The ART Global Initiative

In the last 15 years, the international cooperation has been characterised by the emergence of a large and varied number of “new” actors, namely regional and local governments, the private sector, universities, NGOs and the civil society. These “new” cooperation actors generally work at the country level towards the achievement of common goals but with different chronograms, modalities, administrative mechanisms and technical and evaluation approaches. The potentiality is to enrich the quality of cooperation though the exchange of best practices and innovations in the field of development and decentralization processes, and the risk is the fragmentation and proliferation of specific projects that are unable to provide harmonised support neither to local processes nor to national strategies for local development.

In August 2005 convinced of the importance of regional and local governments and the territories’ social and economic stakeholders as relevant cooperation actors, , the UNDP Bureau for Partnerships (BP) established the HUB for Innovative Partnerships at its Liaison Office in Geneva. The HUB was created as an entry point for all international cooperation actors convinced that the territorial approach appraises the role of territorial communities and interested in harmonising their respective actions in support to national strategies for local development. The HUB also facilitates country-level complementarity between development actors and concretises the strategic potential of the decentralised cooperation, thereby improving the effectiveness and efficiency of the support provided to the development processes prioritised by the countries themselves.

The ART Global Initiative – Articulation of Territorial and Thematic Cooperation Networks for Human Development – is one of the instruments made available to the HUB to reach these objectives. To this end, and in coordination with BDP, BP, and UNDP Country Offices (COs) and RSCs, ART supports the implementation of a legal, programmatic, operational and administrative framework in the countries that request it: the ART Framework-Programme. This referential scheme promotes and facilitates, at the country level, the complementarity between national and international development actors, (national governments, local and regional communities, civil society organisations, universities, NGOs, and the private sector) in order to improve aid effectiveness and its positive impact on the development processes prioritised by the countries and the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

The ART Framework Programmes strengthen the planning capacities at the local and regional levels via the Regional (RWGs) and Local Working Groups (LWGs), which are the expression of the regional and local administrations and rely on a coordinator appointed by the heads of these administrations (governors, regional presidents, mayors, etc). The RWGs and LWGs are integrated by technical delegates from the sectors prioritised by the respective public administrations and are open to the participation of the territories’’ public and private stakeholders, civil society organisations and the involved cooperation entities.

The Working Groups organise and coordinate the territorial planning cycles, that is to say the specific mechanism through which the objectives of actor complementarity and initiative articulation with national and local development processes is materialised. Moreover, the Working Groups represent reference and support entry points for the engaged international and decentralised cooperation actors. They are in charge of the complementary planning of all actions implemented by the different actors, thus avoiding duplications, maximising their impact and directing them towards Regional and Local Development Plans.

  

At the National Level

The National Coordination Committee (NCC) is in charge of ensuring the correct implementation of the Programmes’ methodology and instruments, as well as guaranteeing its coherence with national policies. Led by the Programme’s counterpart at the ministerial level and the UNDP, the NCC assembles representatives from other relevant ministries, UN Agencies and programmes and different international cooperation actors (bilateral and decentralised) involved with the Programme.

The NCC, as the place where regional and local planning is carried out, is articulated with national strategies and programmes, orients donors towards the Framework-Programme and asses the results achieved in the territories in terms of capacity development and strengthening, sustainability, actor complementarity and replicability at the national level. In this manner, projects and actions implemented reach a higher impact not only because they address local needs but also because they become laboratories for practices of potential interest for other regions in the country.

 

At the International Level

 

The Framework-Programmes support and encourage the internationalisation of the regional and local development dynamics, this is, the systematic exchange of best practices and technological, organisational and managerial innovations. ART works through three thematic components, mainstreamed within each Framework-Programme: innovation, capacity development and knowledge management and international economic partnerships. The global activities related to this components are managed by ART’s International Coordination at the UNDP Office in Geneva, as part of the HUB for Innovative Partnerships, and the ART Offices in Rome, Florence, Seville and Barcelona.

For the promotion of innovation, training and capacity development of territorial communities, ART works with international thematic initiatives aimed at strengthening local and national development strategies. Amongst these are: IDEASS – Innovation for Development and South-South Cooperation, ARTLED – Support to Local Economic Development and the component for Capacity Development and Strengthening.

ART also collaborates in several countries with more specific programmes such as TACC – Territorial Approach to Climate Change (see for example the ART Uruguay Programme section), which aims at territorialising mechanisms to face environmental challenges, or ISI@MED –Information Society Initiative for the Mediterranean (see as example the ART Morocco s Programme section).

• The IDEASS Initiative internationally identifies innovations of great impact to human development and the reduction of social exclusion, unemployment and poverty. In collaboration with the national institutions responsible for the promotion of science and technology, it then promotes them in the countries were the ART Programmes are active. It also organises and finances technical assistance missions by the innovations’ inventors to the interested countries in order to formulate and implement transference projects through South-South and North-South cooperation mechanisms.

• ARTLED is ART’s global component providing support on Local Economic Development (LED) to the countries that request it. It provides integrated territorial management services on LED and promotes the establishment of partnerships between local economic stakeholders from the countries were ART programmes are in place and their counterparts in the North and other Southern countries, via decentralised and South-South cooperation.It provides specialised technical assistance for the implementation and/or consolidation of Local Economic Development Agencies (LEDAs), in order to boost and internationalise processes of territorial economic development, and in line with the countries’ national policies.

• ART’s global component for Capacity Development and Strengthening is based upon the premise that universities and training and research institutions from the North and South play an essential role in local, national and international development processes. In this sense, the component’s main objective is to involve these institutions in training, carrying out research, and creating and disseminating knowledge related to local development, the MDGs and cooperation. This element is conceived as a means and a network that allows these institutions to mobilise academic capacities and expertise to accompany actions undertaken by the ART Programmes and contribute to local development processes and the achievement of the MDGs. 

Trough an intersectoral approach, ART works in the action fields prioritized by the countries. Amongst them: