‘Seeing is Believing!’ - International activities with Governance International

Twinning? Trade delegations? Student exchanges? Choir and brass band tours? Europe is full of people keen to meet, learn and have fun with each other.

But, all this activity is time-consuming and very hard to co-ordinate – especially when language is getting in the way! Indeed, many of these potentially exciting opportunities fall rather flat because they have not been properly organized.

Relax! Governance International provides you with practical advice, coaching and tools to get the most out of your twinning arrangements, international exchanges and overseas trips. Our international experience, in-depth knowledge of international administrative systems and multi-lingual team enables us to support you to get the most out of your wonderful contacts.

For example, we can help councils looking to get the most out of twinning partners or organizations which are arranging exchange visits by offering:

Hands-on help with translation and editing of formal letters, documents and website content in German, French and Spanish, so that what you write makes sense and does not sound like stiff translations;
Quick and informal vetting of itineraries, by ringing up the organizations concerned, to make sure they are the most relevant for your visit.

Councils seeking to make their twinning arrangements really work for them (often after decades of relatively casual and unproductive activities) can find a whole new set of benefits – we can arrange:

Peer reviews which allow your council to find and adopt good practices from your twinning partners in a whole range of public services.
Benchmarking circles to help your councils and twinning partners to learn from differences in performance and to improve outcomes.

In our experience, seeing how things are done in different countries brings enormous practical benefits – it shows councils and other public agencies how to find new solutions to long-standing problems at home. Suddenly you notice that a colleague who is apparently doing the same job in your twin city has a totally different perspective, different processes and far better results. And the best answer to the riposte: “Not possible here!” is “Why not? I’ve been there, looked at it carefully, and it’s just what we need!” Of course, it’s essential to adapt, not just to imitate, international good practice – Governance International will help you to distil relevant lessons and support you in transferring them to your own context.

You may also be interested in our tailored exchange programmes – for example, this can involve a short visit to innovative public agencies in another European country or a longer internship in public agencies in the UK or elsewhere. Again our international contact network will help you to find the right placement. Naturally, you might also want to consider doing an internship with Governance International, if you like to have fun (but are prepared for hard work!)

Finally, study visits are an especially effective way of ‘seeing and believing’. Here you can learn from relevant good practice cases at first hand. Governance International has a long-standing track record of designing and organising study trips on issues such as:

participatory budgeting
citizen engagement,
e-government
and public service co-production.

For nearly 10 years we have organised trips for public officials, mayors and local councillors from across Europe to visit and experience examples of the very best practice cases in public management and governance in places like Stuttgart and Nuertingen, Helsinki, Tampere, the Paris region, and London to name a few. Join us! Better still – talk to us about how we can arrange the perfect study trip for the most open-minded and innovative changemakers in your organisation!

John Tatam, Yvonne Harley, Elke Loeffler, Emilie Whitaker, and Frankie Hine-Hughes (left to right) from our UK team are looking forward to receiving you

If you have any queries please contact Yvonne at yvonne.harley@govint.org