Basic Issues Of This Blog: Organized Dialogue, Societal Change, Procedural Politics, and Professional Facilitators

This blog will be concerned with societal change through Organized Dialogue, as provided by professional facilitators. As a political phenomenon, I call that procedural politics.

It is based on a model of Organized Dialogue (OD), which is the most useful model to understand participatory procedures. ODs, in turn, are based on models of dialogue by Buber, Bohm, and Lueken. Practical examples of ODs are multistakeholder processes, Large Group Interventions, or political / public mediation processes, cutting through the many possible perspectives on participatory processes. All of these examples encompass a lot more than just deliberative discourse. Indeed, ODs are a comprehensive expression of Procedural Politics as collective public problem resolution - transformational participatory procedures at the heart of "governance".

While I describe OD at length in my dissertation, and will set forth its basic tenets in this blog, I still need to explore models of societal change, and align them with my model of OD. I thus hope to be able to make a valuable contribution both to issues and networks such as the Generative Change Community, the social entrepreneurs and changemakers, or the German group Procedere which I co-founded in 2005, and enter into a dialogue with the Deliberative Democracy Consortium and other groups.

For political theorists
As a practitioner and political theorist, I'm concerned with a scientific foundation of participatory procedures. This is a necessary step to establish the design of participatory procedures as a profession, which in turn I believe to be a necessity for successful sustainable development procedures, and a prerequisite for a strong global civil society. Somebody just needs to be able to "do governance", that is, shape collective interaction processes between representatives of different sectors (or sides) of a collective problem.

I think current scientific models of cooperation, or deliberative discourse are not sufficient to capture what participatory procedures are really about. I also believe, for certain epistomological reasons, that typical analytical models are not fit for practitioners. Political science, to me, needs to be the systematic workshop of political action. My political theory is practical philosophy in a pragmatistic mode, and my long term goal is to help establish a Theory of Procedural Politics. I'll talk about that in this blog as well.

The basic question of Procedural Politics is: "How are we to proceed?" It can be seen in two perspectives: 1) the analytical perspective, which holds that politics is a process, and political practice a meta-process of political procedures; and 2) the prescriptive perspective, which is basically an action theory that lays out political action in the form of (professionally) competent, creative, both methodic and strategic procedures. The typical critique of rational action theory can be avoided by assuming a pragmatistic view that distinguishes (with Clausewitz) between purpose ("whereto?") and targets/goals ("what?"), thereby allowing intentional trajectorial action, rather than teleological action.

For practitioners
As for the practitioner's side, ODs are an issue for political consultancy, particularly in regard to Political Change Leadership, Process Providing, and the design of models of participatory methods and strategies. As the great site on MSPs at Wageningen University states:

"Practitioners and policy makers who wish to use or learn from designing or facilitating multi-stakeholder and social learning processes currently are confronted with four constraints:

1. The lack of a coherent yet practical conceptual framework that enables potential facilitators to make sense of the diverse terminology and differing conceptual dimensions.
2. Limited practical examples and lessons from experience presented in a way that is sufficiently analytical to be useful in other contexts.
3. The lack of facilitation skills, experience and confidence to design and implement appropriate and context specific processes.
4. The lack of comprehensive and integrated resource materials appropriate to the facilitation of multi-stakeholder and social learning processes."

I fully agree with that analysis. I offer OD as a simple and coherent conceptual framework that allows the comprehensive analysis of different participatory procedures as case studies. It serves as a starting point to identify skills, and more importantly, competences for the design of participatory procedures, cutting through the existing mesh of conflicting categories, and assigning different perspectives their respective place in relation to others.

I will also discuss procedural competences, and training for facilitators. Basically, I rely on theories of professionalism, and cognitive schema theory to design learning experiences for practitioners of Organized Dialogue. I also rely on ideas about the creativity of action put forth by Hans Joas in the tradition of John Dewey and other pragmatists.

I think professionalization processes need to be consolidated, both by self-organization in the field, and by a scientific discipline that corresponds to the professionialization. In my view, that discipline ought to be a special kind of politicial science... but I'm open for discussion here.

What do you think - what are your open questions in regard to the design and facilitation of participative procedures? What scientific discipline are you looking for for systematic some orientation?