About the GDP | |
NeedGlobal society has reached a critical juncture in its ability to address the most vital global issues of our time. We are faced today with an array of complex challenges, some social—like hunger and poverty—and some natural or environmental—like climate change and forest depletion. These pressing problems cannot be addressed by applying historically proven solutions, and traditional approaches to developing new solutions do not seem up to the task. In 2002, the Helsinki Process on Globalisation and Democracy described the situation this way:
The challenges of the 21st century demand that we undertake significant shifts in values, norms, belief systems, and worldviews. We must stimulate innovation and deep change at the levels of individuals, groups, organizations, and societies—change that depends upon people’s ability to recognize and transcend their assumptions and models about how the world works and to imagine and adopt new ways of interacting within and across boundaries. There is a widespread, and growing, belief that multi-stakeholder dialogue is the best way to achieve these deep changes. However, our research shows that the capacity for creating dialogic interactions that can integrate diverse perspectives, bridge differences, maintain focus for time periods global change require and foster the necessary innovations remains underdeveloped. The Generative Dialogue Project is addressing that need by assembling a learning community of practitioners who are developing what we call generative dialogic change processes. These are processes that focus on the connection between individual and societal change. They use the transformative power of dialogue to generate the creative energy and collective intelligence that emanate from a personal sense of connection to the whole. Over the course of the project, the community will work together to develop greater process knowledge, advance the application of generative dialogic change processes to pressing global issues, and promote understanding and adaption of these processes across the full range of global problem solving activities. Read more about generative dialogic change HistoryThe Generative Dialogue Project began in 2003 with a dual purpose: to better understand the role of dialogue in multi-stakeholder, global social change initiatives; and to build a community of dialogue practitioners who would work to develop the potential of dialogue for addressing global challenges. Research that informed the GDP Community Launch Starting in 2004, the GDP support team began an intensive research effort to map the use of dialogic change processes in global issue areas. In that research, we engaged in conversations with three different kinds of actors in the global arena: dialogue process experts who are individuals working as facilitators, consultants and action researchers; dialogue promoters such as the UNDP Democratic Dialogue Project, which are organizations encouraging use of dialogue to address issues; and issue owners—global, multi-stakeholder organizations or initiatives that use dialogue to address specific issues—such as youth development and forest sustainability. In identifying process experts and dialogue promoters, we looked as broadly as possible across various disciplines, such as peace building, negotiation, mediation, participatory action research, and leadership development. We also looked in various fields of endeavor, such as global network development, inter-sectoral collaboration, conflict prevention, democracy building and development, as well as multi-stakeholder dialogue. We were looking for people who, whether they call their work “dialogue” or not, are taking approaches that use the transformative power of dialogic conversation to generate the creative energy and collective intelligence that emanate from a personal sense of connection to the whole—what we call generative dialogue. In our research on issue owners, we investigated more than seventy initiatives (see GDP interview list at http://www.generativedialogue.org/resources/) whose aim is to bring about deep, whole systems change on social and environmental issues such as poverty, climate change and corruption. We focused in particular on global, multi-stakeholder change initiatives, which Steve Waddell has named global action networks (GANs). We looked for GANs that met the criteria of 1) being active at a global scale, 2) engaging stakeholders across sectors of business, government, and civil society, and 3) engaging with, experimenting with, or open to the use of dialogue processes. Examples of those we investigated are the Global Alliance for Workers and Communities, the Marine Stewardship Council, the Cooperative Program on Water and Climate, and Transparency International. Through this research we identified two groups, each on the cutting edge of change work in their respective fields, both of which we believe could benefit from bringing the streams of work together.
The goal of the GDP Community Launch meeting was to bring these two groups together and attempt to define a common domain of inquiry and action that would provide the basis for an integrated approach to developing what we have named dialogic change processes. Read more about the GDP Community GoalsThe goal of the Generative Dialogue Project is to develop and advance the use of generative dialogic change processes that can produce the deep societal shifts required to address the complex challenges that threaten our future. We seek to create the following outcomes:
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