Acentral challenge communities confront is how to manage significant conflict and disputes over important issues such as land use, economic development, environmental concerns, education, poverty, access to health care, and safety.
The ability to manage these contentious issues has been made more difficult by a growing citizenship and democratic deficit (Nabatchi, 2010). An increasing number of scholars have argued that the weakening of civil society has grown over the recent past and that it has produced a citizenship deficit, which is characterized by lower levels of participation by citizens in civic activities as well as decreases in the amount of social capital available to work with complex disputes (Lewis, 2005; Putnam, 2000; Smith, 2003).
At the same time, there has been a rising democratic deficit as citizens have lost trust in local, state, and federal governments to represent their interests. The growing disenchantment with the ability of governments to do their jobs can be traced to several factors, including the use of top-down technocratic-managerialist approaches, which deaden the sensitivity of government officials and representatives to local contexts, issues, and interests (Chilvers, 2009); the involvement of risk averse politicians who see little utility in involving citizens in deliberative activities (Durant, 1995); and employing communication strategies that are designed to educate and persuade the public about the plans developed by subject matter experts versus enlisting them in meaningful deliberation (Yankelovich, 1991). The combination of citizenship and democratic deficits creates a deadly cocktail that threatens our ability to create vibrant communities that engage with democratic practice in a meaningful way.What can we do with a citizenry that is portrayed as not having the ability to engage in civic life and a government that is characterized as being unresponsive to citizen needs, interests, and concerns? Over the past 30 years, one answer to this question has been to foster deliberative democracy, which emphasizes the participation and contribution of everyday citizens in making important decisions that affect their community’s lives and the common good (Cooke, 2000).
Callahan (2007) observes that deliberative democracy, or what she calls direct democracy, “promotes a sense of community and common bonds that transcend individual interest” (p. 1180). There are a number of positive outcomes regarding deliberative democracy, including fostering higher levels of social stability and community cohesion, increased levels of information sharing, and improved collective decision making, learning, and the ability to achieve democratic ideals (Bayley, 2008; Lynam, De Jong, Sheil, Kusumanto, & Evans, 2007; Reed, 2008).A unique feature of deliberative democracy is that it is “talk-centric,” which requires creating forums for citizens and other stakeholders to discuss an issue, to make arguments for and against particular positions, and to inquire into the complexity of issues versus relying on sound-bites, rigid ideologies, and a cursory understanding of complex issues to inform decisions and policy making. Nabatchi (2010) states that “deliberative democracy moves away from competitive pluralism by encouraging the distinctive rationality of ‘the forum’ as opposed to the rationality of ‘the market’ (Bohman, 1998)” (p. 385). Deliberative democracy within communities relies on a form of communication known as dialogue (Barge, 2006). In its simplest form, dialogue may be defined as a conversational process where interlocutors take turns addressing each other to discursively coordinate their meaning making and relationships (Gergen, Gergen, & Barrett, 2004).
If we accept the notion that deliberative democracy and dialogical practices are one way to address citizenship and democratic deficits, how can we design communication practices and forums that work? In this chapter, we draw on the notions of communication as design and dialectical theory to articulate the challenges that designers of dialogues need to address when they design processes and events to encourage dialogically structured forms of communication. Communication as design blends normative and descriptive approaches by articulating normative ideals for communicative practice as well as creating thick descriptions of the interactional problems associated with particular communication practices (Aakhus, 2007; Aakhus & Jackson, 2005). Dialectical theory emphasizes that communication is a tension-filled activity and that interactional problems are never solved; rather, tensions are ongoing within communication systems and must be continually managed over time (Baxter, 2004). The chapter is organized by the following questions: (a) What characterizes dialogical forms of communication? (b) What dialectical tensions may emerge during dialogue? (c) How can dialectical tensions be managed when designers plan and structure dialogue?