GUIDANCE FOR APPLYING SEA IN DEVELOPMENT POLICY AND SECTOR REFORM
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these priorities; validating the recommendations to address these gaps; and engaging stakeholders in follow-up, monitoring, and evaluation. Consequently, the dialogue should take place throughout SEA implementation. Process to Be Followed Multistakeholder dialogue provides a mechanism for stakeholders, especially the vulnerable who are traditionally sidelined from policy decision making, to influence the policy process. This purpose implies the need to establish some kind of institutional structure within which to house dialogue initiatives. It also implies that multistakeholder dialogue has to be structured in a manner that is culturally sensitive. There cannot be a cookie-cutter approach to multistakeholder dialogue; it should be tailored to the cultural and political context in which the SEA is undertaken. Special thought and effort need to be applied to the issue of how to involve unorganized stakeholders in the SEA dialogue. This was a problem for the WAMSSA and Sierra Leone SESA pilots, where artisanal miners were recognized as an important stakeholder group, but remained not easily accessible, as they had no representative association. Policy SEA can be genuinely effective only if it can find a method for dealing with unorganized stakeholders. This activity will often take time, and it raises the question of whether organizing such interests needs to take place before SEA is initiated. Expected Outcomes The expected outcome of multistakeholder dialogue is a robust discussion of key environmental and social issues associated with the sector to be reformed. It opens the policy and reform process to the influence of stakeholders, and particularly to those vulnerable stakeholders who often bear the environmental and social brunt of the reform process. Without a strong multistakeholder dialogue, the preconditions for the SEA outcomes of improved social accountability and policy learning cannot be met. Examples of Multistakeholder Dialogue from the Pilots Policy dialogue needs a focus. Proponents should not use participation/dialogue forums merely to talk, or stakeholders will rapidly lose commitment. Figure 3.4 presents an example of how stakeholder dialogue was established in the WAMSSA pilot. The schematic shows how stakeholders had an input to situation analysis, stakeholder analysis, scenario analysis, and institutional analysis through interviews, focus groups, surveys, and workshops. Worthy of special note is the area below the dotted line in the diagram, which is the process envisaged for