By Tobias Sommer
Good governance is one of the keys to contemporary development cooperation: It is considered the magic solution that allows developing countries to make the big step ahead. It sounds simple—yet it is obviously complicated to achieve. It needs the political will to promote good governance through possibly far-reaching reform, the knowledge about how to do it, and especially that governments learn from their own or others’ experiences. Just providing information and instructions to governments does not suffice for this: They also have to transform the acquired knowledge into action. Unfortunately, this crucial transformation process is far from understood. After all, a government, with its complex composition of actors and political environment, cannot be expected to learn and behave like an individual or an ordinary organization.
In the recent World Bank publication The Black Box of Governmental Learning (Executive Summary PDF), Raoul Blindenbacher1 (in collaboration with Bidjan Nashat) sheds some light on this question. I had the opportunity to talk to Raoul Blindenbacher (RB) and get some answers to questions that had emerged while I was reading his book. (more…)
On the occasion of our 9. Focal Point Workshop under the title of “dynamic e-collaboration through effective moderation of SDC networks” and the subsequent f2f event of the network facilitators’ group, we had the chance to draw from the expertise of Dejan Dincic, Technical Director of Diplofoundation. In today’s guestpost, he underlines key factors of e-moderation, and takes a critical look at a typical concern of SDC networks: growth. (more…)
By Michèle Marin