Resource Link: www.race-democracy.org

Conversations about Conflict have been hosted on University Campuses, in Churches, schools and community mediation centers across the United States.

Conversation about Conflict is not a training course, it is simply a conversation. The facilitator engages the audience with a set of challenging questions and a few propositions. The resulting dialogue is shaped by the insights and experiences of the participants. The format can be adapted to meet different needs and circumstances, the ideal size of the group is 15.

This program emerged from Search for Common Ground's "Common Ground Partnership," which was launched in 2002.

SFCG developed several useful resources to help people high-quality Conversations about Conflict…

• A Facilitator's Guide can be found at http://www.sfcg.org/resources/training/pdf/facilitatorpdf.pdf
• A Guide to Conflict Resolution can be found at http://www.sfcg.org/resources/training/brochure1.doc
• And information about different conflict styles can be found at http://www.sfcg.org/resources/training/conversation_styles.html

If you have questions about this material, need some guidance in facilitating the Conversation, or would like to partner with SFCG on this initiative or host a Conversation, you are encouraged to contact Carole Frampton, Outreach Director, at cframpton@sfcg.org.

Resource Link: www.sfcg.org/resources/training/resources_conversation.html

Carole Frampton, Outreach Director

cframpton@sfcg.org

202-265-4300

1601 Connecticut Ave. NW, #200

Washington

DC

20009-1035

Learn more and purchase the workbook, authored by Thomas R. Flanagan and Kenneth C. Bausch, PhD at https://www.createspace.com/3571032.

The exploration begins with the challenges faced by the founders of the Club of Rome circa 1970. The founding prospectus identified the problematique underlying global sustainability as a set of 49 continuous critical problems. These interacting and entangled problems create what more recently has been called a wicked mess. They are not solvable in isolation because fixing one of them will likely further complicate others.

Considering the full set of problems causes individuals to feel overwhelmed. For that reason, the structured dialogic design divides the challenge of understanding the problem up among members of the group, and then has them interact as a community of “experts” in their assigned problem areas. In a step wise process, this group of experts sequentially clarifies meanings, explores similarities among ideas, and identifies relationships between ideas. In this fashion, the group avoids becoming trapped in a reductionist approach to problem solving and enters into a communal understanding of the complex situation.

Readers who wish to participate in an exploration of the problematique underlying global sustainability are invited to join a group through the Institute for 21st Century Agoras. In addition to the book itself, readers will be provided access to a software tool for tracking meanings that are uncovered, prompting decisions during deliberation, and then also presenting outcomes of those decisions as an easily read “tree.”

A Democratic Approach to Sustainable Futures builds capacities for understanding and resolving highly complex problems in collaboration. It is a “self help” workbook for communities sensing urgency for starting today to build their futures.

The authors, Drs. Tom Flanagan and Ken Bausch, are systems scientists who each have over 20 years of experience in complex systems work. The inspiration for the workbook comes from their collaborative online teaching with Janet McIntyre and her students at Flinders University in Australia.

From the Preface by Ambassador John W. McDonald:

A Democratic Approach to Sustainable Futures: A Workbook for Addressing the Global Problematique requires students to guide their own learning. This is one of the most effective means of learning, and students following this workbook can expect to feel like they have accomplished significant gains at the end.  This is an excellent workbook for serious students who are not satisfied by simple theory or impractical practice.  This is the book to prepare for the messy, multi-layered, multi-faceted, personal, political, real world of applied global activism.

David Loye, award-winning author of The Healing of a Nation and Darwin’s Lost Theory

:

To link the hopeful new wave of students fed up with the status quo and wanting to work for change with an effective method for doing this is one of the most urgent tasks of our time.   This need is powerfully addressed by Flanagan and Bausch in A Democratic Approach to Sustainable Futures: A Workbook for Addressing the Global Problematique.  The key to their approach is to at last provide the new activist wave with a computer-aided way to effectively deal with the complexities that currently so quickly—and tragically—turn too many of them off.

Alexander N. Christakis, Founder,  Institute for 21st Century Agoras

Flanagan and Bausch have offered humankind a real gift by revisiting forty years later the original prospectus of the Club of Rome on the “Predicament of Mankind.”  They managed to excavate its architectural wisdom and enable us all to internalize it by rediscovering individually and collectively the Global Problematique.  People from all walks of life studying this workbook will be able to appreciate our contemporary predicament and the challenges of authentic, participative, and sustainable democracy.

