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Developing Countries Forum Meeting#1 in Washington DC

The first "formal" meeting of the DC Forum was held on October 25, 2005 at SRI International's office in Arlington, Virginia. A bottom-line summary is provided in this article, making no attempt to do justice to the extraordinarily rich mixture of presentations and discussion during two meetings on October 25.

1. Next meeting date

For low participation confirmation, we decided to postpone the meeting to end of January. We will let you know as soon as we have confirmation of the location and final date!

All people interested to join us will be very welcome! Please contact Franziska Blunck fblunck @ competitiveness.org for more information.

All participants in the DC Forum meetings who are not yet members of TCI are encouraged to obtain a membership - easily done via web at www.competitiveness.org. In the case of consultants, for whom the means are most easily obtainable, TCI would require that consultants who have attended one meeting "free" become members of TCI before attending a subsequent meeting.

2. Key points from the Organizational Meeting

• Scepticism. Among donor agencies, there is a core group of "true believers" who have direct experience of a successful competitiveness program, and a wide array of skeptics who do not have a clear idea of what a competitiveness program is, or what it can accomplish. There was a considerable sense of frustration, particularly within USAID, that the concept was being judged by examples that did not represent the current state of the art, and was therefore in some danger of being rejected - or at least of seeing the pendulum swing away for some years.
• There is confusion within the development community regarding the meaning of "competitiveness." While arriving at a fixed single definition that all can agree upon might be impractical, greater clarity regarding competitiveness as a practice is needed. The most practical suggestion was to look at competitiveness as a set of tools, including cluster analysis, cluster development, innovation systems, value chains, competitiveness partnerships and certain measurement and benchmarking practices, upon which most participants could agree.
• There is a lack of widely recognized and accepted measurement tools to evaluate the effectiveness of competitiveness programs. Without these, widespread acceptance and adoption of competitiveness approaches will be slow in coming.

3. Conclusions

Based on these key premises from the main meeting, the following conclusions were reached in the organizational meeting which took place immediately following the main meeting:

Initiative #1: The DC Forum should lead a promotion campaign targeting the development community that clarifies what is meant by a competitiveness program, characterizing it not as a specific orthodoxy, but as a set of tools that are useful for enhancing economic growth and quality of life under certain circumstances. Meetings like the DC Forum discussions, where practitioners who agree on 80% of the issues, and discuss the 20% on which they currently disagree, are not helpful for the "skeptics" who are looking for basic consensus around a set of best practices and predictable outcomes from such programs. Thus DC Forum activities in the future should consist of two clearly differentiated types:

• "high-level dialogues" among competitiveness practitioners, aimed at finding consensus and setting the agenda, and
• promotional activities such as conferences, workshops and trainings that aim to communicate the best practices and focus on areas of consensus among practitioners.

Initiative #2: The DC Forum should focus on identifying and supporting promising evaluation methods that can become adopted as "standard practice" by donors and practitioners. Without such a tool, even a strong promotion campaign (Initiative #1) will make only incremental progress in converting skeptics. Within TCI's ranks, there are several researchers and initiatives that are on the cutting edge of evaluation methodologies today. To the extent possible, TCI will ensure that such methodologies become a major element of the agenda for TCI Forum meetings in coming months.

4. Initiative Working Groups

To move forward on these initiatives, TCI will aim to form two working groups, to further shape and implement these two initiatives. Please address Alec Hansen or Franziska Blunck if you would like to participate and for feedback, comments, suggestions or questions on this or any other aspect of the DC Forum.

For more complete notes from the main meeting, please see the accompanying minutes, kindly provided by Alex Dunlop. For downloading click here .