| Capacity
Building, Lessons and Future Directions BELLAGIO CONFERENCE December
8 –12, 2003
Organized by the Centre for Global Studies (CFGS) University of
Victoria, Canada Gordon Smith, Executive Director
The purpose of the conference evolved from its original
conception, which was to simply assess an “outside the box”
CFGS capacity building initiative for Africa in the context of
NEPAD. Essentially the original project was to identify and train
a number of African civil society proponents in the concepts,
insights and techniques of identifying and influencing the decisions
necessary to implement their policy and program proposals. (In
the policy world, the tendency is to spend a great deal of effort
on refining the “idea” and to neglect the process
of selling or marketing the idea, so that something concrete actually
happens on the ground.) When the initial results of the NEPAD
initiative seemed disappointing, the focus turned to lessons.
We decided to convene a group that included practitioners
(the NEPAD project “decision mappers”), academics,
donor agency officials, and international organization and foreign
affairs officials. The idea was to cross fertilize the insights
from three research efforts: (i) an analysis of the lessons from
UNDP experience (based on a paper and presentation by Shabbir
Cheema), (ii) the practicality and relative desirability of the
recommendations to increase Southern voice and accountability
at the IMF, and (iii) at the macro scale, the prospects of a Leaders’
level G20 (supplanting the G7) to make a difference, and if so,
how to get there from here.
For more insight into the discussions and outputs
of the conference check out the links on the right.
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