Resource Link: www.wisedemocracy.org

The manual can be ordered from Jim Rough and Associates by emailing seminars@tobe.net.

From Joanna’s introduction…

This question-based guide is designed for anyone who plans to host a dialogue gathering—whether for a brief afternoon or an extended series of meetings over time.

After years of convening dialogues through SFU’s Dialogue Program I have learned that dialogue is a journey of inquiry that often produces surprising and inventive outcomes.

The experience seems to work best when thoughtful convenors take the time to attend to their plans with care. As hosts, our work is to create a safe space for deep listening and meaningful talking. It is both a responsibility and an honour to do so.

The questions in this guide are organized around four components — ones that seasoned gardeners will know are important:

1) Prepare 2) Plant 3) Cultivate 4) Harvest.

Keep these disarmingly simple ways in mind as you prepare the ground for fruitful talk and meaningful outcomes.

Based on decades of research and experience concerning how average citizens think and talk about issues, Public Agenda’s Choicework Discussion Starters are designed to help groups and communities talk productively about public problems. Public Agenda’s Choicework guides and Discussion Starters outline several different approaches to solving specific public policy problems, along with the pros, cons and trade-offs of each choice. They use everyday language, not professional jargon, and focus on the kinds of concerns and values that non-experts can readily understand.

Resource Link: http://www.publicagenda.org/files/pdf/Choicework_Parental_Involvement.pdf

This guide moves beyond the traditional discussions of transparency as a means for good government, and considers the real life logistics of implementation for a federal agency, as well as the benefits that an agency may incur from developing a transparency program that fits their mission and improves their internal capacity.

Read the Executive Summary and download the full Guide here: http://openforumfoundation.org/2011/10/03/owning-transparency/

Submitted via the Add-a-Resource form by Wayne Moses Burke, founder and executive director of the Open Forum Foundation. Track him down on the http://open4m.org/ website.

Governments and citizens initiate these programs to (i) promote public learning and active citizenship, (ii) achieve social justice through improved policies and resources allocation, and (iii) reform the administrative apparatus.

Participating Budgeting programs confront Brazilian political legacies of clientelism, social exclusion, and corruption by making the budgetary process transparent, open, and public. By moving the locus of decision-making from the private offices of politicians and technocrats to public forums, these public forums foster transparency. Participatory budgeting programs act as “citizenship schools” as engagement empowers citizens to better understand their rights and duties as citizens as well as the responsibilities of government. Citizens, it is hoped, will offer helpful and creative solutions to the myriad social and economic problems found in Brazil’s urban centers and small towns. Citizens learn to negotiate among themselves and vis-à-vis the government over the distribution of scarce resources and public policy priorities.

It is important to keep in mind that there is no precise or exact model for PB programs. While there are similar tenets and institutional mechanisms, PB programs are structured in response to the particular political, social, and economic environment of each city or state. While alluding to the differences, this report will present a synthesis of the most representative cases.

The presumption of this guide is that the tools and institutional means developed in Brazil are, in small or large part, applicable elsewhere. Different municipalities and states across Brazil are adapting variations of the PB programs. These programs have been successfully implemented in the wealthy Southern region (Porto Alegre), the industrialized São Paulo metropolitan region (Santo Andre), and in the Northern Amazon region (Belém). It is our expectation that municipalities, states, and regional governments in diverse corners of the world can draw upon this experience to develop tools that link budget, policymaking, and citizen participation. Finally, it is our expectation that NGOs and local political activists can draw upon these experiences to promote formal PB programs or informal monitoring programs inspired by the PB example.

This paper is divided into nine sections.

Section One: Introduction

Section Two: Basic Conditions

What are the basic conditions under which Participatory Budgeting programs have been implemented?

PB programs tend to be implemented by local and state governments. The elected governments tend to be progressive, with a focus on citizen participation and social justice.

Section Three: Rules of the Game

What are the rules of the game? What are the specific ways that citizens are incorporated into the policymaking process?

PB programs are based on a complex set of rules that clearly define the responsibilities of governments and participants. The rules regulate meetings and decision-making processes that allocate scarce resources.

Section Four: Social Policies and Public Works Projects

What types of public works and policies do PB participants select?

PB participants select specific public works and prioritize general social spending in two distant policymaking tracks. “PB public works” and “PB thematics.”

Section Five: Actors, Motivations, and Strategies

What are the motivations for different actors to participate?

