Stay Tuned - focus on implementation, what does it mean?

By Arwen Dewilde, LP

Many countries and cities already implement (some or all of) the proposed recommendations, but with varying results. The way in which countries and cities implement the same measure, also varies widely, at least partly explaining the variations in results and impact. Interestingly, in the literature good practices are only conceptual descriptions of the end product. There is no information available on the process, how they made it work. There is no information on the steps that were taken, how the problems and barriers encountered along the way were being tackled and resolved, what techniques were being used and ultimately also what might not have worked in an initial approach and why. There is a lot to learn from what’s inside that ‘Black Box of Implementation’.

Recommendations EU

Stay Tuned aims to build on the work of the working Group ET 2020, making the recommended policy measures work, by continuing to putting into practice the recommendations of the European commission: “Local authorities should establish arrangements for cross-sector collaboration to tackle ESL. However, organising the involvement and contribution of a wide range of stakeholders can be challenging. Successful and sustainable cooperation takes time to develop. Capacity building programmes to strengthen local alliances to reduce ESL should be supported. Good practices on ESL should be shared between local communities and beyond.”

Stay Tuned acknowledges the importance of the capabilities approach. During the work of the network, attention will shift from the ‘what’ to the ‘how’, to the process of implementation. The partner cities of Stay Tuned each have good implementation practices to share about common policy measures, and the network holds a powerful potential for peer to peer learning, complemented with expert sessions. Capturing this learning process also means documenting the Black Box of Implementation.

Some key points in our approach:

• Many cities do have a tradition in participative, collaborative planning, involving their stakeholders and allowing them to co-create policy and influence the shape of action.
• What is still more of a challenge, is collaboratively implementing complex, integrated plans which need to be more than a collection of separate projects.
• Our partners are policy professionals rather than change specialists. They were not consciously aware of the difference between policy (what) and process (how), and the different skill sets involved. Many of them do have valuable implementation strategies, but are often unable to identify them (‘Implementation Blindness’ in Stay Tuned terminology)
• Stay Tuned developed a model for implementation – to be able to target to work to the zone of the implementation blindness – making tacit knowledge explicit (exploring the iceberg, what’s under the waterline)
• Capabilities approach: up-tuning the existing implementation skill sets, enabling partners to overcome their identified implementation barriers, installing a systematic and therefore very conscious approach to the process
• To that end, the 4 URBACT Implementation Challenges were further refined into 7 implementation themes (scheme in section Documents). Those 7 themes each have a set of associated capabilities, schematised in our Stay Tuned Implementation Menu, the backbone for the transnational meetings
• In realising complicated change processes, the role of the URBACT Local Group is key – and quite different than its role in an Action Planning Network.