Interaction w the 3rd World as Tech Cooperation-1

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Nemo solus satis sapit.

Viribus unitis.

Nothing is eternal.

Knowledge is power.

Actum ne agas.







Preface


This article is a concentrated compilation of the personal experiences – as lengthy as almost of a quarter of a century (since 1996) – in and with technical cooperation of the author, who has been engaged into TACIS, ISTC, IAEA TC and a few parallel technical assistance and cooperation programmes and standalone projects. This is why links to other sources are few. The author's extensive knowledge of what technical assistance and related international cooperation factually is and must thinkably be about has led him to the rather critical look, which this work subsequently offers to the reader.


The author has found no descriptive material (apart from internal instructions and manuals of individual organizations) where it would be set out what technical cooperation is, entrusting consequently himself to believe that this account is the first of the kind.




Theory


There is, quite strangely, no strict and universally accepted definition of what either an international organization or technical cooperation is. Internal statements existent in some organizations and somehow delineating both notions do not count. To be more precise in one’s outgivings, one first needs to realize what a definition is.


The definition of a notion is the statement of an array of features characteristic from a viewpoint of that notion so that comparing the features of a thing or phenomenon with that array one immediately and unambiguously sees whether or not that thing or phenomenon belongs to the notion, whatever weird that belonging may seem to be. If weirdness in association with a notion is to be excluded, then the list of those weird associations is included in the definition, marked as exceptions. This last peculiarity explains why judicial (else legal) definitions allow so many ways of evasion or misinterpretation.


History has shown that no single country can live on its own – that is why international cooperation is there. Countries and nations exchange experiences, prevent initiated conflicts from rising, help each other foster their prosperity. International cooperation is conducted in many ways, one and the most efficient of which is through dedicated multinational agencies.


Definition 1
An international organization (IO) is an organization which
• is instituted by more than two states (its Member States; terminology may vary);
• has its Charter with  a clear mandate therein (understood to be a list of its objectives with an indication of timeframes; the objectives implying no direct or indirect violation of international law and of ethics);
• activities are subject to its mandate;
• is governed by a Governing Body without any direct dependence on any government or another intergovernmental body;
• activities are funded by and through voluntary contributions from its Member States (with an envisaged opportunity to receive force-majeure or periodic dedicated or lump contributions from Partners);
• has no taxable objectives of its own (a non-commercial entity);
• employs staff of different citizenships at professional posts (auxiliary staff may be local if the international organization has Headquarters), an IO’s staff normally called its Secretariat;
• professional staff enjoys diplomatic immunity (at least when at work).


All other organizations that employ citizens of different nations or various nationals should be called ones ‘similar to an international organization’. An IO is neither a transnational company nor a company whose staff includes nationals of different countries (whilst the experience with multi-cultural or multi-national professional environments is welcomed when a candidate is considered for a position in an IO).
The activities constituting international cooperation are exempt from taxation, because they already support an assisted country and at the same time they are acts of free will and do not, in particular, finance defence and enforcement in the target countries.
Bullet six incorporates it that an objective of the work of an IO may have commercial implications – if it concerns sustainability of (an entity in) a Member State or a country without the membership of the IO but supported by it. According to bullet seven, whether an IO is headquartered anywhere and/or has affiliates is unrelated to its nature and efficacy. A consequence of an IO being headquartered is that its use of the Headquarters is free of charge, inclusive of all support activities with respect to the building(s), and its operation locally tax-exempt. A building or a complex of them may headquarter a few IOs. Examples can be the UN premises in NYC as well as the UN complexes in Geneva and Vienna.


The last bullet imply, in particular, that an IO’s staff is salaried tax-exempt in the country headquartering the IO with it being the staff’s own responsibility to deal with the taxing authorities in the staff’s country of origin.


