Identifying and Implementing Concrete Donor-led Technical Assistance Projects for Parliaments by Focussing on Stakeholder Co-ordination

Framing the topic

At the outset of any project that seeks to support and/or develop parliaments, collaboration and co-ordination with parliamentary stakeholders both internal (e.g. legislators, parliamentary staff) and external (e.g. donors, judicial, civil society), should be the first focus of the Team-Leader of any parliamentary support project. Outlining therefore, the nature of the different stakeholders and the various degrees and forms of their co-operation constitutes the main focus of this article, as such, approaching issues of co-ordination within parliamentary reform ‘projects’ for developing countries, contracted and financed by national Agencies and international organisations. In this regard, we refer to stakeholder co-ordination as the first, essential step in identifying a ‘concrete’ and ‘sustainable’ overall programme or technical assistance project. The article assumes a certain level of thematic knowledge around the sector and a set of links and references is provided below for the interested reader.

Donor mapping and co-ordination

Parliaments receive development assistance through a number of projects funded by various national and international donor Agencies. However, many projects implemented have either provided only general, non-specific, un-coordinated or even sometimes invasive assistance in their efforts to support reforms to administrative, legal and technical capacities, or the promotion of good governance, or have been focused on ad-hoc activities, whereas the activities of other donors or domestic initiatives have been ignored. Stakeholder co-ordination must always therefore be the first and foremost task, necessary to ensure a well-conceived donor programming stage and subsequent well-targeted projects. A more focussed and co-ordinated approach must therefore be adopted across the board, as it is necessary for developing parliaments to have substantial external support in their efforts to build long-term capacities and specific expertise, also in view of the complex processes and commitments involved with regard to EU Accession countries.[1]

Who will take the lead?

Certainly, donor co-ordination and full-blown sector stakeholder co-ordination is not an easy task. Any given project might de facto take a leading role among donors but different goals and conflicting agendas are difficult to control or monitor, least understood by stakeholders and/or the actual beneficiary itself, who are often overwhelmed by the plethora of often conflicting/overlapping projects offered to them over a given period. On a more positive note, ?an EU Twinning project[2] between two parliaments, for instance, may have a catalyst role for further inter-institutional co-operation. At the same time, it can have a leading role in advancing co-operation and co-ordination between other parliamentary donors or initiatives, due to the longer-term ‘in-house’ nature of Twinning expertise, whereas an additional mentoring role can be employed in terms of assisting a beneficiary with managing stakeholder co-ordination. Acting as an ‘umbrella’ project, a Twinning project may therefore offer the general framework and loosely supervise, on behalf of the beneficiary, operations of other donor projects in order to avoid a wasteful overlapping of activities and squandering of resources.

Depending on the specific situation in-country, donor co-ordination meetings may therefore take place quarterly, for example, with or without the presence of parliamentary staff or officials. As capabilities at parliamentary level are usually scarce, donor co-ordination is rarely practiced by internal staff involved in a project. ?Hence, the use of a web-platform for co-operation and exchange of parliamentary donors could be a useful complimentary tool to face-to-face meetings, in order to assist parliaments in understanding and managing donor projects and provide a platform for the dissemination of project results. Donors themselves could finance the development and implementation of such an ICT tool, where domestic resources are scarce.?However, beneficiary parliaments (as well as Ministry) ICT departments are often more advanced than what donors have appraised and basic ICT tools should always be an in-house product, ‘supported’ by external donors, at this level. In any case, both donors and beneficiaries need to understand the necessity for stakeholder co-ordination and this key aspect must be included in contracts between donor agencies and beneficiary countries and therefore seen as an essential aspect of ‘conditionality’ to such external assistance, on both parties, as well as on the contractor and Experts involved in subsequent projects.

