Workshops

Purpose

The purpose of organising workshops is to 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.

Inner logic

Based on the Stakeholders gather in a space and work together to achieve a result, mainly by jointly analysing different policy choices and studying those alternatives that would seem appropriate to the political, social and economic context of their country.

Workshops can also be organized on a smaller scale and with a focus on deliberation to give the participants a better understanding of the perspectives of the other stakeholders while allowing those same stakeholders to challenge their own views.

As a result, this process may improve the relationships among the dialogue participants. Finally, deliberative workshops can provide the participants with additional knowledge on the policy issues under discussion, which may in turn open new spaces for consensus. 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 the policy area in focus. 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.

Every event should be embedded within the programming document adopted by the stakeholders at the end of the Collective Assessment phase. However, the Hosting Structure and stakeholders should have the flexibility to adapt their initial planning to any unforeseen circumstances that may –and probably will– arise during this phase, and dialogue events should, of course, reflect those changes.

Each dialogue event should focus on clearly stated objectives and expected results, which should not be extremely complex or ambitious in order to allow the Hosting Structure to monitor the discussions without disturbing the nascent trust-dynamics among the participants. It is important that the stakeholders themselves agree collectively on the objectives and expected results of each dialogue event, as this will strengthen their ownership over the process.

References