Actions to take to Shift from Competition to Collaboration and Foster a Sense of Harmony/unity in Resolving our Conflicts

Abstract

The community of practice engaged in discursive conversations, asynchronous written metalogues, SDD dialogues to address areas of shared concern, workshops and a digital conference.   The paper makes a case for Multispecies Hubs and scaled up engagement using mixed methods comprising informal conversations, metalogues, SDDs to find contextual pathways to wellbeing This paper reflects on these discussions comprising exploratory questions, an agreed triggering question, an hypothesis and further exploratory questions for future research.

Firstly, the metalogue relied on emailed discussion to enable us to set an agreed question. Our efforts were prompted by the growing social, cultural, economic and environmental challenges as the divides between haves and have nots expand. Our community of practice has focused on the suggested actions that we can take to make a difference whilst advocating for changes in policy and practice. Secondly, we reflect on the following so-called triggering question for a structured democratic dialogue with our ongoing community of practice led by XXXX, namely: What actions can we take to shift from competition to collaboration and to foster a sense of harmony/unity in resolving our conflicts? This paper is linked with a longer chapter in a forthcoming volume on setting up multispecies hubs to support green circular economies that honour local wisdom. The chapter (and volume) includes the detailed contributions of the participants plus the briefing materials.

A key finding is that if a shared concern is addressed a large group of more than 50 participants from a range of faiths remain engaged in SDD and informal dialogues associated with the SDD and that even if the topic is challenging the structuring makes the engagement respectful and ‘safe’ for a diverse group of people. It needs to be conceded however, that a core group of people have developed high levels of trust which helped to ensure that a core group ‘modelled’ respectful dialogue. This is an important aspect of a successful dialogue. Also starting off with shared norms that guide the process and a realisation by all the participants that they would indeed be ‘heard’ and that their points could be written or shared asynchronously as voice notes. 

The model of dialogue in South Africa hosted by talk back radios provides considerable scope for successful adaptation and scaling up within this model as a way to host the SDDs and metalogues using brief voice notes as a way to inform broader  online, TV or radio based  SDD dialogues and could provide a model for other ‘struggling democracies’ where engagement has deteriorated to polarised debate, victimisation, invective or shunning , now known as ‘cancelling’.