Participants agreed public dialogue facilitates redistribution of power within the very dialogue process itself. This is, the way public multi-stakeholder dialogues are convened and carried out facilitates more horizontal and intense interaction and exposure between powerful stakeholders and other actors; the latter being those affected by the issue addressed, but not having neither many opportunities nor spaces to engage in public deliberation on that specific issue. Nevertheless, this redistribution of power within the dialogue process does not always derive in a permanent shift in power dynamics as a result of what is accomplished or agreed to be done once the dialogue is over. Participants explained that insofar as elites and powerful decision makers are not fully and throughout engaged in the process, the gap between initial public deliberation and subsequent political decision making will not be bridged. And thus multi-stakeholder public dialogues may fall in disgrace and be disregarded as a valid tool/process for accomplishing or at least supporting societal change. Moreover this is true in countries suffering from long rooted socio-political conflicts, undergoing peace building processes and/or having weak democratic institutions which many times happen to be driven by post-colonial political cultures and elites.

This finding brought into consideration the importance of the role public dialogues have in strengthening representative and transitional democracies. This by means of complementing and enriching the mechanisms and spaces through which general public and more precisely key stakeholders can come together, learn from and about each other, and arrive at a shared understanding and consensus on how to better tackle the controversial issues that brought them together in the first place.

Issues on representation where also commented and so the need for further guaranteeing dialogue participants are accountable to and are effectively canalizing the voices and interests of those who they claim to be representing. Decentralizing public dialogues down to sub-national levels was understood as a mechanism for democratizing dialogue itself (moving beyond elites’ dialogue) as well as bridging the gap between the representatives and their constituencies. On the other hand, bringing public dialogues closer to lay citizens and sub-national stakeholders was seen as a sound mechanism for greater ownership and broader acceptance of the outcomes achieved and hence of the actions to be taken later on.

In sum, participants understood public dialogue practice both as a powerful process for societal change and as a useful tool for conflict resolution. However, for this to be true, democratic dialogues must strongly and actively consider power dynamics within and around the dialogic space; so to guarantee, to the extent possible, the sustainability and positive impacts of further actions emerging from the public deliberation. Finally, these reflections open up the ground for further inquiry and research on the implications these findings have as regards to the role the dialogue community may play when dealing with power relations in public dialogic processes.