Do you want to become internationally active as a local government and are looking for suitable forms of global cooperation? This dashboard, developed by the Association of Flemish Cities and Municipalities (VVSG) helps you develop an internationalization strategy that is tailored to your needs, ambitions and capacity.
The main purpose of this dashboard is to inspire local governments and provide them with a tool to determine which approaches best fit their specific context, expectations and capacities. The dashboard does not aspire to be exhaustive. It is a dynamic tool to which additional approaches can be added. Nor are the various approaches mutually exclusive. In fact, it is the rule rather than the exception to apply several approaches simultaneously. This means there may be overlap between the approaches and there may also be significant differences in the way they are put into practice.
The dashboard provides an overview of 8 existing approaches. Each approach is briefly described with a definition and some characteristics, such as the added value for local government, participation, duration and budget. To inspire and show that it’s possible, each approach comes with some good practices. A matrix indicating the main characteristics of the different approaches provides further guidance.
The dashboard covers the following topics:
1. City-to-city partnerships
2. Twinning
3. International youth work
4. Indirect cooperation
5. International cooperation with the private sector
6. International networks
7. Humanitarian and emergency aid
8. Short-term expertise exchange
HIVA, the Research Institute for Labor and Society of the Catholic University of Leuven, collected the basic information for this publication on behalf of VVSG. The development of this publication was financially supported by PLATFORMA, the Flemish government and the federal government of Belgium.