Distinction between internal and external stakeholders

When referring to parliamentary organisations, it is important to distinguish between their internal and external stakeholders. Therefore, a thorough stakeholder analysis is indispensable in order to identify all programme and project actors, along with their roles, positioning and possible conflicts of interest. The application of certain analytical tools for conducting the stakeholder analysis such as the design of a stakeholder matrix shall reveal their relative significance, interest, use and their level of practical involvement in supporting a parliament’s reforms. Other tools such as full and complete contact lists can help towards keeping track of individual stakeholder preferences and hence avoid conflicting circumstances or overlapping of initiatives.?Again, regular beneficiary-led and externally supported donor and stakeholder co-ordination meetings are essential in this respect.

Legislators, staffers (such as administrators and researchers), political advisors and others belong to the group of internal stakeholders. Their genuine and often passionate interest and involvement in parliamentary projects can be of great benefit in the facilitating of donor projects. However, it has often been observed that some internal actors become involved, simply to ‘protect’ their environment and to make sure that certain improvements/changes are not made, during a project cycle. Consequently, such a threat needs to be carefully assessed in order not to be misinterpreted and should be included in a project’s risk assessment. Institutional inertia,[3] also omnipresent in the most advanced parliamentary systems, must also not be underestimated.

Currently, several national and international donor organisations co-operate with parliaments offering their services in a broad range of fields. Major parliamentary reform donors, such as the European Union, are to be counted among external stakeholders. In addition, there is a multitude of donors, as well as implementing partners, that are active internationally at any given time, which are likely to include UNDP, UNICEF, GIZ, SIDA, UK DfID and other EU Member State development Agencies, OSCE, KAS, FES, USAID, NDI, The Westminster Foundation and of course embassies active in development assistance in a particular country. Hence, from the point of view of the beneficiary institution, donor co-ordination makes perfect sense in terms of the necessity to avoid overlapping and maximise potential gains and the desired long-term, sustainable results.[4]

Furthermore, inter-institutional co-operation is paramount for establishing an efficient public administration system. This is because public institutions rarely operate in a stand-alone manner. Moreover, they are often relying on external information originating outside of their regulated realm. In a sound democratic environment, an institutional equilibrium needs to be maintained at all times and there is always more room for co-operation between legislatures and other national institutions, such as independent state bodies, governmental agencies and the judiciary. Joint capacity building groups and activities can be established in order to advance this form of essential co-operation.

Impact areas

Among others, a solid project to strengthen democratic institutions may indicatively include impact areas such as enhanced or improved electoral processes, constitution-building processes, and political participation and representation. Public engagement mechanisms may form an additional point of interest as highlighted in the latest (third) global parliamentary report on public engagement.[5] Responsibility for their implementation is likely to be distributed among different project components. In accordance with the stakeholder analysis model, the positioning of these areas and their respective actors, vis-a-vis the various project components and activities, needs to be clarified. In this context, it could also be preferential to conduct a simple SWOT analysis for internal reference[6] that could reveal opportunities for co-operation that could result in resource savings and the avoidance of project implementation delays, as well as flaws in project conception that should be removed in the early stages. A brief screening of thematic / impact areas such as public engagement, political representation, rule-of-law and oversight usually takes place during the inception period of a project. Potentially, this can reveal several possible connections between key areas, which may be reinforced through complimentary project activities. Hence, new opportunities for co-operation between the relevant stakeholders, for projects engaging with parliaments, may open up, such as a focus on:

??????Legal and institutional framework for elections (parliament plays a defining role in the review of the pertinent legislation);

??????Capacity-building of electoral authorities (some parliaments, i.e. the National Assembly of Serbia, have an active role in the organisation of the electoral process);

??????Constitution-building processes/Constitutional design/Constitutional awareness (Parliaments are key stakeholders in any process related to the constitution);

??????Political parties and legislatures (an area often neglected by donors to parliamentary reform projects, political entities are still constituting major institutional stakeholders with the potential to influence institutional operations);

??????New forms of citizen engagement (in the digital era, parliaments have the opportunity to be engaged in citizen participation schemes and designs, such as digital forums and open parliament initiatives, as well as in new forms of governmental oversight, such as e-petitioning).

