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[ Contents ]

Organising local partnerships

Chapter 3
Optimising the results


3.2 Guiding, supporting and boosting the partnership


    3.2.2 Ways to satisfy these needs and shortcomings

The continual intrusion of the stages of development in the creation, construction and evolution of the partnership means that the same tools used to support the development action can be used for the partnership.

Thus the coordination of the partnership action and the training of the partnership's members are an integral part of the method and the communication.

Central role of coordination

It should not be forgotten that many LEADER areas are in difficulty, particularly because of a destructuring of their social environment (exodus, ageing, social rift, imbalance in the skills offered, etc.).

Consequently, "global coordination", in the sense that it is going to apply to a large number of target groups which are either already formed or are to be formed, seeks to:

  • encourage ideas and turn them into projects;

  • favour encounters between people, dialogue between sectors, the exchange of know-how and the use of skills.

Coordination is in fact the partnership's education-al tool. The action referred to here, which is different from technical support and advice, is given little recognition because its effects are only tangible in the long run. However, it is part of a strategic need since it is through the global coordination of the area and of its partnership teams that development will "take off", enabling the local actors to get going. That is why this immaterial investment, coordination, should be given an importance equal to that accorded to other investments.

The importance of an enlarged concept of local development training

This type of training incorporates the conventional stages of professional training (which aims at an individual acquiring, strengthening, updating and extending technical skills) in a broader approach which:

  • takes into account all the individual's problems. Not only will there be an attempt to increase his skills but also to adapt them to his specific project whose implementation will be part of the training. In some countries this is referred to as "training-action";

  • inserts the individual into a group and an area because the project concerned depends on a professional dynamic of linkage and support (or even participation) of a social, cultural, identity-based environment that will try to be created and strengthened. This is then re-ferred to as "training-development".

In other words, in the case of training-action, the training is concerned with and adapted to an actual economic project that is already known; through this training the qualifications and the acquisitions needed by the project holders and the economic actors exclusively concerned by the project can be inserted.

In the case of training-development, the training applies to a collective development project, a notion that is broader than the previous one, since the social and identity-based aspects are also taken into account. The scope of action is then larger and the public wider since the concern is then with all the direct and indirect partners whose involvement is necessary to develop a network, a sector, an area and to provide an environment favourable to initiatives.

It is through and around these two sides to the same coin (coordination and training) that information and communication, two notions that are all too often confused, can then intervene:

  • information has an internal purpose, that of "know-ing" (technical). It helps bring a group up to par and contributes to the training;

  • communication has an external purpose, that of "making known" (advertising, promotion, image). It is part of the coordinating and serves to create consensus and ensure that the specific work done by a few becomes the work of all. It contributes to the enlargement of the partnership groups and the diffusion of their action.

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