This document for practitioners has been produced as part of the “Prevention of Social Conflicts in the Use of Natural Resources” project implemented by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) in Peru. The main goal of this key initiative – funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development Canada and implemented jointly with the National Office for Dialogue and Sustainability (ONDS) of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers and in coordination with the Ministry of Energy and Mining (MEM), the Ministry of the Environment (MINAM), the Ministry of Agriculture (MAG), the National Assembly of Regional Governments (ANGR), the National Water Authority (ANA), the Environmental Oversight and Evaluation Agency (OEFA), the Ministry of Culture (MC), and the Office of the Ombudsman – is to build stability and strengthen governance by reducing natural resource-based conflicts, as well as to consolidate and build central government, regional government and civil society capacities and abilities to analyze, monitor, prevent and manage conflicts.
The idea of this paper is to document and disseminate the process for institutionalization of dialogue and conflict prevention that has been at work in the Peruvian state. Although the state comprises all the administrative bodies in the executive, legislative and judicial branches, together with autonomous institutions and regional and municipal governments, for reasons of space and a more in-depth analysis this study will concentrate on evolving institutionalization in the executive branch as of 2000, a year in which conflicts began to be clearly seen regarding the use of natural resources. Parallelly, a similar study commissioned by the National Assembly of Regional Governments and the UNDP focused strictly on regional governments.
Unlike tools and techniques such as debate, negotiation, deliberation or mediation where concrete agreements are sought between representatives of organizations and specific interests, dialogue processes also seek to transform conflictive relations and evolve a “collective understanding” to help change conflicts into opportunities.
To achieve this, a rigorous, though flexible, methodology has been developed to facilitate in-depth exchanges and make multi-stakeholder agreements possible.
This process is part of an attempt to move up potential interventions to an early phase in the timeline or history of the conflict, incorporating dialogue into the alternative conflict resolution toolkit.