Investment in formal and informal networking and co-operation - Hungarian Association of Healthy Cities

YEARBOOK 2000 - Investment in formal and informal networking and co-operation

In order to explore formal and informal of co-operations, we asked the respondents to list the five most important partners at local, national and international levels with whom they have already co-operated to ensure the successful implementation of their programmes. We do not include local governments because this partnership is self-evident since local Healthy Cities programmes could not operate without the participation of local governments.

In case of local partners, all the respondents were able to list five as requested. This was not the case for national level partners, because 16.6% of the member towns did not list any national level partners, 44.4% mentioned only one, 16.6% mentioned 3 and 22,2% mentioned 5 partners.

When listing local partners, the co-ordinators of the member towns mentioned the following 5 organisations the most frequently as partners in the implementation of the local programme:

National Public Helath Services
Institutes of Health Services
Local community organisations, non profit service centres
Educational institutes
Police

The distribution of the most frequently mentioned partners by member town is shown in Diagram 8.

As illustrated by the data in the diagram, local community organisations are at the top of the list of the most frequently mentioned partners, because they are present among the local partners of nearly every tow. Other important partners are the institutes of National Public Health Services and Institutes of health services, being mentioned by more than 50% of member towns.

Mention was also made - but by fewer than 25 % of the member towns - of the following partners: Red Cross, the general assembly of the county, County Level Job Centres, local churches, child welfare services and cultural institutions.
Among national level partners the most frequently mentioned ones were the following:

member towns of the Hungarian Association of Healthy Cities
Ministry of Health
Ministry of Social and Family Welfare
Soros Foundation
NEKAP - Institute of Environmental Health
Ministry of Youth and Sports
CHEF Hungary

The situation is rather discouraging in case of the international partners. Not more than 27% of the member towns mentioned at least one international partner. The two project towns mentioned the highest number of international relations. The following organisations were listed as international partners:

AIHA 'Healthy Community' Programme, USA
EUROPA FORUM for Urban Safety (Paris, Vienna)
MILENA 2000 (Vienna)
Vienna Healthy Cities Project
WHO Geneva
European Network of the Healthy Cities

The analysis of the relationships has revealed that member towns have built mainly local partnerships. Their national relations can be divided into two dominant areas, partly the ministries governing the related fields, and the member towns of the association. At the same time we must bear in mind that through the national association the member towns can be and actually are in connection with several national and international partners. In spite of that, it is considered as a deficiency that hardly any of the partnerships mentions are strong, really independently maintained relationships.

The small number of international relations is obviously related to the problems caused by the lack of foreign language skills, as described earlier. Nonetheless, member towns should find a way of building and maintaining a more extended range of international relations, because these would make it possible for them to gain a lot of experiences and acquire the kind of knowledge that they could not have access to in any other way.