Exchanges

Exchanges of knowledge and experience between ten communes of Neiva, Colombia and ten award-winning practices from different parts of the world.

As part of the VII Habitat Colombia International Conference, ten award-winning projects were invited to share their experience through workshops and community exchange with ten different communities within the city of Neiva – a city of 350,000 inhabitants situated in the south of Colombia.

Each of the ten examples of good practice – which included winners of the World Habitat Award, the Dubai International Award for Best Practices to Improve the Living Environment, the UNDP Urban Governance Programme and the 2005 International Awards for the Transfer of Good Practice – was selected to match specific areas of demand identified by the ten communities. The participants in the exchange had the opportunity to share and learn from solutions successfully applied in other contexts, identify potential areas for adaptation and transfer of these approaches and establish lasting relationships to enable collaboration in future initiatives.

This publication, highlighting the fruitful exchange of knowledge and experience in Neiva, was launched at the World Urban Forum 4 in Nanjing, China in November 2008, where UN-HABITAT/ROLAC, Fundación Hábitat Colombia and the Building and Social Housing Foundation, with the support of members of the Ibero-American and Caribbean Forum on Best Practices, hosted an event on the transfer of good practice. The event, entitled ‘Transferring Best Practices: Lessons from Latin America and the Caribbean’, included a discussion on the importance of transferring best practices, as well as the barriers and challenges for the promotion of these mechanisms and presentations of specific, successful cases of transfer in the region.