CHAPTER 3: LITERATURE REVIEW
3.4 Experiences of best and worst case scenarios of twinning agreements
The combined forces of urbanisation and globalisation are dominant driving forces behind the acceleration in municipal twinning partnerships over the previous years (UN-Habitat 2001). City to city partnerships, through their peer-to-peer exchange of knowledge, experience and best practice, have also been seen as a remedial aid to development as evidence worldwide strongly suggests that the essential bottlenecks to urban sustainability are the lack of local implementation capacity and sound governance, rather than lack of scientific knowledge, technology, funding, or international agreements‘ (UN-Habitat 2002). In order to unpack and relate the experiences of twinning agreements that were implemented in different countries the following examples explain some of the best and worst case scenarios across the globe.
3.4.1 Examples of best practices of twinning agreements and lessons learnt The researcher summarised two examples of best practices of twinning from Portugal and Belgium.
3.4.1.1 Lessons learnt from the Porto-Mindelo twinning agreement of 1992 in Cape Verde
The city of Porto in Portugal and Mindelo in Cape Verde signed a twinning agreement in 1992.
The objectives of the twinning focused on urban renewal and restoration of the historic heritage of the cities as explained by Sparke (2002). Since 1992, Porto has been twinned with Mindelo
51 Outcomes of Trans-border Spatial Development Cooperation. Insights Musina and Beitbridge’s Twinning Agreement.
(Cape Verde). Cooperation with other Portuguese-speaking countries is a priority for the city of Porto in Portugal. Porto, thus, developed projects to restore monuments built by the Portuguese as well as a plaza. At the same time, Porto financed the construction of a fish market in order to improve public health in Mindelo. The market opened to the public in 1997, allowing the population and vendors to carry out sales under sanitary conditions. The development of a collaborative urban planning policy has helped the development of infrastructure and quality public spaces.
The rehabilitation projects attracted tourists, thereby supporting the economic development of the twin cities. This assisted the two cities to generate their own income to fund its twinning agreement.
From this kind of twinning, one can learn that the development of a collaborative urban planning policy, generating own twinning funding projects and taking advantage of the dominant local language can assist twin towns to achieve their objectives.
3.4.1.2 Lessons learnt from the Preizerdaul-San Agustine twinning agreement of 2004 in Belgium
According to CEMR (2007), the two cities of Preizerdaul in Luxembourg and San Agustin in El Salvador signed a twinning agreement in April 2004. The city of Preizerdaul decided to support the financing of a water network project for the city of San Agustin. This cooperation became a reality with the signing of a twinning charter in the presence of the Minister of Cooperation of Luxembourg. On this occasion, the political leaders of the two municipalities expressed interest in the twinning agreement and added more concrete projects with respect to infrastructure development, education and health care. Regular official meetings with stakeholders were conducted. Later on, meetings which involved the wider community were organised in order to raise awareness among Luxembourg citizens about the problems faced by a developing country and to allow the citizens to express their views. According to the CMER (2007), the twinning was accompanied by a dedicated source of financial support. This fast-tracked the project for a water infrastructure network in San Agustin. Indirectly, the funds also helped to address the consequences of the 2001 earthquake which had resulted in destruction of bulk water infrastructure. The project was financially supported by the Ministry of Cooperation in Luxembourg. A delegation from Preizerdaul was sent to El Salvador to witness the necessity and
52 Outcomes of Trans-border Spatial Development Cooperation. Insights Musina and Beitbridge’s Twinning Agreement.
importance of decentralised aid in San Agustin. The project budget was around 16 500 British pounds per year (CMER, 2007).
From this twinning agreement, one can learn that possible sponsors like political leaders must be involved in the twinning implementation from the start to motivate them to dedicate more funds and to prioritise twinning projects. The other lesson is that regular official meetings must be conducted with both stakeholders and the general public in order to allow everyone to have an equal opportunity to express their opinions. Lastly, it is important for officials from twinning cities to constantly visit each other to track the progress of development projects.
