Coalition building and strategic communication are important components of governance reform. To deepen understanding of the local governance reform process, ANSA-EAP co-organized a coalition-building workshop with the World Bank Institute and the Communication for Governance and Accountability Program in February 2010 at the Asian Development Bank.
Entitled “Building Multi-Stakeholder Coalitions for Governance Reform”, the workshop focused on facilitating a deeper appreciation of the governance reform process and on familiarizing the participants with various tools for achieving results.
The workshop aimed to deepen participant’s appreciation for creating reform space and support for governance programs, as well as the role of coalition-building and strategic communication in sustaining governance reform. Through case studies and structured learning exercises, participants became familiar with political economic analysis tools to understand the causes of poor governance and use the knowledge in creating space for governance reform.
Participants identified key challenges and issues in promoting and sustaining governance reform and social accountability. They also pointed out gaps in mainstreaming social accountability, causes for such gaps, approaches for addressing the causes, and possible actions or areas for collaboration in solving the problem.
At the same time, participants shared their experiences and insights in applying political economic analysis tools in governance reform efforts as well as in using strategic communication and negotiation tools and techniques in governance reform case.
They noted that stakeholders involved in coalition-building process tend to focus on specific positions and agenda, and forget the need to push the engagement forward. They recognized the need to develop specific competencies like framing effective messages, examining assumptions and data, managing the negotiation process, and solving problems systematically. They also took note of the challenges of mainstreaming social accountability—creating an enabling environment for engagement; strengthening capacity of government and citizen groups for constructive engagement; legitimizing citizen groups as third party monitors; and involving donor agencies in facilitating citizen-government engagement.
Participants from ADB and WB expressed interest in pushing for specific program policies requiring citizen monitoring of bank-funded projects and in involving the banks’ communication groups in project design and framing appropriate messages to help promote citizen monitoring. They noted that the quality of coalition-building efforts and citizen engagement is an understudied area, and there is not much information on how engagement is happening from a strategic communication perspective.
Since strategic communication and dialogue are key competency areas of SAc practitioners, the participants noted that there was a need to assess existing capacities and resources of ANSA EAP network partners in these areas as well as to design and implement appropriate learning interventions. One suggestion was to form a pool of trainers. Grounding the learning process on the experiences of regional partners in coalition building and negotiation, and customizing the learning materials and processes to their need will be key to training delivery.
Going forward, the ANSA-EAP operations team plans to replicate the WBI workshop with country network partners, starting with members of the Transparency and Accountability Network (TAN) in the Philippines. A roll out for partners of TAN’s Bantay Lansangan (Road Watch) project will involve a series of 3-day workshops at the sub-national level which will cater to different sets of participants. This will include culling experiences and lessons from local and regional coalition-building efforts to implement and sustain policy reform efforts.