Les liaisons fructueuses - RUIG-GIAN

V – Eclairages | Témoignage
Who is doing what : the division of labour
Our project benefited by including members from
quite diverse organisations, with different experiences
and points of views. Each individual team
member gave her or his personal flavour to the project.
While some team members were interested in participating
in every step and commenting on all
relevant documents, others preferred to limit their
participation to their particular area of expertise. It
was quite interesting to see that there were no major
differences in the opinions of practitioners and academics,
but rather between different organisations that, due
to their mandates and areas of operations, viewed issues
quite differently.
The consultation process : playing a two-level
game ?
Obviously the main advantage with an inclusive
partnership is the accumulated expertise and the experience
that widens and deepens the perspectives of
the project. An inclusive consultation and feedback
process is the best guarantee that these perspectives
will be reflected in the final products.
The political scientist Robert D. Putnam introduced
the notion of “two-level games” for international
negotiation, understanding that a government of a
given country has to negotiate with internal opinion,
as well as at the international negotiation table.
In fact, being the lead agency of a multi-partner
project is like constantly playing a two-level game.
The consultation process has to be conducted both
internally within the lead agency (in this case Geneva
Call) and “externally” with the partner organisations.
In addition, the ideal solution is also to have
an “externally external” consultation process with
outside experts, not only for parts of the project and
publications, but for the overall picture. Mending
the different opinions and suggestions is in fact not easy.
Nevertheless, this occasionally difficult process is what
generates interesting and useful results. And it is without
any doubt better to receive crucial comments
before publication rather than after it.
One lesson learned over the course of the project
that ultimately produced three reports was that the
consultation process should start early on and that
it always takes much longer than initially thought.
We found three consultation periods for each report
to be a good number : first rough draft consultation,
with a longer timeframe and more substantial
brainstorming and comments for major revamping
allowed ; second draft consultation, slightly shorter
and more conservative (no major structural changes
encouraged) ; third and final draft consultation,
where basically only changes regarding core issues
for the concerned agencies, policy recommendations
and correction of mistakes were allowed.
Project follow-up
For Geneva Call this was the first time that the organisation
was in charge of a multi-party research
project. As such, it was an important experience in
terms of coordination, making compromises and
working in an academic setting. In addition to the
observations discussed in this article, the project
also opened up doors for further involvement in
multi-party research projects. At the moment of
writing, Geneva Call has been asked to contribute
to a Harvard-HEI research project on NSAs.
In conclusion, the fact of leading a multi-partner
GIAN project has helped build Geneva Call’s capacity
for coordination and academic research, has strengthened
the links between the partner organisations and
has opened the door for further related activities.
Hopefully, it has also been a fruitful experience for
the academic institutions to work with us and the
other practitioners. Indeed, working on the implementation
of a multi-partner project should be a
learning experience for everyone involved. In fact,
this is one of the main incentives behind the GIAN
venture.
Nevertheless, these are only the complementary
effects to the main project objectives in terms of
research output and policy impact. In addition,
in terms of partnership, throughout the project a
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