Resolving Community Conflicts and Problems

Public Deliberation and Sustained Dialogue

Roger Lohmann, Jon Van Til

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780231525282
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

Public deliberation and group discussion can strengthen the foundations of civil society, even when the groups engaged in debate share a history of animosity. Scholars have begun to study the dialogue sustaining these conversations, especially its power to unite and divide groups and individuals. The twenty-four essays in this collection analyze public exchanges and the nature of sustained dialogue within the context of race relations, social justice, ethnic conflicts, public-safety issues, public management, community design, and family therapy. They particularly focus on college campuses and the networks of organizations and actors that have found success there. Open discussion may seem like an idealistic if not foolhardy gesture in such milieus, yet in fact the practice proves crucial to establishing and reinforcing civic harmony.

SECTION I

BASIC STATEMENTS

Introduction

SUSTAINED DIALOGUE AND PUBLIC DELIBERATION are two of the most important attempts to take the next steps toward more deliberative democracy in government and society. In this section, five sets of authors offer their perspectives on the basic role and position of public conversation in modern life.

In the first “basic statement” in this section, coeditor Jon Van Til expands upon the theme stated in his opening sentence: “Sustained dialogue and public deliberation are forms of structured human interaction that address, name, and frame issues of mutual concern.” Harold Saunders and Priya Parker lay out the fundamentals of the sustained dialogue perspective as it has developed through the work of the International Institute for Sustained Dialogue. In a second, related chapter, Saunders and Parker discuss a wide variety of local, campus, and international applications of sustained dialogue undertaken by groups associated with IISD. David Robinson ties thoughts on the deliberation and dialogue frame into another, contemporary framework of social capital from the perspective of his practice in Wellington, New Zealand. While there are numerous published studies of social capital, Robinson reports here on what is likely the first study to examine intergroup efforts at sustained dialogue in that context. In a paper originally written for another context and first published here, Lisa Bedinger expands upon the connection between sustained dialogue and higher education. In the last statement in this section, coeditor Roger A. Lohmann and Nancy Lohmann explore the long record of social work involvement with fundamental ideas of deliberative democracy in organizations and communities.

1

THE STRUCTURE OF SUSTAINED DIALOGUE AND PUBLIC DELIBERATION

Jon Van Til

SUSTAINED DIALOGUE and public deliberation are forms of structured human interaction that address, name, and frame issues of mutual concern. These approaches involve processes of deliberative democracy, or public talk, wherein citizen participants engage in designed and moderated discussions with the goal of increasing understanding and reducing conflict among themselves and the solidary groups to which they may belong.

Two major forms of such interaction are specifically identified as “sustained dialogue,” as developed by Harold Saunders and colleagues at the Kettering Foundation and the International Institute for Sustained Dialogue, and “public deliberation,” as developed by David Mathews and colleagues at the Kettering Foundation and the National Issues Forums. Other forms of sustained dialogue and public deliberation are as old as human society itself and have been practiced within traditional communities, town meetings, community workshops, and countless other locales within the commons or third spaces of society.

Dialogue requires a belief that it may succeed. Paolo Freire makes this point when he writes: “Dialogue cannot exist … in the absence of a profound love for the world and for people. The naming of the world, which is an act of creation and re-creation, is not possible if it is not infused with love” ([1970] 1973, 77–78). Harold Saunders, who named the process of sustained dialogue following on his experience as a U.S. State Department official participating in “shuttle diplomacy” between the leaders of Israel and Egypt, writes: “It is in th(e) human process, not in the official negotiating room, that conflictual relationships change” (1999, 5).

SUSTAINED DIALOGUE: BRIDGING DEEPER CONFLICTS

Communication among human beings enmeshed in deep and longstanding conflicts rooted in ethnicity, culture, and historical violence is often Hobbesian in nature: nasty, brutish, and short. It often takes a third party to convince individuals caught in the net of noise and hatred that entering into dialogue can be in both their interests.

Thus it was in 1974 that Secretary of State Henry Kissinger led a team of American diplomats in the task of creating an understanding between the leaders of Israel and its Arab neighbors. For three years, Kissinger and his associates, including an assistant secretary of state named Harold Saunders, shuttled between Tel Aviv, Cairo, and other Arab capitals in an emerging “peace process” that culminated in 1977 in a historic speech by the Egyptian president to the Israeli parliament. Capped by President Jimmy Carter’s Camp David accords in 1978 and the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty in 1979, this was the official peace process—a diplomatic and mediation activity of governments.