An IO is thus effectively an intergovernmental body and may belong to a family of more IOs and/or have sister entities, too. It may or may not allow an expansion of its membership and always includes in its Charter the possibility for any Member State to suspend or stop its membership. It may have ‘allies’, normally called ‘Partners’. Indirect dependence on some countries or institutions is always possible, that is why heads of IOs are usually selected from ‘third party’ states (if an IO is composed essentially of representatives of two geopolitical ‘poles’), which does not however completely prevent it from being biased. Some IOs and intergovernmental bodies – nowadays almost each of them – treat toponymical denotations rather broadly due to historical and geopolitical causes, e.g. the term ‘Europe’ means the geographical Europe (the part of Eurasia between the westernmost banks of Portugal and the Urals) plus the ex-USSR republics in the Caucasus and Central Asia. The end of the 20-th century and the first quarter of the 21-st have been marked with extensive inter-state and intercontinental immigration, but under preservation of their original culture, habits and rites among the immigrants, so that the areas of their origin – culturally – have merely expanded rather than reduced in population.
Multiple or running cases, when a Member State did not contribute to the budget of an IO, may end in a temporary deprivation of some or all of the voting rights with the non-contributing Member State.
Management approaches and techniques as well as whether an IO or an intergovernmental body is credited with a certificate in management (ISO9001, ISO21500, etc) bears no relation to the quality of its staff and work nor helps attest an organization as being an IO.
There are nations availing frontline and topmost technology (which they have produced, having thus made it frontline) and there are others permanently in need but temporarily out of possession of it. Interestingly enough, the biggest countries according to their population and, partly, area occupied are of the second category in terms of the sentence above. Because of the reason why international cooperation is there, nations of the first category may be helping those of the second category in reaching what is called sustainability.


Why ‘Third World’? Firstly, the term is ‘banned’, so to say, from any official use in the UNO system, they speaking instead of ‘developing countries’, which, however, are not defined as well, some external experts assigning the Czech Republic, the Russian Federation, etc, to such countries. (This mistake obviously stems from the mixing of terms, i.e. from equalizing a ‘developing country’ and an ‘emerging economy’.) Secondly, whether the countries, which another – Third – World comprises, are a reality or this notion was devised by one of the two geopolitical poles of the post-WWII times and whether it is possible that they are there for a considerable time to come are practical questions for everybody whose work is related to international organizations or multinational companies. Over ages, Europe has evolved into two camps, its geographical West and East, which later gave rise to two political antagonists and to two subsequent World Wars in the 20-th century. That division – artificial or natural – entailed a speedy development of weapons with an accompanying splash of science and technology (physics in the first run) in those two worlds, and a relatively calm go of the life in the rest parts of the Globe, which journalists had earmarked ‘arms race’ and ‘Third World’ in the fifties of the 20-th century.
A country that has and can exhibit influence (an ‘influential’ country) is a big system, i.e. there is something within the country that runs the life of that country.



Definition 2
A big system is a kernel plus a periphery.



The periphery is the protective layer for the kernel, ‘expendable material’ for the kernel. Therefore the country avails a kernel inside it, external forces are insignificant inside the country. A country that cannot govern itself is absorbed into another’s periphery. The lifetime of a kernel surrounded by a ‘thin’ periphery, say, of a ‘naked kernel’, is rather limited, so such countries live on their own not longer than around a dozen of years, being of the order of magnitude of the statistical error in a centurial move (an estimate valid as of the first quarter of the 21-st century). Therefore, such a country automatically becomes a country of another – ‘third’ – world, as it leaves the control area of one big nation, while it does not enter that of another. That means that the composition of the variety of those countries fluctuates, while the variety itself keeps on being in place.



Definition 3
The countries that keep on existing as part of the periphery of a country which is a big system compose a Third World.

The Third World exists therefore.


(More information on big systems, self-existence, absorption of elements into peripheries, and the like can be found in the author’s other articles, e.g. ‘The algorithms of the Spread of Information in Social Systems and Their Application to the Shaping of a Public Opinion’ (Proceedings of the Ecoinfo-2003 Int’l Conference, Moscow, 2003) and ‘Generalized Categories and the Phenomenon of Safety’, Actual Questions of Modern Science, Journal of the Int’l Institute of Strategic Research, Moscow, 2019’, ‘On the Protective Properties of Sets with Kernels’, in printing.)

International cooperation is, among its many objects, about helping with sustainability. Sustainability, as introduced by the United Nations (UN) Organization (UNO), is understood to be a state of a country when the country avails technological capacities alongside human resources sufficient to create revenues (and does create revenues, making the country independent of continued external aid). Helping reach sustainability is subdivided into the UNO’s seventeen Sustainable Development Goals foreseen to be met by 2031 (the 17 SDGs of the Agenda 2030; learn it at The condition of sustainability silently admits that the country is financially capable of acquiring the equipment and knowledge that it is in need of.


International cooperation features two basic facets – (individual or lump) grants and in-kind support, equally tax-exempt for both the issuing and the receiving sides.


