Ireland & Uruguay - sharing economic development experiences (3)

On my recent trip to Uruguay I worked with a development programme (Uruguay Integra) whose focus is on building the capacity of the local government structures to identify, plan, fund and implement local development initiatives. As part of this I prepared a guide (drawing from several sources) to policy development and engaging public participation in policy. The basis of the guide was again two processes (value chains [Uruguay 2]):

Public policy design process


Public participation in policy design process

Ireland & Uruguay - sharing economic development experiences (2)

On my recent trip to Uruguay I met with a number of agencies where we discussed the Irish economic development structure (from policy to implementation to evaluation and the agencies responsible for this).

From this we developed some enterprise development Value Chains to allow us to compare the Irish experience (policy process and agencies) with that of Uruguay:

Policy Research Value Chain: this is the approach that has been adopted by Forfas, the Irish agency responsible for economic policy research:


Enterprise Development (Agency) Value Chain: this is the approach to building on innovation and entrepreneurial capacity towards export-based growth:


Policy Development (Implementation & Evaluation) Value Chain: we designed a chain of events that tend to be followed when defining a policy, developing implementation strategies for it; the associated coordination, regulation and monitoring and ending with evaluation. The purpose was to create a comparable method that we could align both Irish and Uruguayan development agencies and see where the similarities and opportunities lie:

Ireland & Uruguay - sharing economic development experiences

I have just returned from an assignment in Uruguay, working with the Office of Planning and Budgeting (OPP: oficina de planteamiento y presupuesto). This followed on from a trip by the director of OPP to Ireland in 2007.

The primary deliverable from this trip (in addition to a report and recommendations) was a story-board “Tail [tale] of the Celtic Tiger” – in interactive presentation drawing on more than 40 sources of information describing the Irish economic experience from the 1980s onwards.



The presentation follows the tail of the celtic tiger:
1. What caused the Celtic Tiger? (What existed before & what we did)
2. How did the Tiger roar? (Basis of the Celtic Tiger)
3. How can the tiger keep roaring? (Key Messages for today…)
4. How did we train the tiger? (Enterprise Development Structures)
5. The owners of the tiger (Social Partnership)
6. Feeding the Tiger (National Development Plan)
7. The tiger’s circus (Public Sector Modernisation)