CROSS-LEARNING

Trainings, conferences and collective research are all part of the CPLG cross-learning agenda. Cross-learning among local governance practitioners provides valuable lessons. It allows for the cross-fertilization of progressive reform advocacy agendas and provides insights into political dynamics set in motion by decentralization in post-authoritarian, democratizing polities such as the four countries in focus.

Regional Conference: Scanning of “Women in Politics” Interventions
To culminate CPLG’s main cross-country project for the year, the CPLG secretariat organized a regional conference dubbed “Scanning of ‘Women in Politics’ Interventions. The conference, held in Tagaytay City, Philippines, was attended by CPLG partners and women activists/gender experts from Cambodia, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines and United Kingdom. The conference featured a situationer of women’s political participation in each country and a mapping of existing programs by civil society and political groups to strengthen women’s political participation.

Participants to the conference found a common theme in the need to bridge women’s movement with other social movements. The need for cross-country leaning exchanges was pointed out, as was the need for women to get involved in local politics because it is at the local where there is greater opportunity for “en-gendering” governance. Access the conference materials here.

Learning Visit Thailand-Philippines
From 20-27 November 2005, a delegation of eight Thai activists and local government officials led by CPLG's partner organization in Thailand—the Campaign for Popular Democracy—visited the Philippines to learn about experiments in various modalities of citizen participation. The fieldwork brought them to provinces nearby Manila (Bulacan and Rizal) as well as to the rural coastal municipality of Roxas in Palawan Province. Participants interacted with agrarian reform beneficiaries, cooperatives, and local reformers; attended a village assembly and observed community co-production in water services. These experiences on the ground prompted lively exchanges between Thai progressives and Philippine counterparts on the strategies and realpolitik of instituting transformative local governance in “less-than-democratic” settings, such as in the Philippines and Thailand. Download material from the orientation workshop here.

Training on “Civil Society Engagements in Local Elections”
The Indonesia Corruption Watch (ICW) hosted this training from May 16-18, 2005 in Jakarta . The main resource person for this event was Mr. Patrick Patiño, who heads the political reform work team of IPD in the Philippines . The aim of the training was to provide a venue for critical reflection on the role of civil society activists in instituting citizen participation in a changing political terrain. The training was attended by 24 participants from six regions. Material shared at the training is available here.

Workshop on “Democratizing Decentralisation and Deconcentration: Implications for the Role of Civil Society”
This workshop was organized by the Commune Council Support Project in Phnom Penh from April 25-27, 2005. More than 80 participants representing local Cambodian NGOs and people’s organizations participated in this first-of-its-kind event in Cambodia . Participants were challenged to analyze and reflect on the “politics of decentralization” and its potential for realizing substantive democratic change at the local level. The resource persons were CPLG staff from IPD and Mr. AE Priyono of Demos, an Indonesian democracy and human rights research institute. Workshop materials can be downloaded here.

CPLG workshop at the 2004 Asia-Europe People's Forum in Vietnam
“One lesson is that we are all citizens in our own countries. We can engage and define new contested spaces for local democracy. We can build new, plural political alliances to counter distrust in traditional political processes and institutions.“ These were the words of workshop moderator Andy Rutherford of One World Action during the CPLG workshop on “Democratisation, Local Governance and People's Participation” at the 2004 AEPF in Hanoi . IPD and OWA co-organised the participation of 72 Asian NGO activists and academics in the field of democratisation and local governance from Indonesia , Thailand and the Philippines. Access the full workshop report here.