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----- Original Message -----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Thursday, September 11, 2003 7:24 PM
Subject: [cai-asia] Public Participation Practices on AQM in
Asia ______ We (Ruth Greenspan Bell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> from Resources for the Future (RFF) and Barbara Finamore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> from the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC)) are writing to seek your assistance. Together we are collecting examples of grassroots-level efforts in Asia to use available mechanisms, such as access to information, access to decisionmaking and access to legal systems, to introduce a public voice into environmental and energy decisionmaking. Possible examples include environmental information disclosure or data gathering, citizen complaint hotlines, and government/NGO roundtable meetings, although we are not limited to these examples and are interested in learning about any innovative public participation mechanisms that have been developed. We are particularly interested in efforts to push or stimulate governments to keep the environmental promises contained in existing laws and regulations, for example ! through public interest consultation and/or litigation. We are writing to ask you to refer us to examples and possible case studies of public participation at the grassroots level in Asian countries. We would like you to identify experts, practitioners and/or cases, as well as persons or organizations that we can contact for further information. Please include phone numbers and email addresses for any names you give us so that we can follow up. In addition, you are welcome to forward this note to persons or organizations you think will be interested in our study. We will use the examples we collect in a several-step process. First, after selecting several examples for detailed analysis in a case study format, we aim to identify key practitioners and participants in these cases. We will ask the key practitioners to share their experience, first through a paper describing their efforts, and then by presenting their experience at specially designed workshops at the Better Air Quality 2003 (BAQ 2003) conference, to be held in Manila in December 2003 for approximately 500 experts. BAQ 2003 is an annual meeting convened by the Clean Air Initiative for Asian Cities (CAI-Asia), which is a regional partnership of cities, national government agencies, private sector companies, NGOs and academia, international development agencies and foundations established to address air quality issues in Asia. In the papers and the workshops, we will examine the institutions and culture in which this public participation experience has worked, in order to understand what is transferable experience. With the help of CAI-Asia, we will then work to design a plan for ongoing networking and skill enhancement among Asian countries to improve these grass roots effort. The goal is public participation skill enhancement and cleaner air. Experiences from developed and developing countries, including those in Asia, have shown that public participation can greatly influence how these societies manage and protect their environment. We want to: 1) Understand how the public in Asian societies has participated in the policy making and implementation process of national or local environmental and energy issues; 2) Identify good practices (and innovative approaches) for grassroots public participation in Asian countries; 3) Promote exchanges of information about these practices among Asian countries; and 4) Identify training needs and propose through the CAI-Asia network means to enhance the skills of Asian environmental and energy advocates, including experience sharing and ideas from Asia as well as from the mature environmental regimes, and 5) Develop policy recommendations to the governments of Asian countries on how to further engage the public in their development efforts, and disseminate these recommendations through the CAI-Asia network. _____ ____________________________________________________ Herbert G. Fabian Clean Air Initiative for Asian Cities Asian Development Bank, Manila tel: + 63 2 632 4444 loc. 7666 fax: + 63 2 636 2198 http://www.adb.org/vehicle-emissions http://www.worldbank.org/wbi/cleanair/caiasia/ --- You are currently subscribed to cai-asia as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] |
