Nurturer engagements to co-development

Towards the end of 2009, the Girona City Council proposed the policy of not providing specific services for immigrants, but instead offering these to the

114 A second edition of this course took place between 2016-2017, and was held in the Catalan cities of Salt and Manresa. See http://www.enfortintelcodesenvolupament.org/ for the trainings website [last checked March 2017]

citizenship regardless of their national origin. At the same time, this approach began changing internally in 2010, when the settlement policies were revised and improved within the framework of the regional Welcoming Law. In addition, during 2006-07, the council started a pilot project in two neighbourhoods with higher rates of immigrant residents. Among the aims of the project, the council wanted to reach out to migrant associations. In this context in Catalonia, in the city and surrounding counties where co-development was conceived during the late 80s, the elected councillors in charge of international cooperation (during 2007-2011) wanted to capitalise upon the work undertaken in co-development by civil society. Several actions were initiated (diagnosis, creation of a co-development commission, a technician dedicated to co-development etc) but these processes were not fully in place when the next municipal legislature arrived. Hence, cuts in funds and human resources then led to the dismantling of many of the initiatives. Importantly, a 2009 diagnosis unveiled the need to strengthen migrant associations (through capacity building, technical support measures and so on). Apart from this, as the sole staff member working in the international development section explained to me in 2014, a specific call for the co-development projects funding had been in place during the period (2011-14 was the last year this was checked). This was despite the fact that it was a contested initiative within a municipal social services area that did not want to have services that were differentiated according to the national origin of the people.

The unfolding of co-development activities must be understood in Girona as closely linked to local ‘autochthonous’ civil society, represented through the coordination platform of local NGOs. Therefore, rather than being direct actor executing co-development initiatives, I would rather depict Girona City Council as a nurturer of

‘native’ civil society working in co-development.

Among the considered cases (and probably among many local experiences in Spain), Lleida City Council is the municipality with the most developed co-development framework. The degree of reflexion upon the scope of co-development policy-making undertaken by the international cooperation municipal area and the array of activities the government undertakes directly is more extensive than in other localities. The city has a co-development program that was launched in 2003. In the beginning they worked closely with the Fons-Català. The Lleida City Council’s International Cooperation area defined an intervention cycle that included an analysis of the local

migrant civil society (in terms of the viability and capacity of migrant associations) in order to identify potential groups with which it could work. Subsequently, according to the City Council webpage, migrants could participate in training to develop their capacity to act as ‘development agents in their community of origin’. Besides, autochtonous local actors working in international development could also attend the course to develop a better understanding of realities faced by of migrants¹¹⁵ in their communities of origin. Next, there were mixed groups – consisting of migrants and non-migrants – that were formed in order to elaborate, the objectives and scope of a co-development project in conjunction with the partner in the country of origin.

Training at this stage was also foreseen. Overall, the programme included continuous training opportunities aimed at strengthening migrant associations. At the end of the cycle, projects could respond to competitive calls in order to get funded. Usually the successful applicants were migrant associations. Since 2009, the City Council started thinking about how to undertake outreach towards younger and/or female representatives. Therefore, mostly since 2010, a specific approach to work with migrant women and their associations has reinforced local skills in, for example, through literacy initiatives, or entrepreneurial courses. In addition, there have been specific municipal initiatives implemented to increase the ‘intercultural exchange’

between migrants’ children or younger migrants and other collectives as well as to involve them as mediators in their communities.

The approach taken by the public officer responsible for international development work by the municipality is clearly underpinned by the awareness that migrant collectives in Lleida suffer from social exclusion and unequal access to rights.

According to the elected representative of Lleida City Council in charge of social policies, when she arrived in government (2007) there were no municipal programmes to work with immigration related issues apart from giving grants to third party actors. Thus, it became clear in an interview during 2009 that the recently incorporated unique staff person dealing with immigration only worked in migrant settlement. It was the international development area that had a stronger discourse in relation to the need to work on migrant empowerment and social cohesion. In fact, at

115 Regidoria de Drets Civils, Cooperació i Igualtat, Ajuntament de Lleida:

http://www.paeria.es/dcci/pages/Cooperacio/CooperacioDefault.aspx?area=3&idioma=0&id=40&sec=

111 [last checked 06/April/2016]

that time it was the only area of local government clearly dealing with migrant incorporation issues.

Before finishing this initial description, it is worth mentioning two points. First, the four municipalities studied were all members of the Fons-Català from the beginning, and they have sat on its board since the municipal elections held in 1999. Regarding co-development policymaking, the interviews show that Mataró, Girona and to some extent Barcelona have coordinated or delegated their approaches to Fons-Català albeit with different intensities. When Lleida city council started promoting co-development it took a distinctive approach. In addition, not all of them participated in the co-development commission promoted in 2012-13. Barcelona, for example, is not a member of this body. According to Fons-Català, Barcelona does not work directly on co-development and has delegated its work on the subject to the municipal association (which is indirectly supported by Barcelona City Council’s membership dues). The extent to which Mataró, Girona and Lleida network around co-development as an area of intervention is important. Overall, one can conclude that, even if each of them has their own approach, Fons-Català has been very influential with regard to their perspective on co-development. As has been already mentioned, Mataró is a special case among the three, because they have delegated the whole project management to Fons-Català. Girona manages its own direct cooperation but has also outsourced the management of the so-called indirect cooperation (that is cooperation executed by actors other than government which are preeminently NGOs) to Fons-Català.

Second, there are different approaches taken by these four local governments in some other aspects. For example, one issue is the existence of, and access to, local migrant associations’ consultative organic councils where civil society can formally meet.

These may provide, depending on the nature of these spaces, places where groups might be informed, or also discuss, or even help define public policies or institutional actions. Despite the fact that all local governments have Municipal Councils that deal with international cooperation, only Barcelona and Mataró (the so-called ‘neutrals’) have had migrant associations regularly among their members. The organisational arrangements of the Barcelona Solidarity and Cooperation Council formally gives a seat within the meetings to migrant associations. Barcelona City Council also has a

council to specifically deal with immigration issues. Meanwhile, Girona City Council has a Solidarity and Cooperation Council, in which the association of Colombian members has a seat. The city has also a Social Cohesion Council but no migrant associations are member of this body. Moreover, Girona supported the idea of creating a Co-development commission in 2009 and, later on, they also supported the creation of a Rural Council (outside the government) to replicate the structure of Senegalese Rural Councils. However, both initiatives, for different reasons, did not bear fruit. In brief, considering the overall context of the studied localities (not only the selected migrant associations), it would appear that the ‘neutral’ municipalities had a weaker focus on defining co-development actions but instead focussed on the civic representation of migrant associations. These issues will be discussed in more detail in the next section.

Table 5.1. Migration and Development policy environment in Barcelona, Girona, Lleida and Mataró City Councils in its 4th objective, but there is more focus on social services in 2012-15

• Pla de Treball per a la immigració 2008-11

City

• More general plans such as Pla de Mandat 2007-2011 includes

City

City

Source: own elaboration from interviews and follow-up phone calls, fieldwork, and analysis of Internet webpages, municipalities and Fons-Català documentation. Part of the information draws on material from a qualitative study of local governments and migrant transnational involvement in

co-development in Catalonia in 2009-10¹¹⁶. Also from (Acebillo-Baqué and Østergaard-Nielsen, 2011).

116 This study, Ciutadania local i transnacional a Catalunya: la participació i incorporació política dels migrants a Barcelona, Girona, Lleida i Tarragona was coordinated by Eva Østergaard-Nielsen and financed by the Research Agency of the Catalan Government, AGAUR.

5.1.3 Formal Institutional approaches and migrant associations’ presence