Las ciudades en el sistema de cooperación internacional.

By the middle of the eighties, the traditional mechanisms of international cooperation started to show some symptoms of exhaustion, generalizing a perception about the weaknesses of such mechanisms to improve the living conditions of the population. At the same time, the greater involvement of sub-national governments in international relationships and the revaluation of local communities in the development strategies fueled the need of thinking in new traditional perspectives of international cooperation. It is in this context that decentralized cooperation emerges as an approach that reclaims the active role of cities and their communities in the international cooperation system, not as simple beneficiaries but as leading actors of initiatives. The European Commission has been pioneer in the design and implementation of specific resource allocation and of decentralized cooperation programs. Among these programs, URB-AL offers the possibility of developing joint initiatives between cities and regions of Latin America and Europe on key issues relative to urban policies. The purpose of this paper is to present URB-AL from a methodology that combines a descriptive analysis of the Program with an approach that takes contextual elements which took part in the program's design and formulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]