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THE ART OF DECISION MAKING

28 April 2014

Students of Togliatti State University participated in third and final stage of the Erasmus Intensive Program Local Decision Making, which took place in VIVES University College, Kortrijk, Belgium, on March 24th - April 4th.

This Intensive Programme was based on collaboration between 7 universities from the Netherlands, Scotland, CzechRepublic, Poland, Finland, Belgium and Russia. The project coordinator and host in 2012 was InhollandUniversity, Rotterdam, the Netherlands; in 2013 the IP was arranged in Brno, Czech Republic, at the University of Masaryk. Every year each of the partners sent five students and one or two teacher to participate in the project and to represent their university, their city and their country.The primary focus of the project was on the local level decision making. Different solutions and problem solving techniques for the same questions resulted in an overview of the general directions of the decision making process in the participating countries. Every year this resulted in practical recommendations to the Board of the City that hosted the project. The participation of youth in such programs is very important that is why at the very beginning of the project the Mayors Office of Togliatti assisted TSU group in investigating local decision making processes from different perspectives of our city life.

TogliattiStateUniversity represented Russia during the entire project. This year the curriculum designed for the course was based on the students investigations before coming to Kortrijk. During the two-week intensive course, the students worked in multinational groups, focusing on studies conducted of their own municipalities. The students shared their knowledge on the local government, municipalities, and local decision making from different viewpoints, such as political involvement, elections, environment and mobility, unemployment-housing-economy and also social-cultural perspective. During the stay in Kortrijk TSU group also enjoyed a number of cultural and social events organized by the University including a weekend trip to Paris.

All results and materials produced for the whole LDM Erasmus IP course are published in a series of three books Local Decision Making.

Official website of the IP Local Decision Making is www.localdecisions.maweb.eu

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