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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
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On this page
  1. The INSPIRED Toolkit
  2. The tools

7. Workshops and focus groups

Type of tool: Capacity development and Trust building.

Purpose

Workshops provide time and space for the stakeholders to meet and discuss, negotiate, learn and/or analyse different aspects of the selected policy area with a view to achieving a pre-defined goal or milestone within the consensus-building process. This orientation to results is crucial for workshops to deliver concrete outcomes in order to progressively build trust and confidence among the stakeholders involved.

Rationale

Stakeholders are to gather and work together to deliver some sort of joint appraisal of a given aspect of the problem at stake, usually by jointly analysing different policy choices and assessing those alternatives that would better adapt to the political, social and economic context of their country.

Workshops should be organized on a smaller scale than public events and with a focus on deliberation, so as to give the participants a better understanding of the perspectives of the other stakeholders, while allowing those same stakeholders to challenge their own views.

Consequently, workshops are designed not so much as a tool to “negotiate” or “reach agreements” than as a means to improve the relationships among the dialogue participants through joint learning. Thanks to their deliberative nature, workshops can provide the participants with additional knowledge on the policy issues under discussion, which may in turn open new opportunities for consensus (or unearth buried conflicts, a situation for which the facilitator needs to be ready and that will require strong dialogue skills to reconduct the debate towards constructive solutions).

On an even smaller scale, focus groups feature a guided discussion among a small group of people led by a facilitator to understand their attitudes and views on some of the policy issues at stake. Focus groups can provide useful information on how stakeholders respond to particular questions. However, being short in terms of timing, the depth of discussion remains rather limited. Such dialogue events are not an end in themselves, but the means to achieve a pre-defined goal or milestone within the consensus-building process.

Outcomes

  • Ownership over the dialogue process enhanced.

  • Preconceived assumptions are either confirmed or debunked.

  • Interests of the different stakeholders are resurfaced and expressed as legitimate concerns.

  • Potential incentives for change are explored.

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Last updated 1 year ago