WHY WE SHOULD TALK? THE POTENTIALS OF COMMUNITY DIALOG IN GROUNDING AN INTEGRATED RURAL DEVELOPMENT

Rural development is a social process. It involves local community in all stages of development. Community dialog is a means for facilitating community involvement in determining a development direction, potential development plan and development sus-tainability in the future. Frequently, local community is considered as the development target. This position puts them just being development watchers, spectators, silent and passive recipients. Moreover, these silent roles make them remain unempowered since they do not know how to determine their future, how to take part in collective decision and feel being neglected. This study examines potentials of community involvement in dialog. A qualitative research paradigm is adopted. The data are collected byrecording, transcribing and analyzing community dialog at Klagen, Nganjuk, Jawa Timur. The study finds that community dialog offers considerable potentials. The first potential of community dialog is generating local community commitment, awareness, sense of belongingness and supportive character to build their own homeland. These positive development psychological states,characters and ethos are soft human dimensions which can be critical drivers in rural development. The second is creation of local knowledge and scientific knowledge joint enabling innovation and collective learning process. This joint-knowledge allows the combination of local wisdom and scientific insight. The third is building shared or collective development vision and plan. This plan and vision allow the development prioritizing process and development of rural strength, potential competitive advantage and resource building. The fourth is expanding rural networking and exercising rural people capacity to build wider internal and external social relationship.