During the last journey of the Workshop on Assessing the Impact of Democratic Dialogues, President Carter and Ms. Rebeca Grynspan held a session with the group. Elena Díez presented the main findings of this workshop:

This meeting is about democratic dialogue; and democratic dialogue as one instrument for societal change and as a tool for conflict prevention, a tool for peace. Of course that there are other approaches like mediation and negotiation, but here we are dealing with multi-stakeholder dialogues that bring together different sectors, stakeholders in society who are part of the problem and who can be part of the solution.

Our point of departure yesterday morning was a set of diverse questions and dilemmas. An actually what we did was to go deeper into our questions and dilemmas. Our intention was to build a common understanding of evaluation: How can we measure impact? How do we know a dialogue is working? How do we measure success? According to whom? What needs to be assessed? How can we conduct evaluations that are meaningful –both to internal and external stakeholders—be them governments, practitioners, international organizations or dialogue supporters?

So what we did was to cluster six sets of inquiry questions. (i) What are our collectively best practices and shared learning? (ii) How do we convince others that dialogue is good? This includes international organizations and governments. (iii) What is the role of dialogue in conflict resolution? (iv) What kind of evaluation methodologies are the most useful? (v) How can we increase ownership by decision-makers to make the effort sustainable? (vi) And we explored the close relation between dialogue and societal change.

There were also some dilemmas set too. For instance: What is the purpose of doing an evaluation? Is it learning to improve our practice of dialogue or is it a matter of external accountability, for instance for external organizations who may be wondering “Should I be doing this?” or “Is it worth it to go ahead with this?

So far, we have the following findings:

• There is a strong relationship between dialogue and power. Through dialogue, existing power relations may be changed as many more persons participate in the process of developing alternatives to their problems. Dialogue allows many voices to be heard and it may be a tool for power redistribution.
• External actors such as donors can play a key role, not only in supporting the preparatory or the dialogue phase itself, but also the post-dialogue phase. This support is crucial to monitor the impacts of following dialogue and the implementation phase. It is important to reach an agreement, but it is not sufficient. Implementation of agreements is crucial for keeping trust in dialogue and democracy.
• Evaluation processes could be stronger if they were more dialogic. We usually come into evaluations with an external team, but participant’s inputs in terms of what needs to be evaluated, how and with whom, provides opportunities to assess issues that may not have been thought initially by external evaluation teams.
• Evaluation efforts should take into account at least the three dimensions of societal learning and change processes: the personal dimension, the organizational dimension and the societal dimension. Dialogues bring about short and long term impacts on those realms, and they often change the individual’s mental maps, or their relations with each other, and their societies.
• Dialogue can be seen as a new political culture to address complex social issues. We cannot continue using Cartesian and linear approaches to dialogue because social complex problems require another set of tools and instruments.
• There are no unique frameworks for conducting evaluations. Evaluations should respond to specific social, political and historical contexts. What works in one place may not work in other places; or what needs to be evaluated in one place may be different according to the specific conditions that are found in each country.
• And finally, many stakeholders must be somehow engaged or at least acquainted with the process in order to create ownership, and public opinion must be broadly reached out with clear and powerful messages.

Following this journey, we expect to have a clearer idea of how these dialogues relate to other conflict prevention approaches, and how can we make dialogues more effective to really achieve a world with less violent conflicts and stronger democracies.