Global Coordination Unit(GCU)
Responsible Institution: Centro de Educacion y Technologia (CET),Chile

Final report
Building partnership
Other outputs
 

Progress Reports

Building partnership

The importance a of building trust and partnership among all members of the Programme was pursued by the Global Coordinating Unit and was never underestimated.

The first phase of the CBDC Programme was planned under the implicit assumption that a strong partnership existed among those participating. Its implementation showed that such partnership was still to be built, and that a long learning process on what it means to cooperate across national and cultural boundaries, institutional styles and professional interests (as well as personal characteristics). CBDC members generally applied cautious procedures as a way to deal with differences or uncertainties.


It is within this framework that many agreements can be understood. For example,
  1. The GCU mandate starts by saying [The GCU] "will take up only those coordinating activities that should necessarily be carried out at the global level…";
  2. A clear policy of institutional autonomy of all partners outside and within the CBDC predominated over all other agreements
  3. The Protocol sets a number of procedures before information originated by CBDC activities can be published
  4. All decisions had to be made bottom-up, and the GCU had no clear authority
  5.  
Many of these agreements were a basic and extremely useful tool for the building of trust during the first phase, but they also seemed to convene the message that the GCU should not deal too closely with regional or national matters. Monitoring and information sharing became then an area that the GCU was never quite certain on how to deal with. 

It became apparent that it would have been far more appropriate to build a plan of action that would have led -after trust and common experience had been built- to strong monitoring and information sharing, rather than expecting this to occur from the beginning. 

The more active involvement of the PCC in coordination matters after the midterm review, and the set-up of an email intranet at CGN provoked some important changes in our administration. Monitoring then became a collective task and was easily seen as a necessary part of being a programme. The electronic "platform" allowed for a more effective and multi-sided sharing of information. Although the system was still lacking in some systematic characteristics, monitoring and information sharing improved significantly from then on.

Other outputs

The partners of the CBDC Programme went through an extremely useful process of learning that will allow a much more effective and fruitful second phase. They also were able to build a sense of mutual respect and trust that has served as the basis for many of the improvements proposed for a second phase. The GCU staff members believe that much of this process was due to the more active involvement of the PCC after the mid-term review. They also believe that the GCU was an important factor in creating an atmosphere of transparency and correctness that gradually allowed for more open dialogues among all partners. From the very beginning, the GCU strove for equitable and fair relations within the programme, a task that sometimes led to tensions and in which the GCU made mistakes more than once. However, the GCU kept an attitude of openness to criticism and proposals by partners that allowed a gradual process of joint action and understanding. The GCU staff also believes that the GCU made an important contribution to the improved design of a second phase. Many of the ideas about decentralization and shared responsibilities undertaken first by the PCC and later by all partners were initiated by the GCU.