The final knowledge product, marking the conclusion of the project ‘Working with faith-based actors for sustainable development’, is a Dialogue Guide that seeks to provide a starting point for development practitioners and policymakers – both religious and secular – to engage in an open dialogue on the role of religion in development cooperation.
In October 2021, The Broker ventured into a new project, ‘Working with faith-based actors for sustainable development’, commissioned by Prisma and four of its members—Dorcas, Tearfund, Woord en Daad and WorldVision Netherlands. A year later, we have explored the vast diversity among faith-based development organisations (FBOs), obstacles to faith-secular partnerships for sustainable development and opportunities to increase collaboration. Our exploration undertook various forms, ranging from desktop research to interviews with researchers and practitioners, and interactive workshops. Several knowledge products, including a synthesis report and three case studies of FBOs’ development programmes, distil the key insights and findings emerging from the research.
One of the common threads running throughout the project is that, although examples of very successful partnerships between secular and faith-based actors are numerous, misunderstandings, biases and lack of trust stand in the way of even more fruitful collaboration. As such, the final knowledge product, marking the conclusion of the project, is a Dialogue Guide, which seeks to provide a starting point for development practitioners and policymakers – both religious and secular – to engage in an open dialogue on the role of religion in development cooperation and the opportunities for collaboration between religious actors and between religious and secular actors. And while the term ‘final’ suggests that this document forms some sort of conclusion, in fact it seeks to offer a beginning – a beginning of interesting, challenging, productive conversations as a prerequisite for inclusive and sustainable development cooperation that bridges different backgrounds, religions, cultures and identities.
While the project, Working with faith-based actors for sustainable development, has come to an end, we are continuing our fruitful collaboration with Prisma, co-organising and hosting an interactive session during the KPAC22 Conference, Re-imagining Social Contracts, which took place in the Hague on October 20th, 2022. During the session, we presented some key findings from our research and we used the Dialogue Guide to stimulate productive conversations on religion and development.