BOX 1.1

Stage One: Deciding to Engage

• Find willing and appropriate participants

• Agree to meet

• Reach an understanding of the nature, purpose, and rules of the dialogue

Stage 2: Mapping and Naming

• Set the tone and habits of the dialogue

• Set out the main problems that affect relationships among the participants

• Identify all significant relationships responsible for problems

Stage 3: Probing Problems and Relationships

• Probe specific problems in depth

• Frame choices among approaches

• Weigh choices to set a general direction for action

Stage 4: Scenario Building

• List obstacles to change

• Design steps to address these obstacles

• Identify people who can take these steps

Stage 5: Acting Together

• Decide whether the situation in the community can be solved by steps designated in stage 4

• Identify what resources and capacities can be used to take them

• Take steps

When he left government, Saunders began more than two decades of work in nonofficial dialogue—what he later called “the public peace process,” a continuing dialogue among citizens in the policy-influencing community outside of the government. As he cochaired a task force of the Dartmouth Conference in the 1980s, an ongoing dialogue between nongovernmental leaders in the United States and the Soviet Union, he came to the recognition that “citizens talking in depth together can become a microcosm of their communities, experiencing a change in relationships and then learning to design political actions and interactions that can change their larger bodies politic” (1999, 6). In the 1990s, Saunders named the processes he had participated in “sustained dialogue,” identifying a process of five stages by which enmity and suspicion become transformed into understanding and accommodation (see chapters 2 and 3 of this volume). Box 1.1 shows Saunders’s stages of sustained dialogue.

PUBLIC DELIBERATION: THE WORK OF ISSUE FORUMS

Saunders developed his writings on sustained dialogue during his service as director of international affairs with the Kettering Foundation, a research organization devoted to social innovation. During that same period, Kettering staffers, under the leadership of foundation president David Mathews, formerly president of the University of Alabama and secretary of the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, played a central role in the development of National Issues Forums.

Issues forums build on concepts of deliberative democracy, seeking to create a basis for shared discussion and increased understanding among citizens on specific issues of public concern. Critical to this process is the careful naming and framing of public issues by the participants in the issues forums. In the naming process, an issue is selected for exploration, and its definition is crafted to reflect the concerns of involved citizens and to assure a full and fair consideration of the issue and its ramifications. In the framing process, the most central aspect of public deliberation, three or four principal options for responding to the issue are developed, assuring that the forum will address the issue in a full and fair manner. Each approach reflects something that people value. The tension within and between approaches fuels the deliberation and enriches the weighing of pros and cons for each approach.

BOX 1.2

THE NATURE OF THE ISSUE FORUM

Deliberation is different. It is neither a partisan argument where opposing sides try to win nor a casual conversation conducted with polite civility. Public deliberation is a means by which citizens make tough choices about basic purposes and directions for their communities and their country. It is a way of reasoning and talking together.

National Issues Forum deliberations are framed in terms of three or four options for dealing with an issue—never just two polar alternatives. Framing an issue in this way discourages the diatribes in which people lash out at one another with simplistic arguments.

To deliberate is to weigh the benefits and costs of various options based on what is truly valuable to us. Think of the way people used to weigh gold on an old-fashioned scale. How much will each consequence tip the scale? What are the costs and benefits of doing what we want to do? Answering these questions requires a setting in which we can explore and test ideas about how to act.

Deliberation also involves weighing the views of others. Careful listening increases the chances that our choices will be sound because a wide range of people have pooled their experiences and insights. No one person or small group of people has all the experience and insight needed to decide what is best. That is why it is essential for an inclusive group of citizens to combine their perspectives.

While we can’t know for certain that we have made the right decision until we have acted, deliberation forces us to anticipate consequences and ask ourselves whether we would be willing to accept the worst possible case.

Deliberation is looking before we leap.

(MATTHEWS AND MCAFEE 2003, 10)

WHY DIALOGUE AND DELIBERATION?

The achievement of true dialogue is an ancient goal of human beings. The sacred texts of world religions speak of the beauty of ongoing understanding and communication among brothers and sisters, lovers, children and parents, neighbors, communities, and nations, and between humans and the deity. The excerpt in box 1.3, developed by a group of Californians of Jewish and Palestinian background who meet in one another’s living rooms, expresses the aspirations of those who seek dialogue as a way of increasing social understanding and achieving peace and reconciliation.

BOX 1.3

WHY DIALOGUE?

Beginning with compassionate listening, dialogue can dissolve boundaries between people, heal relationships, and release unprecedented creativity. Dialogue can result in a wellspring of new social intelligence previously unimagined. Dialogue moves us out of our isolated existence and beyond our restricted views.

We begin to understand diversity in perception, in meaning, in expression—in people. With this authentic speaking and authentic listening to each other, to Earth, to Life, together we can invent a way of living that works for the benefit of all.

Dialogue Is Not Debate

• Dialogue causes introspection on one’s own position. Debate causes critique of the other position.

• Dialogue opens the possibility of reaching a better solution than any of the original solutions. Debate defends one’s own positions as the best solution and excludes other solutions.

• Dialogue creates an open-minded attitude: an openness to being wrong and an openness to change. Debate creates a closed-minded attitude, a determination to be right.

• In dialogue, one submits one’s best thinking, knowing that other people’s reflections will help improve it rather than destroy it. In debate, one submits one’s best thinking and defends it against challenge to show that it is right.

• Dialogue calls for temporarily suspending one’s beliefs. Debate calls for investing wholeheartedly in one’s beliefs.

• In dialogue, one searches for basic agreements. In debate, one searches for glaring differences.

• In dialogue, one searches for strengths in the other positions. In debate,...