The Diplomat
More than 600 professionals from the Spanish public sector cooperate every year with institutions in developing countries through the International and Ibero-American Foundation for Public Administration and Policies (FIIAPP), a public entity linked to the Spanish Cooperation.
As reported this past Friday by the foundation on the occasion of the Day of Cooperating Persons, FIIAPP mobilized, only in 2022, 622 public officials to participate in institutional cooperation missions in third countries.
FIIAPP, a foundation dependent on the state public sector that is integrated into the whole of Spanish cooperation, was created in 1998 with the aim of helping developing countries to improve public policies and public systems that can impact on development, in areas such as climate, migration, justice and security to digitization, employment, transport, or trade and, centrally, social cohesion. FIIAPP is the body in charge of managing the participation of Spanish administrations in these projects.
In the last year, 172 institutions allowed their professionals to participate in this type of cooperation. “This is a type of cooperation that is gaining more and more weight in European external action: Europe wants to share with the world its commitment to the rule of law, to social and territorial cohesion and effective access to rights as the foundation of the social contract, to a welfare state that requires effective, rule-based multilateralism,” said FIIAPP’s Director of Strategy and Communication, Tobias Jung. “It is the normative power that can make the difference with the cooperation of other powers and doing so hand in hand with institutions is crucial to move forward with guarantees on the triple fair social, green and digital transition globally,” he added.
The process of institutional cooperation starts with the collection of demand in EU partner countries. In these cases, the FIIAPP, with the EU delegations when they are European programs, meet with the institutions of a country and listen to their priorities on public policies or institutional strengthening needed to advance their development. Other times the public administrations themselves pick up this demand. The FIIAPP compares this information with the offer of the European institutions prior to the formulation of a project.
When this project is approved, the Spanish institutions, on the basis of the profile designed by FIIAPP, designate the experts who will travel to the country in question to support their counterpart institution. Most participate in short missions (7.3 days in duration), but in 2022, 72 officials were deployed on missions lasting more than one year, which are those that ensure the sustainability of international partnerships. In total, officials went last year to more than 120 countries, 37% in Latin America and 22% in both Sub-Saharan Africa and Europe (outside the EU).
The Ministries of Interior and Justice, along with the judiciary, are the institutions most involved in this type of cooperation, which FIIAPP is seeking to expand to involve municipalities, communities or universities or to incorporate more public talent in areas such as climate and digitization, aligning with the European connectivity strategy known as Global Gateway.
Women represent only 30% of the cooperation mobilized from institutions and are more concentrated in the areas of inclusive public systems, social policies and public finance, where they are 70, 60 and 50% respectively. The Ministries of the Interior and Justice are the ones that mobilize the most female employees in absolute numbers, due to their greater representation in the total number of public development workers.
