Three categories

All the INSPIRED tools can be categorized according to the outcomes that they intend to deliver, although very often they will have a collateral impact on other areas. For instance, a training workshop that is designed with a mixed audience, bringing together civil society activists and public officials or private sector representatives, will not only improve the capacities of the participants, but could also contribute to building trust amongst them and to promoting further cooperation through joint assignments. Each of the tools is therefore presented with an icon that refers to the kind of outcomes that it can deliver. They are as follows:

Capacity development

For any policy reform to succeed and last, those actors in charge of implementing it need to be capacitated in terms of fulfilling their expected role. This can seldom be achieved overnight; on the contrary, it is usually the result of a long process of capacity development that needs to adapt to the realities and constraints of the policy at stake. More importantly, capacity development interventions should not be designed to tackle policy actors in an isolated manner, but rather as parts of a whole – the Policy Network – that need to understand the overall functioning of the different pieces that conform to the system.

Timing: These tools are preferably mobilised during the first phase (Collective Assessment) to ensure that all participants are in terms of engaging proactively in the dialogue and of contributing to the Participatory Policy Assessment. They also stretch along the next two phases, albeit usually with less emphasis.

Trust building

Being the lifeblood of any dialogue process, trust needs to be built, nurtured and expanded by means of specific activities. To put it simply, it cannot be left up to luck, but has to be actively taken care of by the dialogue facilitator, who can make use of a number of tools and techniques specially designed for this purpose. More often than not, activities aiming at building trust are embedded into other activities with complementary objectives: learning, knowledge sharing, even campaigning can be designed in such a way that trust-building becomes wired into its logic of intervention, operating in the background and delivering results that are better left implicit.

Timing: Trust needs to be built and nurtured from the outset and all along the whole process, but related tools are most often deployed during the consensus-building phase. In any case, every tool needs to take into account its potential impact on the trust relationship developed by the stakeholders and factor in some kind of risk analysis to avoid any negative effect.

Cooperation and networking

Effective policy implementation requires high levels of coordination among all the actors involved, be it from a technical perspective –according to their capacities and mandates– or a territorial one –depending on their geographic scope. The collaborative dynamics that the INSPIRED process instils amongst stakeholders aims at progressively implanting a culture of cooperation and a more efficient division of labour to achieve policy change.

Timing: The collaborative dynamics developed along the process are more prone to yield fruits at its end, during the Monitoring and Alignment phase, once the Roadmap for Reform states the agreed objectives and delineates the direction to take. At that point in the process is when stakeholders can benefit the most from tools related to cooperation and networking.