stakeholder participation

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Forging Stakeholder Partnership

The Asia-Pacific region has gone a long way in adopting multi-stakeholder partnership. Its accomplishment is no mean feat when one considers the region's diversity, culture, traditional practices and political history. However, more work needs to be done and greater efforts need to be exerted to shift paradigms and espouse this innovative form of governance. Many useful lessons have been learned from the experiences of multi-stakeholder bodies in the region. These lessons are presented below so that they may serve as guide to those who have yet to practice multi-stakeholder governance, and to those who would like to improve their current mechanisms and practices.

Partnership begins with trust Traditional practices, political experiences and lack of understanding of each other's roles have bred distrust among government, business and civil society. This distrust has become the greatest obstacle to partnership. Fortunately, trust can be built and nurtured. The only pre-requisite is that parties to partnership must decide to engage one another and invest time and effort to build trust. They must strive to level their expectations, perspectives, and paradigms for approaching sustainable development. Civil society and business must exert effort to learn and appreciate the mainstream economic paradigm that guides and conditions government policies as well as the context within which government makes a certain decision. The government must shed strict biases and keep open minds to alternatives offered by business and civil society in confronting development issues. All must strive to establish mechanisms for transparency and constructive discussions. The key is regular and open communication.

Trust must be nurtured The substantive content of the partnership must initially focus on smaller, more specific, and less debatable concerns like improving systems and procedures. The seeds of confidence and trust are easily germinated through quick agreements or resolutions of less contentious issues. With bigger and stronger trust and confidence comes the ability to seek win-win solutions to major and more controversial concerns and issues.

Partnership is investment Parties to a partnership must also commit and invest time, effort and resources, to sustain the partnership and execute common activities. Government, which has greater command of and access to resources must provide financial support to civil society or, at the very least, provide the policy and institutional environment that would facilitate civil society access to resources. Civil society must invest in internal capability building to strengthen its ability to partner with government on equal footing and undertake its tasks. It should be able to contribute knowledge, human resources, and whenever available, financial resources. Private enterprise must contribute in terms of physical, technological and financial resources. In a region that is predominantly composed of developing countries, partnerships with other parties, the resource providers (e.g., financial institutions, philantrophic organizations), must also be forged. Among others, resource providers must invest in building capacities of both government and civil society, and in strengthening partnerships among them. Good partnership among actors result in greater cooperation and better efficiency, factors that are material to both financial institutions and private enterprise sector.

Partnership Needs Impetus from Top and Bottom Global (e.g., UNCSD, World Bank) and regional organizations (e.g., ADB, ESCAP) are critical agents of change and promoter of regional and national partnerships. They must set examples and encourage partnership through multi-stakeholder participation in their programs and projects. From the bottom, the people themselves must assert their right to be part of the development process. They must get organized and forge alliances with others so that they may have the mettle for partnership with government.