Dialogue in Pursuit of Development - Are you looking for one of ...

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things in the beginning. Why could we not we use our quick estimates if
the decision maker needed some data?
It is extremely important to have a precise frame of cooperation.
We have to design how the co-operation should be from the early stage
and who will be the real partner, SCB or the International Consulting
Office within Statistics Sweden? This must be clear in order not to create
confusion. However, the frame of co-operation can be flexible in some
aspects. The demands from some areas might differ from other areas and
also be different from time to time. It is our experience that these things
were not fully discussed at the outset of the project, a better dialogue
should have taken place. It is, for example, probable that a better dialogue
would have resulted in a clearer understanding on both sides of the problems
with the national accounts and the business register and, consequently,
that more resources would have been allocated to these areas at
an early stage.
The long-term contract is very important for twinning co-operations.
It helps us to think about development in a long-term perspective. That
is not the case in many other development projects, where everything is
supposed to happen very fast, which often means that somebody from
abroad is actually doing it. The long-term contract allows us to have a
long-term perspective in our development work and to maintain an ongoing
dialogue with our partner.
Furthermore, the personal relations are very important.
It takes some time to build up trust, but now we have come to know
Statistics Sweden, we know their capacity and we know the people working
there. We talk about many things, not only about the question of
funding.
In twinning the transfer of knowledge is a key concept.
This is not a simple process, particularly in the twinning cooperation, due
to the fact that the staff of each organisation has different qualifications.
Thus the question of how to transfer the knowledge is important. Should
we merely copy experiences and skills from the sister organisation or
should we focus on learning (application of skills and experiences in the
local context)? This is an issue that we did not discuss explicitly at the
outset of the cooperation. A thorough discussion in the beginning would
have clarified the roles in the transfer process better. However, even without
that discussion we can see a gradual shift from copying (which is the
predominant way of learning at the early stages in the knowledge transfer
process) to learning through application of acquired knowledge in
the local setting. An example is the rather technical area of sample de-