The Oxford Fellowship Programme

Oxford Fellows at Trinity College 2006

At the heart of the ecbi is an Oxford-based Fellowship Programme for climate negotiators and other stakeholders directly involved in the UNFCCC process from the participating developing countries. Its primary purpose is to build trust and exchange procedural and institutional knowledge both among the Fellows ('South-South trust-building'), and between them and their European colleagues ('North-South trust-building').

The North-South element of this trust-building effort involves a Bonn Seminar during the annual intersessional meetings of the UNFCCC Subsidiary Bodies in Bonn/Germany, Country Visits to selected European countries, and an Oxford Seminar during the Oxford Fellowships at the University of Oxford, United Kingdom. They bring together the developing country Fellows with their European colleagues in a structured yet informal environment to establish working relationships outside the guarded context of the official negotiations. These meetings provide an opportunity to exchange views in an congenial and non-confrontational setting. They also enable the European partners to discover and gain a better understanding of the situation of their developing country colleagues - one of the reasons the ecbi is not just a capacity building initiative by Europeans, but also for Europeans.

South-South relations and trust-building - of at least equal importance in supporting the international negotiations - is addressed during the Oxford Fellowships by a Fellowship Colloquium, enabling the Fellows to exchange knowledge, views and experiences between themselves. The Fellowship Programme also manages an electronic ecbi Network (ecbi-net) to assure the sustained long-term nature of the relations established both during these country-visits and between the Fellows themselves.

Further information is available on a PDF from this link.