Nevertheless, addressing these areas can only be the result of a detailed screening / assessment of the institutional needs and a series of discussions with all the relevant/key stakeholders active in the sector, whilst considering of course the extent of their allocated budget for such interventions. The result of these planning and co-ordination activities should be captured in a project’s inception report, usually submitted within a few weeks of a project’s commencement date.

Skill-set

One may rely on soft skills, such as for advancing a project’s implementation, but ultimately, a clear and legally binding framework for co-operation with donors and implementing partners is always necessary, such as in the form of an Association Agreement, Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), or detailed contract, which can be negotiated in advance. In this vein, a commonly accepted and agreed upon project management methodology, such as PRINCE2,[7] PCM PMP,[8] or the newly EC developed Open PM2,[9] can be useful in terms of defining a common language and standard rules to be respected by all stakeholders. Parliaments should work towards endorsing a standard implementation methodology for projects that require such a level of stakeholder co-ordination.

Conclusions

This brief article dealt with the broad issue of donor and stakeholder co-operation and co-ordination within the framework of parliamentary development projects. Based on reported best-practice and own professional experience, it stipulates that co-ordination efforts between a project and its stakeholders needs to be established and indeed formalised within a contract as ‘conditional’ on all implementing parties to the project, early on in a project’s life cycle and suggests several tools and approaches to improve such practice. Naturally, such an approach is dependent on the specific national setup and might be influenced by prior national regulations, donor/contractor experience and/or good (or bad) practice. Hence, it is imperative to conduct a careful and comprehensive stakeholder analysis before engaging in the actual project implementation, as should be the case with all programming exercises and subsequent project engagements in all sectors.

Authors

Dr. Fotis Fitsilis is parliamentary practitioner and researcher, focusing on e-governance projects. In 2017, he co-founded the Hellenic OCR Team,[10] a scientific initiative for the processing and analysis of parliamentary institutions and their data.

Bruce Philip Todd is consultant in Justice and Home Affairs policy, strategy, programming, and parliamentary development engaging in national, EU and UN projects.

References

[1] An overview and the theoretical background of the Accession process in the case of Serbia is provided by Fitsilis, F., & Jovanovi?, A. EU Twinning Projects in Serbia: Analysis of Policy Areas and the Influence of Member States. Contemporary Southeastern Europe, 8(1), 67-93

[2] EU resource for institutional Twinnings; not to be confused with the town twinning Instrument: https://neighbourhood-enlargement.ec.europa.eu/funding-and-technical-assistance/twinning_en

[3] Kingston, C., & Caballero, G. (2009). Comparing theories of institutional change. Journal of Institutional Economics, 5(2), 151-180.

[4] Some useful abbreviations: GIZ (Gesellschaft fur Internationale Zusammenarbeit); SIDA (Swedish International Development Cooperation); OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe); KAS (Konraad Adenauer Stiftung); FES (Friedrich Ebert Stiftung); NDI (National Democratic Institute).

[5] Inter-Parliamentary Union and United Nations Development Programme (2022) Global Parliamentary Report: Public engagement in the work of parliament, https://www.ipu.org/file/14340/download

[6] Phadermrod, B., Crowder, R. M., & Wills, G. B. (2019). Importance-performance analysis based SWOT analysis. International journal of information management, 44, 194-203.

[7] Bentley, C. (2012). Prince2: a practical handbook. London: Routledge.

[8] Mahaney, R. C., & Greer, B. M. (2004). Examining the benefits of project management professional (PMP) certification for IS project managers and organizations. Journal of International Information Management, 13(4), 4.

[9] European Commission, Directorate-General for Informatics, (2016). PM2 project management methodology guide : open edition, Publications Office. https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2799/957700

[10] https://hellenicOCRteam.gr