Local governments, citizens, voluntary associations, NGOs, and the business community have different reasons for supporting and opposing PB. Their incentives to participate are often quite distinct.

Section Six: Administrative Reform

How is the administrative apparatus reformed to account for the new policymaking system?

Governments must gain control of the administrative apparatus to provide information, to support new types of technical plans and programs, and to implement selected projects.

Section Seven: Limitations

What are the limitations?

PB programs provide new opportunities for participation. Yet, the impact and the consequences may be limited to local policymaking. PB programs can also be manipulated by politicians, thus undermining advances.

Section Eight: Promising Results

What are the most promising results?

The dissemination of PB programs throughout Brazil has led to a variety of interesting and promising results. This section analyzes the most promising results by looking at how they (i) promote public learning and active citizenship, (ii) achieve social justice through improved policies and resources allocation, and (iii) reform the administrative apparatus.

Section Nine: Can Participatory Programs Travel Beyond Brazil?

Can Participatory Budgeting Programs be implemented in other countries? In other regions of the world?

There are several questions and issues that governments, NGOs and civil society actors should address while contemplating if PB would be an appropriate policymaking process for their political and social environment.

Resource Link: http://ncdd.org/rc/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/Wampler_PBGuide.pdf

The following January 7, 2008 article by Florence Olsen from Federal Computer Week provides a nice overview of the Guide and of why public and corporate managers need to build skills in collaborative problem-solving and conflict management.

IBM Study Points to Need for Negotiating Skills

Some public managers might feel they are ill-suited by temperament and customary practice to sharing power, but new public policy research shows that managers can adapt to changing rules of governance in the public sphere by becoming, in essence, better listeners.

Multiagency collaboration and decision-making demand a new kind of public manager, one skilled in negotiation, bargaining, collaborative problem-solving, conflict management and conflict resolution, according to a new report published by the IBM Center for the Business of Government. Among the managerial attitudes described in the report, adversarial is out, cooperative is in.

Negotiations across organizational lines in which no one person is in command demands a special attitude, said the report’s authors, Rosemary O’Leary, professor of public administration at Syracuse University, and Lisa Bingham, professor of public service at Indiana University at Bloomington. That attitude, they said, must be one of “understanding others when they misunderstand you, consulting others even if they appear not to listen…being non-coercive and not yielding to coercion, and accepting others and their concerns as worthy of consideration.”

The authors said conflict is inevitable when organizations with different missions, organizational cultures and stakeholders are asked to be partners in governance networks that cross traditional jurisdictional boundaries. Managers face that situation as more public services are delivered through networks of federal, state and local government agencies, nonprofit and for-profit corporations.

Collaborative public management has proved successful in several high-profile cases, such as ending apartheid in South Africa and signing the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, according to the report. The authors said President Clinton believed so strongly in collaborative problem solving that he signed an executive order in 1993 that directed all federal agencies to use it to increase union involvement in agency decision-making. President Bush later rescinded the executive order.

The researchers found that collaborative managers view others as negotiating partners, honestly disclose what is important to them and willingly revise their positions when presented with good options. Collaborative managers look for ways “to expand the pie” rather than fight for the largest piece.

Learning the language of collaborative management is not difficult, the authors said. Their report offers examples of language that managers should use when negotiating across organizational lines: “What will having X do for you? What difference would it make for you to have X? How would it be helpful or beneficial to get X?”

In addition to such suggestions, the report cites several successful collaborative projects that engage citizens in public policy decisions: the Public Conversations Project, AmericaSpeaks and the Kettering Foundation’s National Issues Forum.

Resource Link: http://www.businessofgovernment.org/sites/default/files/ConflictsCollaborativeNetworks.pdf

Agencies in coming years will face greater fiscal pressures and they will also face increased citizen demands for greater participation in designing and overseeing their policies and programs. Understanding how to most effectively engage citizens in their government will likely increase in importance. Nabatchi hopes this evaluation guide will be a useful framework for government managers at all levels in helping them determine the value of their citizen participation initiatives.

The report can be downloaded from the Center’s website:

http://www.businessofgovernment.org/report/manager%E2%80%99s-guide-evaluating-citizen-participation

If you would like to distribute hard copies of this report to others, please e-mail or call the IBM Center at (202) 551-9342 to request free copies.

Tina Nabatchi, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor in the Department of Public Administration and International Affairs and Faculty Research Associate, PARCC, at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs of Syracuse University.