Definition 4
Technical cooperation (TC) is the subdivision and type of international cooperation that is
• meant to ensure technology transfer (fulfilled as knowledge sharing and equipment supplies);
• conducted by IOs;
• managed by dedicated staff within an IO (which may be the very IO);
• funded by voluntarily raised generic TC funds and by dedicated funds for specific purposes;
• tax-exempt for both the donator and the recipient (generic of international cooperation).


Bullet one viewed separately from the others and unidirectionally (i.e. from one or a few countries to another or more countries and not oppositely) squeezes (or widens) TC to technical assistance. Technical assistance is tax-exempt in the target countries, since it does not finance the defence and enforcement in the target countries. Technical assistance does not need to be tax-exempt in the countries where the equipment or expendables being the object of assistance originate, though commercial companies willing to supply equipment or expendables to those in need usually seek their governments’ tax exemption in such individual cases.


It is international organizations only that conduct TC. Technical assistance, with equipment and training provision as well as with funding, by one state towards another is an example of bilateral cooperation and is not one of that which they denote with ‘technical cooperation’. However, ideally entities of both types should employ experienced managers of complex sci&tech projects.
A few IOs treat TC and technical assistance as one single area of activity. For example, the IAEA has its TACC (Technical Assistance and Cooperation Committee).


There have been – as has been said – TC-purposed IOs, e.g. ISTC, UNIDO, etc, as well as solely technical assistance-aimed programmes, e.g. TASIC, PHARE, etc.


Export control regimes are turned on when the equipment planned to be supplied to an institution or a plant in a technically assisted country may be used – due to its physical properties and technical performance – for purposes other than those declared; such equipment is known to be dual-use equipment. The End-User’s declaration – End-User statement – to that effect serves to ensure the validity of the supply in terms of the use of the equipment as declared. Verification of the accordance of the use to the declaration is, however, a problem when a Third World country is implied (because of its political instability, fundamental incredibility, etc), therefore, End-User statements are done so that effectively they are disclaimers.


Some IOs leading TC or conducting technical assistance procure equipment with a parallel transfer of its ownership to the End-User (UN Family organizations, EC); some retain ownership, declaring that the legal person the End-User is related to only stores the equipment supplied (ISTC). The reasons to this bifurcation are that some technically assisted organizations are under a special control regime in their countries so that reception of foreign equipment must either undergo a long line of governmental and institutional approvals or the local government simply prohibits the direct use of equipment of ‘dubious’ origin (stored equipment is understood to be in indirect use).


Some IOs that procure equipment to their Member States or under needs-based circumstances to non-Member States do so through their TC units (if any are on their organizational charts) – e.g. the IAEA. If such equipment is hazardous against a list of hazardous equipment and the IO itself has developed that list (e.g. the IAEA regarding radiation-hazardous devices), the conditions in the country or facility of destination must be verified in advance with respect to them meeting the requirements of the list.
Usually, a Partner is interested in and consecutively funds the development of (actually the production of a pilot batch with) a specific technology by a TC-participant institution, which results in the Partner’s non-exclusive rights over the intellectual property (IP) – non-exclusive because institutions only submit for funding the technologies that they (had) developed, which in its turn may put obstacles to the development team’s commercial usage of and profiteering from their own technology. There is a World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) – a UN Family entity – that has raised a Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) with 153 signatory countries (at the start of 2020), the PCT helping file a patent application and then register the patent, if successful, under lean terms and valid across the PCT signatory membership. TC IOs may fund PCT patent applications.
Grants are monetary amounts that can be individual or purposed for entire teams, the latter meaning that it is up to the team manager to decide on which team member is given which amount of money for performing (advance payment) or having performed (expense coverage) which part of a TC activity.


In-kind contributions are all types of equipment (including property) submitted for use by a TC participant side – either donating or receiving – or by an IO. They may be a donation by a Partner of equipment or a facility or when the Recipient side, i.e. the technically assisted side of a TC activity, leaves a facility of its for use by a TC IO or by a third party according to the respective TC programme.


TC IOs and technical assistance organizations are of two types: those directly doing TC and assistance (UN Family entities, USAID, etc) and those which are intermediaries in the technical assistance or cooperation process (TACIS management units in the subject countries, ISTC, etc), while both cases share the same name of ‘Secretariat’ for their staff (except, probably, really small teams).


