Facilitating Process - Training

Building Alliances

Public, private and civil actors increasingly engage in dialogue and partnerships to contribute to social-economic development and poverty reduction. Multistakeholder dialogue and partnerships are often part of national consultation processes on Poverty Reduction Strategies (PRSPs) or sector-wide policies. However it is also common that multi-stakeholder dialogue and partnerships are needed to solve urgent local, regional or national problems that affect broad sectors of society. Without partnerships, actors are left to operate in isolation.

With unfocussed dialogue, people waste time in interaction without tangible results. In this course you learn to analyse the context of an enabling environment or institutional constraints for dialogue and partnerships. Based upon this analysis you will learn to choose who to engage when and how in dialogue and how to create partnerships that fashion a break-through in social-economic development.

As the civil, public and private sectors move towards each other to develop more encompassing forms of multi-stakeholder co-operation, institutional constraints, such as imbalance of power and conflict of interests need to be tackled, and a stimulating regulatory framework and enabling environment needs to be established.
These conditions are essential to realise the full potential of public, private and civil partnerships. Developing such partnerships requires a careful positioning of key actors within the public sector and regulatory authorities who relate to the private and civil society sector and vice-versa. Multistakeholder co-operation demands accountability and enforceable, transparent rules and regulations.

Public, Private and Civil Partnerships depend upon two essential basic elements:

1. An enabling policy environment in which conflicts of interests and imbalance in power can be mitigated and multi-stakeholder dialogue can be fostered;
2. A sound dialogue and proper design of partnerships to enable realisation of goals of common interest.

Participants
Senior policy makers in ministries and regulatory authorities, managers in agencies for private sector development or civil society strengthening, business leaders, managers of NGO 's and independent advisers or facilitators of multi-stakeholder dialogue and partnership processes.

Course objectives
After this five-day course, you will have acquired skills and instruments for actor-oriented institutional analysis. You will have insights into aspects of enabling and disabling environment for multi-stakeholder dialogue and partnerships. You will have learnt to use tools and skills to facilitate multi-stakeholder dialogue with the purpose to enhance partnerships for socialeconomic
development. You will be able to monitor the quality and progress of partnerships and have gained insight into critical success factors for effective partnerships.

Course contents
This course focuses on the institutional aspects of dialogue and partnerships. We will discuss when to engage which actors around which topic in which forum, and how to create a conducive environment for multi-sector partnerships altogether. In the Process Management course (which can be followed immediately after this course, see page 52) you learn to shape the organisational and operational aspects in order to get the best out of multi-stakeholder dialogue.
In the present course we first review relevant trends and concepts related to the enabling environment of multi-stakeholder dialogue and partnerships. You will be introduced to the Institutional Sector and Organisation Analysis (ISOA) model as a tool to analyse the institutional contexts of multi-stakeholder dialogue. Then we will analyse the characteristics and specific interests of each sector (public, private and civil) in dialogues and partnerships. Based upon concrete case-experiences and lessons learnt, we will derive principles for the design and planning of in multi-stakeholder dialogue and public-private civil partnerships. Next you will exercise some basic skills for effective communication, negotiation and facilitation in multi-stakeholder dialogue. Finally we will pay due attention to monitoring and evaluation of processes of multi-stakeholder dialogue.
Throughout the course you will apply models, tools and skills on cases brought in by the participants themselves. At the end of the course you will use all insights as input for the design and planning of public, private and civil dialogue and partnership processes in your own context.

Course outline

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