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Whether it’s in the form of a single meeting or an ongoing series of interactions through a range of media,
dialogue can significantly influence how your community is perceived and treated by external actors. In
many situations, it may be a useful way to begin to balance power dynamics and address specific
challenges or plans. Box 37 above outlines key considerations that your community may wish to discuss
before and during the process. If the dialogue turns into a negotiation process toward a binding
agreement, please see Part III: Section IV for more specific guidance.
Dialogue is just one approach that may or may not be suitable for your local context. Depending on past
experience, you may have strong feelings about external actors such as government officials, researchers,
and companies. If the community has had particularly negative experiences in the past, they may be
unwilling to engage with them or highly doubtful that dialogue would improve the situation. Those actors
in turn may feel apprehensive about working with communities, which may indirectly limit opportunities
to achieve local visions and goals. These challenges are all too common and likely to increase with growing
demand for scarce resources and lands. It is ultimately up to the community to decide whether and how
they wish to engage with each external actor that affects their lives and territories or areas.
COMMUNITY EXPERIENCE:
Using Participatory Video as the Basis for Dialogue between Fishing Communities and Government
Officials in Eastern Canada
Resource: Adapted from The Fogo Process: An Experiment in Participatory Communication (Quarry,
1994) See the Fogo Process films at the Memorial University of Newfoundland Digital Archives Initiative
One of the first participatory film initiatives was undertaken in the 1960s on Fogo Island, an isolated
area off the northeast coast of Canada. Local fishing communities were suffering from high
unemployment rates due to significant drops in fish productivity and became the target of a
government resettlement programme against their will. They also had little local organization, few or no
government officials, minimal access to information or communication media, and lack of confidence.
Determined to help show that these challenges can be overcome, two filmmakers worked with the local
communities using what would come to be known as the “Fogo Process” to produce 27 short films from
20 hours of footage. Sharing the fishermen’s stories through community screenings around Fogo Island
illustrated the communities’ shared concerns and opportunities to resolve them. The films were also
shown to the provincial Premier and his cabinet Ministers, who then recorded responses for the
fishermen from the government’s perspective. It became a two-way process of sharing views and
alternatives to resettlement. This led to the formation of an Island-wide producer’s cooperative and a
shift in government priority towards supporting the local economy rather than resettling the
communities to the mainland. The Fogo Process became an internationally acclaimed prototype using
media to promote dialogue and social change and has since been innovated upon by various
communities around the world.