To ensure fulfilling the basic and general idea of a particular TC IO or a technical assistance leading organization, grants may be transmitted individually to TC project team members (i.e. at their banking accounts). Individual grants were paid (Simple Past is used to show the bygone expiry of the programmes) to support, for instance, ex-WMD (weapons of mass destruction) developers through the International Science and Technology Center (ISTC) TC programme as well as through different bilateral mechanisms established between particular governmental bodies in one country and the mirror ones in another (ISTC was initially a joint endeavour by the US Department of Energy and the Russian Ministry of Atomic Energy under an agreement between their governments). Per diems are another kind of grants.
In-kind contributions were placed through a bilateral European Commission-Russian Federation assistance programme called TASIC (Technical Assistance to the Commonwealth of Independent States) and through a parallel one for European Union candidate countries called PHARE (after its original title Poland and Hungary: Assistance for Restructuring their Economies). Pre-paid travel along with event participation fee coverage is another sort of in-kind contribution.


As is seen, equipment supplies – either budgeted in a TC programme or in-kind – are a critical part of TC and the primary component of technical assistance. This is why procurement offices and units of TC and technical assistance organizations play a key role in the overall assistance and cooperation process. Small ‘outdoor’ management teams may have no procurement unit or a staff member in charge, as the ‘base’ organization itself performs that function. TC and assistance supplies are procured under the DDP or DPU conditions (Incoterms-2020; learn them at

As has been said, TC funds are raised as voluntary contributions. These may be donated by governments, private companies, and individuals (though this third option occurs seldom). As a rule, they arrive at a TC-purposed account of an IO after a governmental decision (as a part, for instance, of the yearly state budget). Certain TC organizations let their Member States know reference contribution figures calculated on the basis of the budgetary information shared by the Member States with the organization. Repeated provision of amounts below the reference figure may lead to suspending reception of technical assistance by the non-compliant Member State, which somewhat decreases the voluntariness of TC fund contribution, whilst there are other instruments of disciplining a permanently aided country apparently sustained by other nations’ assistance only.
The focal agency in a country usually appointed to be responsible for technical cooperation is the local Ministry of Development (the preferred name of an economy or industry ministry in the Third World). Special forms of technical cooperation (medical services, nuclear industry, etc) are dealt with by respective dedicated agencies or ministries, provided that they exist in the country.


The TC ‘clientele’ is academia, industrial engineers and institutional researchers, laboratory technicians, and career diplomats – both in subject countries and at local bases in countries headquartering IOs.


A project, according to the California-based Project Management Institute (PMI) as well as to its Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBoK), is a consorted number of activities under two limitations:
(1) in its objectives – a project aims at achieving a unique result, i.e. something which is finely delineated and has not yet been implemented – and
(2) in its duration – as a rule, it is within three years’ period of time (the exceptions are large endeavours like construction of very high multi-level buildings or quite specific objects, which may last up to a decade or longer).
Denunciation of either limitation turns a project into a programme.


Accomplishing missions and addressing tasks by means of projects has a number of innate drawbacks, which are scrutinized below.
TC programmes, i.e. envisioned or factual conglomerates of TC projects, are proposed by either a Member State or a group of Member States to the IO or by the secretariat of the IO itself (which evidently is a hidden proposition by a group of Member States). An international, potentially omnipresent, problem may result in the start of a TC programme with a dedicated budget to be filled for solving that problem. A TC project budget-wise is usually of an order not exceeding a few hundred thousand USD. Exceptions may be of an order of a million or a few millions USD if the justified construction of a complex facility is implied, the assisted country lacking its own funds.
There are rather extraordinary types of TC projects, e.g. the so-called ‘commercialization (or innovation) initiatives’, i.e. TC projects, which unique objective is to introduce a particular novel technology in a country (which may have developed the technology) and therefore directly addressing the final end of technical cooperation (i.e. sustainability) with the only task of equipping a pilot production facility (a small plant, in fact) which will put that technology into practice and which will fit local industries with that technology (with a potential of expanding it overseas if it was a local development).


