2. Focus on constructive multi-stakeholder dialogue
Multi-stakeholder engagement bears fruit when rooted in constructive and non-confrontational dialogue. Organisations can play a facilitation role between stakeholders that may have fractured or adversarial relationships.
In Kenya, communities felt marginalised and they felt that they lacked adequate mechanisms to report and seek remedy for their concerns. While civil society organisations had tried to promote community benefits, their recourse to adversarial tactics had often alienated the mining industry and government decision-makers, and ultimately had done little to address community grievances.
TI-Kenya supported the development of Mining Alliance Working Groups that focus on different issues affecting communities. There is a rotating membership comprising different stakeholders to ensure a cross-pollination of ideas. These working groups have ensured that stakeholders have turned the page on fragmented action and adversarial tactics and they now engage in incremental dialogue resolving differences respectfully and constructively through processes and mechanisms they have themselves shaped.
3. Connect the local to the national
Organisations will often work with multi-stakeholder groups at different levels on related issues. For example, they may be involved in a national-level forum with national stakeholders while simultaneously working at a local level with different actors. When using this approach, it is crucial to ensure that there is ‘vertical integration’ and sharing of ideas between the different levels. Community-level work should be informed by national-level partnerships, and vice versa.
In the case of Kenya, the TI office, in collaboration with other leading civil society players, runs national-level mining forums with a wide variety of participants, and are structured as a participatory, bottom-up process. This national-level work informs both partnerships and advocacy, with change being achieved and leveraged at multiple levels.
Meanwhile, county-level forums have become a key mechanism to discuss progress in establishing benefit-sharing mechanisms nationally and for stakeholders to learn from TI-Kenya’s efforts in Kwale County.
4. Ensure that your networks are sustainable when your project ends
All multi-stakeholder engagement work should ensure that there is sustainability built into the approach. This means ensuring that once project funding is finished, networks and groups can continue to work independently.
For TI-Kenya, a key premise was that multi-stakeholder action should continue regardless of TI-Kenya’s ongoing ability to provide support. The Mining Alliance Working Groups have been established to be led by conveners external to TI-Kenya for each group, with an overall coordinator overseeing the process.
TI-Kenya plays a facilitation and capacity-support role in developing the groups. As they become more independent and autonomous, the groups can assert their leadership and actively work to communicate and address issues. TI- Kenya can progressively step back while ensuring the multi-stakeholder network continues to function sustainably and run independently after the project ends.
In conclusion, effective multi-stakeholder engagement leverages capacities and connections that your organisation may not have. For smaller organisations working on systemic issues such as corruption, leveraging these capacities and connections can ensure that your work has wider effects and that it results in systemic change.
