Garnet Second Capacity Building Workshop on Governance and Society: the role of the private sector in the transition to democracy
Governance and Society: The role of the private sector in the transition to democracy
Kyiv-Mohyla Business School, Kyiv, 6-8 September 2006
in partnership with IEDC Bled School of Management
Ranging from doctoral students and academics to civil society representatives, regional officials and business leaders, 52 delegates from 20 different countries convened to pool resources around the theme Governance and Society: The role of the private sector in the transition to democracy in Kyiv for the second Capacity Building Workshop. The meeting was designed to spread excellence through dialogue and offered a platform to reflect on the policy of private sector development under transition in Ukraine and neighbouring countries.
Ukraine’s turbulent post-independence economic and political history offered a challenging setting in which to debate the interaction between private sector developments and the democratic transition. The role of business education was discussed as well as credible perspectives on multilateral and regional integration. The extent to which Central Europe can provide lessons in this process was equally examined. Finally, a strong emphasis was put on the pivotal role of entrepreneurship in the relation between governance and society. Social entrepreneurs, new enterprise, private owners and foreign investors presented the stumbling blocks and opportunities of the Ukrainian transition in a globalising world.
The aim of the workshop was to elaborate a set of suggestions on the dynamics of entrepreneurship, business education and democratic processes that would inform the broader policy sector, researchers from the Garnet consortium and business educators.
For this Second Garnet Capacity Building Workshop, a pilot formula was tested with the aim of creating as interactive an environment as possible. To this end, the workshop was facilitated using a specific methodology used successfully at IMD. As a member of a specific group for the duration of the workshop, participants were encouraged to be pro-active in a collaborative manner. The confirmed Evian Group formula, alternating plenary sessions and working groups with representatives of different cultures and constituencies, was kept as the general framework for the event.
The underlying objective of the capacity building exercise was to bridge the divide between academic and business education so as to create greater mutual understanding and common interest. It unfolded in two main different ways:
1. The establishment of a dialogue and collaborative work reaching across-generations, across-constituencies, across-cultures
2. The methodology used and the process it generated provided an extra capacity building dimension to the exercise
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