Coordinating the division of labour

Any collective endeavour requires a strong coordination effort to align everyone’s contributions and to foster synergies amongst them. This becomes even more important when joint research is being used to develop bonds and mutual understanding, especially when the stakeholders involved in the dialogue process are diverse by definition and come from different organizational and managerial traditions. Public officials do not operate in the same way as social workers, activists or researchers from a think tank, but such diversity of professional backgrounds and capacities, far from being perceived as a drawback, can be turned into an advantage through the development of sound coordination mechanisms.

In many ways, dialogue offers a unique opportunity for participants to step out of their respective mindsets and broaden their views about the societal problem that is being collectively addressed, but they shouldn’t lose sight of the main added value that each of them brings to the deliberations. Their focus on the specific tasks to which they can bring a strong comparative advantage is to be secured through a clear division of labour that, following the INSPIRED philosophy, needs to be agreed upon in a participatory manner.

This is what moved EMC (the Human Rights Education and Monitoring Center, INSPIRED’s Dialogue Host in Georgia) to engage human rights-focused civil society organisations, social partners (such as the Georgian Employers Association and the Georgian Trade Union Confederation), academics, political party representatives (including Members of Parliament), government officials and mediators in a joint analysis of the state of the labour mediation mechanism in Georgia. The work dynamics developed among all these actors after a whole year of common research (from March 2018 to April 2019), paved the way for the joint identification of policy recommendations to increase the effectiveness of the labour mediation mechanism that would end up conforming to the INSPIRED Roadmap for Reform.