions and suspicions, certitudes and insecurities, will all play a significant role in the dialogue process and will thus need to be managed through adequate facilitation techniques. Prior to engaging at this human level, the Dialogue Host first needs to bring on board all the relevant institutions and organisations of the policy domain, who in most cases already know each other or are at least aware of their existence. And here is where the problem of preconceptions and prejudices may jeopardize one of the preconditions for dialogue, that of mutual recognition.

Much like in dinner parties, where the attendance of some guests hinges on the confirmation by others, key stakeholders may become reluctant to engage in dialogue if they find that rivals or competitors have also been invited. Similarly, the most powerful actors can refuse to participate if they consider that the political weight or technical skills of the other players is not at their same level. Moreover, the mightiest stakeholders – who are usually the State institutions – can rapidly alter the balance of power to their advantage, co-opting the dialogue and taking a dominant stance towards its outcomes.

In order to avoid these situations, the INSPIRED model advises restricting the first phase of the dialogue process – the Collective Assessment Phase – to civil society organizations, which are often the weakest actors in terms of resources. By bringing them together in the first place and putting them to work on the development of a concrete output – the Participatory Policy Assessment –, the Dialogue Host seeks not only to build bonds among them, but to promote the pooling of resources – human, knowledge, financial, etc. – so as to raise their joint profile and strengthen their position vis-à-vis the public actors.

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Last updated 1 year ago