Transnational Competence

Empowering Curriculums for Horizon-rising Challenges

Peter H. Koehn, James N. Rosenau

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781594516788
• eBook ISBN: 9781317250166
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In this timely new contribution, Koehn and Rosenau develop their transnational-competence framework and demonstrate the promise of its application across six critical professions: teacher education, engineering, business management, social work, sustainable-development (encompassing agricultural sciences, public administration, and natural-resources management), and medicine/health. Transnational Competence offers higher-education leaders around the world useful ideas for enhancing and transforming professional programs so that graduating practitioners will be prepared with the skills needed to manage horizon-rising challenges that connect populations, ecosystems, and fields of study. Aimed principally at higher-education leaders and graduating professionals throughout the world, Transnational Competence focuses on the skills that tomorrow's practitioners will need to deal with what the authors term horizon-rising transboundary challenges.

Chapter 1
Transnational Competence and the Skill Revolution

Given the growing interdependence among nations as a result of trade, increased communications, and migratory flows, it will be crucial for people to develop the skills to understand and help resolve . . . urgent [shared planetary] challenges.

—Fernando Reimers¹

THE SKILL REVOLUTION offers a launching pad for further exploration of the more encompassing concept of transnational competence. Skill involves the mental and physical “capacity to use knowledge in accomplishing a task.”² Spurred by advances in information technology and means of human mobility, people everywhere at all levels of society—from rich to poor, from elites to ordinary persons—are enhancing their skills and capabilities.³ As time and distance continue to contract, individuals around the world, by necessity, are developing new and extended skills.

The “empowerment of individuals to act globally is the most important feature” of the flattened and shrinking world popularized by Thomas Friedman.⁴ People have gained an increased ability to grasp the underlying dynamics of situations they encounter and an expanded working knowledge of how their world operates. One impressive aspect of the global skill revolution involves enhanced information processing and interpretation. While this dimension of the skill revolution is assisted by technological advances, the overall competency progression is derived from a multiplicity of sources.⁵ Our focus in Transnational Competence is on how specialists can increase portable transnational skills through one of these sources: advanced education.

The Interpersonal Nexus

The diverse and multidimensional talents that comprise competence are individually based. They encompass street smarts and advanced learning, experiential wisdom and intellectual curiosity, judgmental and reflective capacities, native intelligence, and technical mastery. It is safe to assume, therefore, that each individual possesses a unique, imperfect, and constantly changing competence profile. One’s competence profile is pivotal when professionals are called upon to engage in boundary-spanning roles.⁶

If it is to make a difference, professional competence must, in most cases, be expressed interpersonally. While it often is valuable in knowledge-building exercises to master virtual links, face-to-face interactions remain the nexus of empowerment in our interconnected age.⁷ While cyberspace is useful for engaging disparate professionals in shallow encounters, it also offers “an escape from many of the difficulties of deeper more involved human relations.”⁸ Person-to-person relationships even turn out to be “paramount when building an electronic network for information exchange.”⁹ In the application of technical knowledge to challenging problem situations, specialists primarily depend on human connections and relational attributes that build social capital.¹⁰ As individuals increasingly are called upon to translate pressing proximate concerns into transnational deliberations and to transform intruding distant complexities into locally contextualized actions and products11, the most relevant interactions and experiences are simultaneously face-to-face and deterritorialized.

In short, individuals manifest or fail to demonstrate transnational competence in their boundary-spanning interactions with other individuals. In managing complex interdependent issues, people and human transactions remain decisive. Working with diverse individuals is difficult and cooperating as a network member adds a demanding measure of challenge to the task. It is crucial, therefore, that all professional training incorporates interpersonal skills that facilitate interactions with persons who are different from oneself.¹²

Governance and Transnational Epistemic Communities

The skill revolution is developing alongside more widespread and deeper borderless involvement by individuals and nongovernmental collectivities in steering rule systems, framing goals, and shaping policy and resource-allocation outcomes.¹³ A variety of mechanisms and institutions have come into being as influential webs of governance that transcend national borders. Today, a vast and shifting network of informal and decentralized forms (spheres) of authority supplement long-established formal and institutionalized structures, such as national governments and international organizations, that have diminished capacity to steer socio-technical systems.¹⁴ The goals and interests of the individuals, groups, and organizations crowding the global governance stage are so numerous, diverse, and disaggregated that a hierarchical global structure with a single mechanism for governance is not likely to arise in the foreseeable future. Some steering mechanisms (e.g., markets) possess wider scope for influencing the course of events than do others, but none is capable alone of dominating the processes of governing.¹⁵

With the wide dispersion of centers of authority at every level of community, people around the world have witnessed a vast extension of rule systems and steering mechanisms.¹⁶ The result is an ever-widening realm in which governance is undertaken as new role challenges arise that offer opportunities for rapid-network-mobilizing nonstate actors to seize the advantage.¹⁷ Epistemic communities,¹⁸ including horizontally as well as vertically organized groups of professionals, are deeply involved in this multilevel and multicentric world of global governance. Compliance is the key to ascertaining the presence of formally and informally constituted spheres of authority. Professional associations offer excellent examples of how civil-society collectivities in our multicentric world use expertise to create rules and to evoke compliance with their issue-specific recommendations among members, policy makers, other nongovernmental actors, and lay publics.¹⁹

