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• Collection of good practices of catalan cooperation
• Methodological practical guides of cooperation

Good Practices 5

Brotherhood San Miguelito (Nicaragua) and Sant Boi de Llobregat (Cataluña)

In Catalonia, the town halls have been, inside the scope of public administrations, the pioneers in assuming that in a world leaded by the globalization movement like the current one, the situation in which a huge part of the planet lives is not foreign thing to us and cannot make us indifferent. That is why, in the middle of the eighties, a high number of municipalities decided to make the first steps of the municipal cooperation to the development in our country. We have to be conscious also of the few resources that the local ambience can use, in many cases the decision made was in favour of an imaginative formula similar to the one that at the end of the Second World War promoted an approach between municipalities of the centre Europe that had been divided for years, into two edicts: the brotherhood cities, in order to generate a formula that helped to construct socially the peace.

Inspired by this experience, and once recovered the democracy in the local ambience with the elections of 1979, the first in the municipalities since the dictatorship, the municipalities started working to improve the living conditions of its citizens with undeniable advances. Soon it was seen that it was possible to work also from the local scope to promote a more global development. This is how was born the will to promote an approach with another municipality of the South in order to focus better on the resources and to be able to collaborate, to do exchanges, to share the path to follow in order to achieve the local development of both municipalities. This is how were born the cooperation brotherhoods. Many established with countries that also were doing a process of recent change, as it is the case of Nicaragua, in which also in 1979 was proclaimed the victory the sandinista, after so many years of war. Today, there are still almost forty Catalan demos who have a brotherhood with Nicaraguan populations.

An example of living brotherhood is the one of Sant Boi of Llobregat with San Miguelito (Nicaragua). In it there get together the initiatives of institutional cooperation between both municipalities with the initiatives of cooperation of some of its entities. This model of brotherhood, which keeps on being consolidated by the time, has been provided also with processed mechanisms as there are: the evaluation, analysing and improving the quality of its cooperation, and to have a Transversal Municipal Program of Cooperation and Solidarity (2006), with which it is claimed that the cooperation it is not an isolated policy, if not it should be coordinated with other public polices of the city in order to increase its effectiveness, and simultaneously designing also a sensitization line in Sant Boi and of promotion of the social participation in the brotherhood.

In San Miguelito some initiatives have been promoted: support to infrastructures, educational support, microcredits for women, social housing, environmental progress... but also in the institutional strengthening in the Mayor’s Office so that it can be the engine of the local development and collaborating actively in the Strategic Plan of Municipal Development of San Miguelito (PEDM 2007-2015) and in initiatives as it is the support to the cadastre and a proposal of Territorial Arranging.

We can say that the brotherhood of San Miguelito with Sant Boi of Llobregat has managed to generate public policies that both in the South and in the North have managed to involve the local institutions and a good number of entities, and make dynamic in Catalonia the support of other public administrations: Catalan Agency of Cooperation to the Development, Diputació the Barcelona, Fons Català othef Cooperació al Desenvolupament and the University of Barcelona. For the dynamism of the brotherhood, for the contents and for the participative and planning mechanisms that have been implemented, we think that it is a good practice of municipal cooperation and that it is necessary to announce it because it can be a good model to take into consideration for other initiatives.

Núria Camps i Vidal
Director of AVALUEM

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