Interfaith Dialogue Based on Community Action in Catalonia (Spain): Mapping, Indicators, and Conditions for a Successful Public Policy

This paper shows the outputs of a study on interfaith dialogue based on community action in Catalonia (Spain). Our hypothesis was to check to what extent interfaith dialogue is a facilitator of community action. The study was carried out between 2023 and 2024 in three phases: the first one devoted to mapping the existing practices within the research context; a second one focused on building an indicators system as well as an instrument for monitoring and assessing interfaith dialogue practices based on community action (the questionnaire QCID_CA); and a third one oriented to identify some conditions for success. We implemented qualitative methods: document analysis, individual interviews, focus groups, active participant observation from an ethnographic position, and comparative analysis. We identified the existing interfaith dialogue practices in Catalonia that are developed under community action; we raised some indicators to assess these practices to promote community action within local contexts; we validated the QCID_CA tool by contrasting it with current interfaith dialogue practices; and we confirmed the dialectical relationship between interfaith dialogue and community action. Interfaith dialogue practices based on community action print a real influence on social interactions in the contexts where they take place. This is the reason to implement a public policy based on some principles like knowledge, acknowledgement, action, and transformation. Interfaith dialogue aims to confront individualism and social fragmentation, which may be the prelude to increasing inequalities and exclusion. It also fights against a passive understanding of citizenship by inviting participants to feel like active agents in raising their standards of living. And more: interfaith dialogue based on community action creates alliances between participants to face the lack of spirituality nowadays. Some limitations were raised from the analysis, mostly related to the number of analyzed cases and the instrument’s implementation. Further research should be required to explore that.