MPA-DP Program Links Executive Training and Institutional Innovation in Jordan
Like other nations in the Middle East, Jordan faces the enormous challenges of rapid population growth, climate change, poverty, inequality, and environmental degradation. These issues can intertwine in many ways: climate change, for example, often disproportionately affects poor communities, while economic opportunities that alleviate poverty can put greater stress on the environment.
To address these complex challenges while pursing sustainable development, officials in government and the nonprofit and private sectors must draw knowledge and lessons from a range of disciplines. In an innovative partnership to this end, the government of Jordan and Columbia University agreed in December 2010 to jointly tackle issues of extreme poverty affecting 800,000 Jordanians spread across 21 so-called poverty pockets.
Dr. André Corrêa d’Almeida is an adjunct assistant professor at SIPA’s MPA in Development Practice Program and program director of executive education at the Earth Institute’s Center on Globalization and Sustainable Development. For the last two years, he has been leading Columbia’s capacity-building and executive-education efforts in the area of sustainable development in Jordan.
The program there, offered through the Institute for Sustainable Development Practice at the Columbia Global Center in Amman, draws on the expertise of more than 30 sustainable development professionals – international specialists in fields including conflict resolution, economic development, climate change, global health practices, human rights, and many others.
All told, it has trained more than 370 Jordanian development practitioners from more than 35 different governmental units and nonprofit organizations.Through lectures, workshops, and fieldwork, policymakers and development practitioners learn both general theory and factual information particular to the region. Participants gain tangible skills and multidisciplinary knowledge to help tackle complex issues, and leave with strong peer networks for future collaboration.
Corrêa d’Almeida suggests that executive training targeted to competitive business environments may be unsuitable for settings that require cooperation and coordinated action among different stakeholders. As such, the education models must be adapted for its setting.
“If you coordinate action by means of developing mutual trust — not only interpersonal but also between organizations,” Corrêa d’Almeida argues, “then the linkages between those that design the policy and those that implement policy are much more effective.”
The fundamental hypothesis behind this approach, Corrêa d’Almeida says, is that if conditions are created to help foster connectivity in public governance, shared ideas gain momentum that leads to institutional innovation.
For more information about this program and the plans to expand it to other countries in the Middle East visit: http://cgsd.columbia.edu/projects/jordan/jordan-capacity-building/
Learn more about the MPA in Development Practice (MPA-DP) degree, which trains aspiring practitioners to understand, develop, and implement integrated approaches to sustainable development. The MPA-DP emphasizes practical knowledge and skills while drawing on the extraordinary educational and research facilities of Columbia University.