How “Builders” Forge Pluralism: Top‑Down & Bottom‑Up Strategies That Last
The essence of pluralism is mutual engagement, which can be positive or negative. In my experience, the best kind of engagement must mirror the goals that you and your partners seek in a given context. When building pluralism, the process is the product, and the person must embody the process.
I am a builder, and I thought I might reflect a bit on the profile and process of “builders” —as they are a certain kind of person, if there are to be synergies; and they use a certain kind of process, if there is to be sustainability.
Foremost, the “builder” is a serial listener. “Builders” will always be in complex contexts that s/he will never fully understand. S/he has to listen to local partners, as well as global partners who seek to work there. Critically, a “builder” must embody key virtues: humility, empathy, patience, courage, practicality, and the capacity to execute excellently.
A “builder” is also a serial entrepreneur, creating an innovative process that presents good ideas (that have resulted from listening), harnesses self-interest, and provides a unifying narrative of common purpose that local (and global) partners can understand, take pride in, and support. It requires constant attention to relationships and the agility to adapt.
The “builders” approach, or process, means working with grassroots organizations and civil society from the bottom up, within a context or country, while working simultaneously with the government officials from the top-down.
Most probably know about working with fellow NGOs or businesses from the bottom-up; but some might feel uncomfortable working with government officials. It is always good to take a strategic pause before beginning a partnership (with a government agency), and consider the various possibilities. But it is also true that government officials are a key ingredient to sustaining your work. For example, you might need permission to do your work. It is also true that government officials are usually looking for programs and policies that work; especially if they strengthen the social cohesion of a society, equipping citizens to engage one another across deep difference.
Meanwhile, religion is a critical element to building pluralism because it can provide a common point of moral departure in many places, validating the work; not least because the engagement is consistent with the best teaching of the majority and minority faiths of a certain context or culture. Even here, though, where many in the “West” would consider the engagement of religious actors as a bottom-up process, it can also be a top-down process.
For example, many countries in Eurasia have government ministries for religious affairs. Some are rooted in communist history (e.g., most countries of the former Soviet Union), and some are rooted in their own democratic norms—e.g., Indonesia, the largest Muslim democracy, has a Minister for Religious Affairs.
Two mechanisms can strengthen the mutually respectful process of engaging bottom-up and top-down at the same time. The first mechanism is signing agreements—e.g., a memorandum of understanding (MOU)—that lay out small, practical steps of working together. Such a signing gives public credit to the local government or organization, even as that agreement holds them accountable for what’s in it. The steps are specifically small, in the beginning, at least, in order to ensure their accomplishment. Which, in turn, provides something to celebrate—as, most vitally, trust and confidence between the partners grow.
The second mechanism, as a function of earlier MOUs, is academic conferences and certificate programs. They become change agents precisely because they are non-threatening to a government and/or culture—precisely because they are educational and serve everyone’s interests.
These conferences/certificates provide a safe space for a comparative analysis of other countries and for learning skills that are needed on their own. They also enable relationships between people who would otherwise not meet—among government agencies and between government officials and civil society leaders.
Such a process creates the opportunity for significant milestones that help the country transition toward greater social cohesion and stability and a more transparent rule of law that respects all beliefs and ethnicities. Such milestones might include conducting an independent assessment of a country’s religious freedom, teaching the government’s leaders about how to engage religious minorities, and teaching K-12 teachers how to embody and teach this kind of engagement in the classroom, such that it ripples across the campus, community, country, and culture.
As trust is built, and as “builders” continue to listen to local leaders, opportunities are revealed to meet the needs identified by those leaders.
When the “builder’s” organization cannot meet the leaders’ needs, the trust becomes transitive as the original “builder” invites other organizations into this process, as their respective comparative advantages create synergies that meet the needs of that context or country. Such “builder” organizations can become a “collaborative,” serving the host country in a synergistic manner.
Over time the “collaborative” and their local partners realize that their common element is not the service provided, as important as that is, but the trust of their relationships.
In sum, as a friend of mine likes to say, these kinds of people and this kind of process resemble Newton’s Law of Inertia: “Builders” are the objects (persons) in motion acting on (process) the objects at rest (e.g., a bureaucratic mindset). In so doing, “builders” catalyze a new and ongoing reaction such that the iron-sharpening-iron of the reactions—because of that essential element, trust—yield new ideas and new policies that serve the people of that country.
May we always build.
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