Global Partner Components and Initiatives

With the aim of strengthening the local and national development strategies through the promotion of innovation, training and capacity development of territorial communities, ART works with international thematic initiatives. 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.

IDEASS currently works in the following countries: Albania, Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, Lebanon, Morocco, the Dominican Republic, Serbia, Sri Lanka, Uruguay and the MyDEL Programme in Centre America.

More specifically, IDEASS:

• Develops human development innovation databases and catalogues at the international level;
• Promotes the identification and exchange of innovations among local stakeholders from the North and their counterparts in the countries were ART Programmes are active, via decentralised and South-South cooperation partnerships;
• Promotes the role of the ART Programmes in the identification of areas of interest and specific innovation needs;
• Promotes innovations before stakeholders from potentially interested countries and at the international level, through informative brochures and catalogues;
• Organises international events and missions to interested countries in order to present the innovations and to promote technical exchanges; and
• With the support of the innovations inventors, formulates and develops the transference of innovations to the interested countries, coordinates the technical and financial support to the respective ART Programmes and to the international cooperation organisations involved.

IDEASS works in close collaboration with several UN Agencies participating within the ART framework, in particular UNDP, UNOPS, UNEP, ILO’s Social Protection Service in Geneva and the UNIFEM Office for Latin America and the Caribbean.

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.
By strengthening human and institutional capacities, ARTLED also articulates the competitive potentialities of the territories’ local and endogenous products with efforts to eradicate structural poverty, promote social and gender equality, create dignified employment and protect the environment, mainly.

ARTLED provides the following services:

• Support for local economic development national policies;
• Support for territorial economic development strategies, following a sustainable competitiveness approach that also factors in equity, gender equality and environmental sustainability;
• Capacity building to local actors for the identification and appropriate implementation of instruments and modalities to concretise LED strategies,
• Support in the establishment of LEDAs: non profit public-private institutions integrated by local stakeholders, capable of providing integrated services for local economic development;
• Training of economic development officers and technicians;
• Internationalisation of local economies;
• International promotion of LEDAs (network of 59 existing LEDAs);
• Development of specific tools (operational manuals, tailored assistance, virtual libraries, training courses, etc.); and
• Promotion of international territorial partnerships.

Capacity Development and Strengthening

This ART global component 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.

It collaborates with universities and training and research institutions from the countries that request its intervention to elaborate specialised curricula and training courses in specific thematic areas such as: local development, democratic governance, capacity development (in the fields prioritised by the countries), aid effectiveness and efficiency at the local level, among others.

To this end it:

• Organises university training activities on programming and monitoring local participatory development processes, catering to the different actors involved in the ART Programmes: professionals, technicians, representatives from the civil society’s organisations, local authorities, among others;
• Supports the elaboration of specialised courses and masters degrees for national and local professionals;
• Develops and promotes the establishment of partnerships between Universities from the South and North for the exchange of knowledge and capacity development;
• Promotes the participation in national and international university networks;
• Promotes the establishment of partnerships between national and local governments, civil society organisations and universities around the learning component related to the development priorities identified by the countries; and
• Promotes the systematisation of information generated from the ART Programmes’ innovative experiences and best practices.

Articulation with the Non-Governmental Development Organizations

The articulation of the actions undertaken by the Non-Governmental Development Organizations (NGDOs) within the framework of the ART Initiative, represent a vast potential that can improve the impact of the International Cooperation in the different countries.

Based on the current experiences, in general the articulation modalities that we propose are: participation of the NGDOs to the regional and local planning in he framework of the ART Programmes; identification and implementation of joint actions and projects as part of the territorial coordinated development strategy; technical assistance and support related to the expertise of each NGDOs and articulation with networks of Decentralized Cooperation.