Achieving concrete results or milestones is crucial when it comes to building and nurturing trust among the different stakeholders involved in the policy dialogue process –whose sustained participation is an important achievement in itself– as well boosting their confidence by making them realise that they are influencing policy-making. However, one of the aspects of trust that scares many donors is its intangible and volatile nature.
How can one measure trust? How to build and nurture it? How not to lose it in the face of unexpected events? And even more importantly, from a developmental perspective: How can we prove that our efforts to build it are efficient and effective?
Most attempts to answer them come from the field of specialisation that used to be called conflict management and was later rebranded as conflict transformation, a name change that conveys a whole new mindset towards the topic, as “managing” a situation does not require building bonds and developing trust among the confronted actors so that they can lead their own processes of change. Here is where the transformative power of dialogue enters the equation and where donors have a very important role to play, as in most cases at least some of the key actors in a conflict wouldn’t agree to sit at the negotiation table without being offered some kind of incentive and/or invitation from a party that is perceived by them as being impartial.
Among the panoply of resources that donors deploy in partner countries, their own convening power is one of the most neglected, often taken for granted by them without realising its full scope and potential. In strongly polarised political environments where democratic institutions are still rather young and the culture of dialogue is not fully developed, foreign actors can play a crucial role in bringing together economic interest groups and rival political factions. Moreover, they can encourage the most powerful actors to open the game to other players that would otherwise be side-lined, thus ensuring that the political process is inclusive and its potential outcomes politically sustainable.
However important this convening power may be, gathering the stakeholders is just the starting point, and doing so without a clear purpose may even backfire, as it can create confusion and unleash old grievances. To avoid this sort of situation, the participants in dialogue need to feel that they are building a future together instead of scrutinising the past, and one of the simplest and most effective strategies for doing so is to put them to work together. This is why Participatory Action Research (PAR) has become over the years one of the most recognised and effective approaches towards trust-building.
This open method of collective research dates back to the US Civil Rights Movement and played a key role in the dismantling of Apartheid in South Africa. Aimed at social change, it is nowadays so widely used and in such a diversity of fields (from community development to public health, environment, education or feminism) that it escapes a clear definition. It is based on the principle that reality is subjective, so any inquiry into it needs to engage the subjects that are to build such reality by combining action and research in a feedback loop that encourages participation and empowers individuals.
Asking the participants in a dialogue process to analyse together the policy or policies at stake has proved to be one of the most effective ways of building trust and generating mutual understanding. For instance, in the Philippines, the local NGO network ANGOC, which was in charge of facilitating a participatory and inclusive policy dialogue process in the framework of our INSPIRED+ project, brought together representatives from ethnic communities, fishermen and farmers to incorporate their first-hand knowledge into the (name of the study). In Cabo Verde, within the same project, the collective research on the situation of domestic workers coordinated by the local NGO Associação Cabo-Verdiana de Luta Contra a Violência Baseada no Género as well as an ad hoc survey that the dialogue participants decided to launch so as to supplement the lack of official data, served to shed light on the situation of a social group that is usually ignored due to its belonging to the informal sector. Moreover, by complementing existing data with additional evidence about the sector, the project prompted the National Institute of Statistics to reconsider its data collection methods to better reflect the reality of domestic workers.
Not only in the Philippines and in Cabo Verde, but also in Georgia, Kyrgyzstan or Mongolia, the participatory work conducted by the stakeholders in the initial stages of the INSPIRED+ project culminated in the joint approval of a set of Policy Indicators that reflected the concerns of the different organisations and institutions involved in the process. Far from being a mere technical issue –which is what most people tend to think upon hearing the word “indicator”– the selection of policy indicators has important political consequences, as the indicators in question reflect the priorities of the policy at stake and, in turn, justify the allocation of resources to achieve the targets that are linked to those priorities.
Moreover, the fulfilment of the “accountability” requirement introduced by the eligibility criterion nº 4 of the new EU Budget Support Guidelines –“Transparency and Oversight of the Budget”– has more chances of succeeding if civil society has a say in the choice of the policy indicators that condition disbursements by the EU to partner country governments, and not just a mere oversight role. After all, trust is unlikely to develop between domestic officials who constantly feel on the defensive and civil society organisations that focus exclusively on inspecting their performance.
This opens another opportunity for donors to promote trust among domestic stakeholders, as in most cases the disbursement of the different tranches of budget support programmes is directly linked to the fulfilment of specific targets, which are assessed through the aforementioned policy indicators. Country ownership in the widest sense is enhanced when those policy indicators are not agreed by the government and the donor on a bilateral basis, but when other players and in particular civil society organisations representing the interests of the final beneficiaries also have a say in the process.