La Facilitation as a participatory method of managing socio-environmental conflicts

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a research project that sought to implement, in practice, the method of managing socio-environmental conflicts that had been identified —in a previous work— as the most appropriate for this type of situations: facilitation (also called “facilitated dialogue”). Throughout the process, and despite having deployed enormous efforts, we discovered a series of elements that ended up conditioning the possibility of carrying it out as planned. The opportunity was then taken to identify, describe and present those elements that we consider necessary to advance the implementation —in the field— of this type of methodology. Facilitation is a species within the “mediation” genre of a collective or multi-party type, in which those involved choose an acceptable mediator to approach, facilitate and guide in the design of a process and to reach an agreement on mutually acceptable solutions. Due to the widespread local unfamiliarity of this participatory mechanism for conflict management, there is skepticism and mistrust regarding proposals of this nature. The methodology of this research is the case study, while the research approach is descriptive-qualitative.