Capacity Building for Diplomatic Academies

Clingendael Academy offers capacity building and consultancy services that provide strategic advice, support and training to diplomatic academies abroad. We conduct organisational analyses, evaluate activities, and offer advise on human resource development to strengthen training capacity. Our capacity-building cooperation varies in scope and size: from comprehensive, multi-year programs to help establish a diplomatic academy, to concise workshops to share knowledge and expertise with curriculum designers and trainers at partner institutes that are already well-established. The expertise offered by Clingendael Academy ranges from the strategic to the practical. Activities include institutional capacity building, joint curriculum development, enhancing proficiency in the design and use of interactive exercises, and training of trainers.

Team and experience

Clingendael Academy’s capacity building activities with other institutes are coordinated and implemented by a core team of three experts in diplomatic training, led by the director Ron Ton, who has over 20 years of experience in diplomatic training and capacity building at Clingendael Academy. The team is further composed of Marianne Ducasse - Rogier and Nils de Mooij. Both also have extensive experience in diplomatic training and capacity building. The team is supported by and works with the entire staff of the Clingendael Institute – a group of fifty professionals in diplomatic research and training. In recent years, the three members of Clingendael Academy’s core capacity building team have worked with colleagues in diplomatic training from the Western Balkans, Bulgaria, South Africa, Indonesia, the DRC’s diplomatic academy (in French), Central Asia and Mongolia, and Pakistan and Bangladesh (for more information, see ‘capacity building partners in diplomatic training’, below).

Methodology

All our capacity-building courses are tailor-made and developed to suit the needs of the partner institution. Our philosophy in capacity building is to encourage as much as possible the participants’ ownership of the training. The Clingendael Academy’s own experience is used as a basis to stimulate reflection and encourage creativity. Concrete examples and case studies are used to make the training interactive and engaging. From brainstorming sessions on innovations in diplomatic training to role-playing sessions on classroom situations, we create the conditions for taking an active part in their development. Our programmes and workshops can be organised in The Hague, at Clingendael, or in the interested countries, in English as well as in French.

Contact us

If you are interested in Clingendael Academy’s capacity building programmes and would like to receive more information, please contact Nils de Mooij or Marianne Rogier (also for our partnerships in French).