DEVELOPMENT POLICIES IN THE REGIONAL VALENCIAN GOVERNMENT

COOPERATION FOR DEVELOPMENT FROM THE VALENCIAN REGIONAL GOVERNMENT

In this Conference, that took place today, we had the chance to listen to one of the political figures in charge of Cooperation for Development , from the Valencian Government.

The talk put forward the necessity to have more control in what comes to be the destination and actual use of the public funds that the mentioned organism manages. In this way, the speaker was asked by some of the attendants about certain project controls, that should take place and seem not to work effectively in controlling the destination of funds.

In this way, some analysts on the topic have pointed out the necessity to change the current Valencian Law of for Development Cooperation, which indirectly is allowing private enterprises to manage the cooperation funds and is not establishing any parliamentary control on the program for Development.

Thus, cooperation in Valencia seems to have gained a relative discredit both within and out of our Community. As a matter of fact, the necessary conditions to be allowed funds are getting less and less restrictive, allowing newly-created NGO’s to be given huge amounts of money.

The assistance to this talk has been kind of deceiving in what comes to acquiring new knowledge about Development. The speaker was not able to answer all questions the way an expert would. The talk seemed to be rather a political speech (and I hope it had nothing to do with the fact that we have autonomic election in about two months), rather than an academic instance.

Furthermore, I believe for the Intercultural Seminars it might have been better to focus on the academic aspect of International Development Cooperation, rather than the political one. That is, the exposition of the claimed success of the current regional government in the field of Development was of no interest for most of the students there, who mainly come from abroad or other regions in Spain.

ARMED CONFLICTS AND PEACE PROCESSES

Conflict, Culture and Communication: Our Conceptual Imagination

Comments on the Intercultural Seminar given by

In this Intercultural Seminar we were presented to the different conceptions of culture and conflict and the way they can be related to intercultural dialogue. The seminar, which was given from an extremely theoretical perspective, assumed the fact that understanding the origin of these conflicts can be the key in order to apply them.

In this way, the presentation developed a prospection into the etymology and history of these concepts and the way they were used nowadays. It is a fact, however, that it was not easy to link such extremely theoretical investigations with the reality of Interculturality. In this way, questions that might have come to my mind related to the topic were not even mentioned and are part of important knowledge gaps I might expect to build in an intercultural seminar related to Interculturality.

In this way, understanding the necessities of our current globalized world and the challenges we face as future peace-builders against a very specific discourse claiming the end of Interculturality (like the German Prime Minister Angela Merkel affirmed) or the preponderating discourse in certain spheres that affirms the necessity to acknowledge a Clash of Civilizations and react against it are two key topics I would have liked to talk about.

On the other hand, the eternal discussion between Cultural Relativism, Communitarianism, Cosmopolitanism, etc... that have a direct relationship with the work of peacebuilders, peace educators and also peace researchers is also an unresolved one, but an interesting to have, in order to give grounds in order to orientate our work towards a certain structural change, and lead our future work with confidence and the acquisition of a specific goal towards which to continue in the thick of things.