A project is a tool to plan, while it is unable to predict, being dependent, on the other hand, on well done prediction, which – when TC is in question – is always a problem, since it deals with the Third World.
TC projects can be national, regional and interregional. Countries submit to an IO their proposals of their national TC projects through official channels only, because a potential project may deal with sensitive information (in any respect of sensitivity) and the proposal must thus be cleared by all relevant authorities internally in the country. An IO always avails the list of its Member States’ and its Observers’ (if any) official channels in respect of that very IO and – if need be – of other countries’. An IO must therefore only undertake formal (and even informal) consideration of the proposals arrived at the IO through the official channels.
TC projects work under their Work Plans, a term that is to be met nowhere else, except international cooperation. Work Plans are integral parts of Terms of Reference (ToR), Project Agreements (PA), etc, that comprise the formal documentary side of TC projects.
A characteristic implied to help monitoring and control of the run of TC projects is the so-called implementation rate (IR), i.e. the portion of the TC project budget expended to date (the amount already disbursed in versus the amount approved for funding the TC project). UN Family organizations follow this trend.


Presently, the UNO and other international and multi-lateral entities and structures follow, when conducting international cooperation, the directing principle of ‘result-based management’ (RBM). One of the outcomes following that principle is the orientation of TC projects towards no further need, after they are completed, in ‘re-doing’ them in that or another sense. Another one is the prerequisite availability in a project of a task to transfer and disseminate the technologies gained during the project by the project-target team, in particular – to more teams inside and outside the project-target country, preferably commercially, as part of helping them reach sustainability.


In order to best use the funds allocated for a TC programme, the approach known as project finance was developed to be utilized. However, ‘monstrous’ unions of IO’s like the UNO and UN Family still practice financing their TC endeavours through programmatically budgeted funds and programmed fund allocation, which may seem to be project finance, while it is not: the RBM approach, when applied to the Third World, incorporates too many uncertainties – nicknamed ‘assumptions and risks’ – that entail underfunding or, vice versa, uplifting the budgets of projects over thinkable margins.
Practically, the RBM principle has driven forward the planning and monitoring of project implementation through and with the use of a dedicated project-specific visualization tool called ‘framework matrix’. Regular project management representation as well as monitoring and control tools – Gantt diagrams, specific software (Visio, etc) – serve supplements to that framework matrix. An example follows, where it is illustrated with the framework matrix of a regional TC project entitled ‘Clean Metropolitan and Urban Areas in Countries of Region Õ’.


It is seen from this typical sample that project modules are represented with a decrease of the level of generality with a concordant expansion in the details constituting a module. It is also seen that the wording of a project title is usually much more generic than its gist and the specifics of its integral parts, up to the extremity of bathos, which violates straight the definition of a project. A peculiarity of project monitoring is that the indicator of the readiness of a plan or blueprint of something is that very plan or blueprint, while the means to check the indicator is again that very plan or blueprint. It is also seen that it is impossible to achieve within one project its many widely formulated objectives because of temporal and financial limitations of a project as such (the basic minus of the very idea of project) due to the existing fundamental restriction to the available types of Activities (which earmark tasks) and of the number of Inputs (practical ways to address tasks). In regional TC projects, in contrast to interregional and national ones, a focal country is identified with a focal organization in it. It is seen that the amount of inputs, i.e. the scope addressed by a TC project, is rather limited – another critical drawback of the project approach, substantially decelerating resolving a problem, because it only serves the purpose of accounting and reporting to the funder. No equipment supply will take place in this example, this being a regional TC project, as TC projects combining several assisted countries exclude procurement, leaving it for the parishes of national ones to operate. Since it is a real problem for and in a TC project, a regional TC one may become biased towards one group of countries where it is easier to implement, i.e. to disburse funds for activities in them, in opposition to the others, making project-based assistance only partially productive, or even counter-productive, especially when disbursement as such comes in the first place because of the IR requirements.


An ‘innovation initiative’ (II) type project serves to lift up technology if no other jack and must include the only Activity of merely equipping a facility.
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CONCLUSIONS
• This article words the definitions of an international organization and of technical cooperation.
• The Third World exists.
• International cooperation aims at sustainability.
• There are technical cooperation and technical assistance.
• Any international activity involves in that or another way technical assistance, including the sub-statement that any programme of an IO involves to that or another extent technical cooperation.
• There are international organizations and other entities comprised of staff with various citizenships.
• TC is funded voluntarily and sometimes aimed at instant needs.
• Technical cooperation is conducted via TC projects, the idea of ‘project’ having basal shortcomings.
• Many contemporary TC-related international organizations follow a ‘result-based management’ (RBM) principle realized through a ‘framework matrix’ project planning and monitoring paradigm.