3.4.2 Examples of worst practices of twinning agreements and lessons learnt Literature on worst practices of twinning agreements varies from one country to the other. In this regard the researcher has summarised examples including countries like Britain, Turkey, South Africa and Germany. A brief summary of the nature of each twinning agreement was provided. At the end of each summary, the lessons learnt were explained. Each case has a separate heading as follows:
3.4.2.1 Lessons learnt from Gauteng Province’s s post-apartheid twinning agreements in South Africa
On the provincial level, Gauteng Province had sister city agreements with numerous areas soon after South Africa gained its independence in 1994 (Seedat, cited in Buxbaum, 2014). It signed sister city agreements with Havana (Cuba); North Rhein Westphalia (Germany); Malaysia; Kyoggi (South Korea); and Bavaria (Germany) (Van Wyk, 1997: 52). The Gauteng Province Mayor at that time stated that twinnings were sought to promote trade, investment, tourism and deepening the culture of service to communities instead of advancing justified luxury overseas trips for individuals (Kariem, 2006). However, despite all the existing twinning agreements, maintaining active and beneficial city partnerships proved to be a difficult aspect of municipal international relationships, with various factors affecting the implementation of Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) agreements. It was also difficult to prioritise the twinning implementation, especially when a new mayor came into office. Gauteng province lacked dedicated staff who could contact and follow up with partner cities to ensure commitment to objectives (Buxbaum, 2014). Therefore, one
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can learn that partnership objectives have been unattainable due to lack of capacity to implement, making them inactive or dormant (Buxbaum, 2014). A twinning agreement requires dedicated staff and stakeholders who are committed to make follow-ups to achieve the stipulated objectives.
It is somewhat ironic that city-to-city cooperation partnerships are often designed to improve municipal capacity but cannot be implemented because of capacity issues.
3.4.2.2 Lessons learnt from the Britain and Turkey twinning agreement of 2003 Britain and Turkey signed a twinning agreement in 2003. It was based on a water and sanitation project (Perkmann, 2003). Furthermore, a contract was entered into between a Turkish Public Water and Sanitation Company and a British utility operator to assist the Turkish company in strengthening its institutional capacity. During the implementation phase of the twinning agreement, Turkey started facing difficulties in assigning adequate staff to work with the foreign twin due to lack of English speakers. The Turkish government imposed a hiring freeze law in public and municipal enterprises during the same period. Hence the twinning arrangement was suddenly forced to cease during the project implementation.
The lesson learnt here is that it is important to conduct a proper assessment of the readiness of both twin towns to implement the twinning objectives with respect to inputs and resources available. In this case, a twinning agreement was implemented without conducting a proper assessment of the readiness of the recipient party.
3.4.2.3 Lessons learnt from the Britain and Germany twinning agreement
According to Jonson (2012), some towns in Britain had to scrap their twinning arrangements with continental counterparts. In September 2011, councillors in Stortford voted to end local authority support for the town's 46-year twinning arrangements with Frieberg in Germany and Villiers-sur Marne in France. The major argument put forward was that Villiers-sur Marne was not putting any effort into the relationship. It was no longer a twinning agreement of mutual benefits. The mayor of the town announced in the same year that he was scrapping twinning links as a saving for the municipality. This was mainly because most of the politicians were capitalizing on the twinning agreements to justify their luxury overseas trips. We can learn that if twinning parties do not stick to the terms of reference the implementation process will not be a success. If one twin town stops
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cooperating, the twinning objectives will not be achieved for the benefit of both. Stakeholders and political leaders should not take advantage of the twinning agreement to further their personal trips as this can jeopardize the success of twinning. Some studies pointed out that such schemes will have to make better use of communications technology in place of physical fact-finding visits if they are to avoid corrupt use of public funds for travelling (Johnson, 2012).