The Long Conversation is the name given to a process of community dialogue that Living Earth has been initiating across the North Slope. This project developed in response to the discovery that despite the plethora of community organisations and representatives on the ground, the majority of people are not making their voices heard, or receiving satisfactory answers to their questions about issues that concern them.
Building on lessons learned from working in similar scenarios around the world, and whilst maintaining a crucial understanding that every context is unique, Living Earth has begun to develop a new framework of non-threatening, transparent and finely grained dialogue, whereby every individual, however un-forthcoming, will have the capacity to engage in effective dialogue with their own communities, and with the many external agencies including industries, government bodies and non-profit organisations that impact upon their day-to-day life.
This process, which is in its early stages, will entail exhaustively trained and locally trusted community volunteers speaking to their friends and neighbours in their own homes or wherever they are most comfortable, and capturing details of their worries, their ideas, and their burning questions. This information will then be collated by part time Local Co-ordinators based in each village.
The data will first be directed back into the villages to be addressed within the well developed local frameworks already in existence, and anything that cannot be addressed internally will then be taken to the Programme Co-ordinator based in Barrow, who will make the links necessary to address these questions and concerns to the relevant external agencies.
This process will be recorded transparently, though anonymously where individuals are concerned, on an open website, which will allow all those engaged in this ‘Long Conversation’ to see which issues arise repeatedly, what responses have been received from external agencies, and how various responses to the same query may differ.
It is anticipated that the many of the same issues will come up frequently, and the process will be one of ongoing iterative dialogue, with the expected end result that communities, government and industry, whether facing a conflict of priorities, or simply co-existing in the same environment, will have the improved capacity to converse rather than clash.
