EQUAL - Final report - eng - navreme

EVALUATION OF CIP EQUAL TRANSNATIONAL CO-OPERATION PRINCIPLE
0.4 Selected quotations from the evaluation visits and
interviews
0.4.1 Czech Republic
“The transnational cooperation was the most effective part of EQUAL at all.” 1
“It was an absolutely unique opportunity to compare culture – company, working culture, negotiation,
discussions, and bearing, in the wider sense of the word – as far as to the pub.”
“Selection of partners takes a lot of time, therefore it would be good to select from several partners
that had been singled out, but there was neither time nor space to do so.”
“At the beginning we did not suspect at all, what the transnational cooperation was in general, what
was it good for, what we could expect from it and what was expected from us.”
“The Czechs have realized they can learn something and that the matters are not secret, that
everybody need not mind his own business and be afraid that someone would find out his tricks or
“steal him something”.”
“One has realized here we are not completely impossible idiots: for example, we had improved the
Belgian project so that they gazed on it and will use our tools further.”
“The project’s administration was incredibly demanding, it cannot be compared to other European
projects at all: innovation, gender mainstreaming, horizontal topics … I am persuaded that none of
the implementing entities has understood the content of these terms so far and that even the people
from the MoLSA would not be able to define them precisely. And we were forced to pretend all the
time we understand them and we work with them actively and to make up whole paragraphs about it
into interim reports.”
“I am sceptical that an obligatory partnership could bring concrete joint results – I cannot imagine
this from our experience. But sharing experience, practice, approaches and tools, including
transnational meetings are wonderful.”
“I would leave out conferences for the next time – they are boring and mainly they are then just
tourism for the most of the participants – and I would focus on study visits for small groups. It was
the best thing of the whole EQUAL to se how people work somewhere else.”
0.4.2 Abroad
“The transnational cooperation helped us to go back over some of our traditional services; for
instance, the experience made by our Spanish partner gave us the idea to look critically to gender
stereotypes on kids’ care where only women are traditionally considered suitable to this activity. We
re-focused our services, which are now provided both to men and women.”
“We wish we had linked up (more closely) our transnational cooperation activities with the public
policies promoted at the local level. This would have allowed us to achieve some tangible results from
the TC component.”
“Transfer of tools among partners is a critical issue, as several partners feel this practice as a loosing
of ownership over the tools.”
“Dialogue with the Management Authority was very intense and burdensome on administrative issues,
while the Authority was very much less interested in the TC content of the project..”
“TC had a tremendous and beneficial effect of opening up the minds of national partners. It helped
them in putting their specific local experience ‘in context’, by showing how under different national
and local environments some trustable partners achieved their goals by the use of different
approaches.”
1 This citation and the following mentioned citations come out from the coordinators of the transnational
cooperation (as the case may be of the whole project) of the individual partnership organisations in the Czech
Republic.
Navreme Boheme, s.r.o. 7