WSI’S Integrated INTEGRATED COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT Program

WSI team members providing labor market technical assistance in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) in the early 1990s saw first hand the severe conditions that economic restructuring was creating at the local level. Based on our experience during the early, difficult period of reform in the region, we learned three critical lessons:
First, the delivery of such basic labor market measures as employment services, unemployment compensation and severance pay are important and necessary, but not sufficient to achieve successful adjustment. Communities and enterprises also needed restructuring assistance to enable them to preserve and/or generate sufficient jobs to absorb the workers being displaced by privatization and restructuring.
Second, projects using discrete or separately administered adjustment programs (e.g., those providing dislocated worker assistance, vocational training, financial restructuring, business incubators, or local economic development planning) to facilitate enterprise restructuring are less successful than projects using a comprehensive, integrated approach-one that addresses worker, community, and enterprise adjustment needs in a systematic and holistic way.

Third, the successful alleviation of the negative impacts of economic and enterprise restructuring and privatization on workers, managers and their communities requires the effective use and careful integration of four adjustment components. These components are:

1) workforce development

2) private sector competitiveness

3) community economic renewal

4) financial resources

We recognized that the deeply interwoven problems of worker, business and community adjustment demanded innovative approaches to encourage and facilitate continued reform. . In cooperation with our CEE parters, the WSI team created the integrated community development program (ICDP) . ICDP comprises four integrated programs that provide a more effective framework to overcome or reduce the impact of privatization and restructuring of state-owned enterprises (SOEs), particularly in monoindustrial areas. When governments adopt this program and use it in a systematic and integrative way the ICDP reduces the economic and social costs of adjustment and provides a framework for achieving economic renewal and development at the local level.
The ICDP’s integrated programs include:

1. Private Sector Competitiveness to strengthen local enterprises in order to (a) make them more competitive, and (b) preserve and create jobs;

2. Workforce Development facilitates the transition of displaced or redundant workers to new jobs;

3. Community Economic Renewal stimulates local economic development efforts and generates new jobs in communities affected by enterprise restructuring; and

4. a Financial Resources Component leverages local, national and international funds to implement the workforce, community and competitiveness components.

WSI has successfully implemented the ICDP in Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, Macedonia and Ukraine.