Bellagio Conference December 2003

Project Summary

Title: Capacity Building, Lessons and Future Directions - Bellagio Conference December 2003

Date: December 8 –12, 2003

Location: Bellagio Center, Bellagio, Italy

Lead organization: Centre for Global Studies (CFGS)

Director: Gordon Smith, CFGS

Personnel involved: Barry Carin, CFGS; John English, CIGI; John Stremlau, CAIR; Ngaire Woods, Oxford University

Funders: the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation and CIGI

Description: The purpose of the conference evolved from its original conception, which was to simply aassess 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.

Project Materials

Conference Materials:

Bellagio Agenda

Bellagio Attendees

Bellagio Conference Proceedings

Background Documents:

IMF Accountability Report
(November 2003)