Increased participation by highly educated professionals will not resolve the democratic deficit that vexes global governance.²⁰ Input legitimacy will remain a challenge in the absence of a transnational public sphere. By effectively addressing serious global problems, however, collaborating professionals can enhance output legitimacy. The influential, if often low-profile, output roles that individual experts and epistemic communities have assumed in global governance underscores the importance of preparing transnationally competent professional scientists, engineers, architects, physicians, economists, and other specialists who are committed to ensuring that global steering mechanisms are inclusive, responsive, flexible, accountable, and promote social justice.

Building Transboundary Social Capital

Effective global governance is contingent upon the construction and activation of transboundary social capital. Our conceptualization of social capital emphasizes human-resource enhancements. Social capital encompasses the building of influential nonhierarchical “networks of civic engagement” among actors who “are bound together by trust and reciprocity”²¹ and the development of multilevel/multiple-context interaction skills. When professional stakeholders are challenged by complex interdependencies, transboundary social capital expands the scope for cooperative action and enriches both the individual professional and transnational teams. In a linked but fragmented world, characterized by the proliferation of authority networks and the relative absence of cross-cutting cleavages among them, human-relations skills in conflict-management and in transboundary bridging will be at a premium.

As one available means of building social capital, governments, foundations, and other nongovernmental organizations can encourage and facilitate the development of transnational competency through education and training. At the end of the 20th century, for instance, the U.S. Social Science Research Council launched a human research capital initiative aimed at addressing the worldwide need for research professionals capable of “understanding local situations in relationship to global, transnational and international trends and impacts.”²² Developing transnational skills helps to enhance the performance of the organizations and networks within which professionals operate and increases people’s capacity to participate effectively in global governance.

Transnationally Empowering Professional Connections and Projects

For today’s universities, external networks, alliances, and partnerships are a central mechanism for campus internationalization.²³ Kent Buse and Gill Walt suggest that “partnership can be placed at one end of a continuum, with networks at the other end, and alliances somewhere in between. The partnership end involves more formalized agreements and consequently fewer parties, while the network involves a looser grouping of a greater number of parties who share common interests."²⁴ While some networks are purposive, the occupants of others “may be entirely unaware of one another—for example, people who . . . visit the same website.”²⁵ All networks are useful, however, in identifying the potential for alliance or coalition formation.²⁶ In an information-driven age, it is not surprising that universities have positioned themselves at the hub of globally interconnected networks.²⁷

By necessity in an interdependent world, professionals cooperate on projects through alliances and partnerships that cross disciplinary, institutional, and nation-state boundaries. The potential benefits of transnational and transprofessional linkages include positioning at the cutting edge of information flows, emerging ideas, resource opportunities, impending policy changes, and technical and social breakthroughs.²⁸

The potential of transnational professional connections that arise around shared concerns and purposes is fully realized when they result in concrete projects. The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), for instance, encourages transnational research by providing the opportunity for all principal investigators (PIs) awarded an NSF grant to add an international dimension to their projects via supplemental funding that would support overseas partners in any country.²⁹ For large-scale projects, PIs increasingly seek out consortia of domestic-based institutions and foreign partners. When informed that one of us was constructing a database of international research and development projects covering the 218 Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities (APLU) members, a number of forward-looking PIs indicated that they would explore the posted profiles as part of their technology-prospecting and consortia-building processes.³⁰ The likelihood of success in transboundary partnership-building and in constructing complex consortia is enhanced when transnationally competent professionals in both the South and North take the lead in designing projects and arranging the details of collaboration.

Transnational alliances are difficult to sustain.³¹ From project design to implementation, skills in interacting with professional counterparts of diverse nationalities and across specialization boundaries are pivotal. Although professional networks and partnerships vary in size, purpose, scope, coherence, intensity, location, and duration, those that experience the most extensive and reciprocally fruitful interpersonal interactions are likely to be the most effective when addressing arising interdependence challenges. Our challenge in the chapters that follow is to demonstrate how TC can enable diverse, horizon-preparing professionals to make the most of their specialized training as they serve distant and proximate individuals, collectivities, and societies.

Chapter 2
The Case for Transnational Competence

How ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 Transnational Competence and the Skill Revolution
• 2 The Case for Transnational Competence
• 3 Transnational Competence and Professional Education
• 4 Eyes on the Horizon: Discerning Transnational Challenges
• 5 A TC Framework for Training Tomorrow's Teachers Today
• 6 Business Management: Educating MBAs Who Are Ready to Take on the World
• 7 Engineering Education for Interdependent Connections: Technology and Society
• 8 Educating for Social-Justice Work in a Disparate World
• 9 Preparing for Sustainable International-Development Practice
• 10 Guiding the Transnational Flow of Health Expertise
• 11 Learning Processes for Enriching the TC Professional Curriculum
• 12 Conclusion: Preparing Transnationally Competent Professionals
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors