Nowadays, countries, their regions and continents live on in a world characterized by the ever increasing role of cities and regions. This happens as the effects of CHANGE, yesterday an occasional event and today a mere routine, traverse it all: things, beings, concepts, plans, and mentalities.
For such decisive issues as international relations, cooperation between countries and their subnational territories, decentralisation and regional development, the mastering of the required new strategies, all of it inexorably surrounded by the effects of globalisation, it becomes imperative to bear it very much in mind and to learn to dominate it in the day-to-day practice. This is, we are called to a wonderful and modern TRAINING effort.
The culture of trans-nationality, of globalization, imposes itself. We need to learn to control it and do it in conjunction with the culture of regionalisation. The world is becoming larger day after day, but also smaller at the same time. Local communities generate new and challenging worldviews, often unnoticed by the centre. The voices from the great centre will arrive hoarse to the regions if those voices don’t understand that they can’t impose their “imperial” and absolute criteria without any respect or consideration for the new realities and claims arising from the claimant subnational territories. In this new and more democratic scenario, the times of “Roma locuta, causa finita” are moving further away.
And the Regions United Organisation, ORU-FOGAR, has understood it with clairvoyance. The recent international Leadership Course carried out in the first week of this month in Barcelona is proof of that. They did it with ESCOLAGI’s cooperation, which I have the privilege to lead, and that is the School created by the Organisation of Latin-American Intermediate Governments, OLAGI.
From the current stage of civilisation in which we have to act and deal with our phenomenologies, from these times of decentralisation and regions, it is worth recalling Ortega y Gasset’s words on human beings: “A man is not, a man is becoming”
Of course, it is not the same everywhere. But in Latin-America, where institutional frameworks are younger than in Europe, for example, regionalisation, progress, subnational potential, and the regional capacities for development, are still awaiting some progress, which won’t materialise unless our regions wake up actively and creatively to acquire skills and approaches aimed at a conjunction of multi-territorial efforts, at a collective coordination of transnational muscles and brains to take on the leading roles, sine qua non, with which to meet the challenges of these issues.
This is why I find the effort and wide vision with which ORU is enriching its meritorious performance outstanding. By aiming at the TRAINING of civil servants and the regions of the international communities, ORU is hitting the intelligent mark to achieve the progress that requires, but to a great extent also OFFERS, the reality of each of our territories. Governors, Mayors, Public Administrators, Local Councilors, Civil Servants, Public Service Directors, in short, all those fulfilling public functions in the territory must constantly improve their skills to fulfil their functions, and must be able to count on the fact that their institutions will organize quality systems to help them become efficient and vital public servants.
Dr Luís Guastavino
Director of the Training School of the Latin American Intermediate Governments Organisation, OLAGI.
