Yesterday we had to imagine that we were consultants commissioned by a municipality to design a participatory process over a year to handle a complex problem.
In groups, we designed a participatory process that would be run during a year. We had to think about a purpose depending on the study case we received and consider the possible participants involved.
Although the whole design process was a bit improvised, and expectations weren’t very high because it was just an exercise to develop some understanding of what sort of things you need to consider in a collaborative process, groups put effort on it and we presented the proposals to the class.
For example, in the group I belonged to, we aimed to build collaborative capacity among the different social groups and associations in order to reach a collaborative solution for a controversial project of building a road in the area. We had to consider issues like who and how will stakeholders participate in the collaborative process, representativeness of the groups, stages in which they would be involved, and activities in the process. One groupmate had the idea of naming our presentation “The Road to the Road“ and we agreed on it because it sounded quite poetic, doesn’t it?
Some references on methods for participation: method data bases such as http://www.communityplanning.net/ , http://dialogguiden.se/ or a handbooks such as https://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:768134/FULLTEXT01.pdf