Oana Marcu

In November 2015, Codici Social Research Agency participated at the final conference of the Finally and E-Roma Resource projects, organized by Ric Novo Mesto in Doljenske Toplice. Apart from presenting Finally products to the participants and building networks with other actors in the field of Roma integration, we presented a paper in one of the plenary sessions.

The presentation held by Oana Marcu dealt with the role of social research in designing participatory processess for policy making, drawing on the example of the development of a Local Action Plan in Bologna Municipality, as a part of the Roma-net project.

The main idea of the presentation regards the effective stakeholder involvement by means of facilitation methodologies, going beyond the politics of participation by representation, too often considered a solution for the 10th basic principle of Roma inclusion.

What we should more carefully consider, we argued, is the choice of who participates and how conflict and discrimination awareness is ensured, instead of escalated. Another point is how to step ahead from face agreement to actual shared responsibility. Last but not least, participated planning should be backed up by participated evaluation, in order to close a circle between ideas, agreement, and action. These are basically some of the main challenges that an action-research framework, deeply rooted in our agency’s approach, tries to deal with, while developing and testing new instruments for large scale decision making, such as open space technology, word caffè or future search.