Regional Centre in Bangkok

Democratic Governance in Asia and the Pacific

The Asia Regional Governance Programme (ARGP)

The Asia Regional Governance Programme (ARGP), based in the Regional Centre in Bangkok, is UNDP’s flagship regional democratic governance programme for Asia-Pacific. The programme commenced in 2004 and will continue through 2007.

UNDP’s regional programmes are designed to add value to initiatives at the country level. Criteria for the programme includes that it shall:

• Disseminate regionally and globally the lessons learned from country-level experience and identify innovative ways to promote governance and the goals enshrined in the Millennium Declaration, and disseminate this knowledge regionally and globally;
• Provide technical guidance directly and through partnerships with other international governmental and non-governmental institutions;
• Undertake advocacy to ensure that issues relevant to the promotion of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and democratic governance are incorporated into global, regional and country agendas;
• Focus on high-leverage, strategic interventions that draw on the advantage of UNDP’s global and regional presence and perspective;
• Serve as a bridge between country and global initiatives, notably to promote the adaptation and application of global initiatives at the regional and country level; and
• Facilitate cooperation among countries sharing similar geographic, social and economic conditions. Such co-operation is designed in particular to consolidate or improve peace and security and promotion and protection of human rights.

The ARGP thus provides the bridge between UNDP’s global and country programmes in the area of democratic governance. The programme, funded at $6.8 million over a four year period, covers all the service lines of UNDP’s Democratic Governance Practice. The primary focus of the ARGP is to operationalize the link between democratic governance and the MDGs, in recognition of the fact that the MDGs can not be achieved without the enabling environment that democratic governance provides. The overall programme objective is to: "promote greater democratic governance practices and processes for inclusive and equitable sustainable human development and for achieving the MDGs".

In order to achieve this, the ARGP is designed to achieve the following four outcomes:

• Outcome 1: Increased effectiveness of representative bodies at central and sub-national levels to perform their democratic functions and enhance national poverty reduction goals;
• Outcome 2: Increased access to justice by the poor and disadvantaged groups;
• Outcome 3: Transparent, accountable and inclusive State-citizen partnerships for effective service delivery; and
• Outcome 4: Greater and more efficient inter-country development cooperation for furthering regional public goods, managing aid coordination and cross-border externalities and spillovers.

The outputs of the programme will be achieved through a variety of activities including demand driven (i) applied research and policy analysis (ii) advisory services and technical support, (iii) capacity development and practice building (through training, networking, south-south cooperation and brokering regional dialogue), (iv) advocacy, and (v) country-level pilots in select areas, to catalyze new areas for development cooperation and methodology application.

In carrying out these activities, the programme will ensure the matching of regional knowledge demand and supply on substantive democratic governance challenges, thus allowing the exchange of experiences of good development practice between countries in the region. The programme will use knowledge networks as a powerful complement to conventional training.

In order to achieve its stated objective the ARGP provides funds to support the development of key outputs in each of the following service lines (for further information click on the links below):

• Parliamentary Development;
• Electoral Systems and Processes;
• Justice and Human Rights;
• E-Governance and Access to Information for Citizens' Participation;
• Decentralization and Local Governance; and
• Public Administration Reform and Anti-Corruption.

In addition to supporting activities under the above service lines the ARGP also supports a number of initiatives (for further information click on the links below):

• Aid coordination and management;
• Leadership course for young leaders in governance; and
• Youth, Democratic Governance and the MDGs Initiative for Asia.

Primary beneficiaries and partners are intended to be UNDP programme countries and their corresponding executive, legislative and judicial branches of governments, along with national and regional institutions, civil society organizations, the private sector, think-tanks and other relevant partners.

The programme has been endorsed by the following countries: Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Viet Nam. However, activities cover all countries in Asia.

For further information on the ARGP, please see:

• Programme Document
• 2006 Workplan