PARLIAMENT AND DEMOCRACY - Inter-Parliamentary Union

An effective parliament (II): Parliament’s involvement in international affairs I 177
the realisation that fledgling parliaments often found themselves lacking
resources, both human and material, required for them to fulfil their constitutional
mandates in an effective way. Technical assistance is thus a conjugation
of financial and material resources and expertise from the more established
democracies and developed countries of the North in support of parliaments
in the emerging democracies and developing countries of the South. However,
in recent years, South-South cooperation has also grown significantly in
this field.
Technical assistance can be of several types. These include development of
infrastructure, institutional development through improved procedures and
modernisation of parliamentary processes, building awareness through
exchanges of experience and information between members of parliament
from different countries, capacity-building and professional development
involving training for members and staff of parliament, and legislative
development in which parliaments receive assistance with the content of new
legislation or reform of existing legislation.
Technical assistance typically covers a wide variety of areas, such as
standing orders and rules of procedure, committee systems, legislation, the
representational function of parliament, oversight, administration, and library,
documentation, research and archives services. Gender and human rights are
cross-cutting issues which feature prominently in training programmes and
advisory services. For its part, infrastructural support covers public address
systems and audio-visual recording and broadcasting of parliamentary
proceedings, printing, transportation and refurbishment of premises. Technical
assistance is delivered in the form of advisory services, seminars and workshops,
study tours, attachments and other in-service training programmes, as
well as meetings and conferences. Increasingly, information and communication
technologies are taking centre stage in technical assistance programmes.
At the multilateral level, the IPU played a pioneering role when it initiated
its technical cooperation programme in the early 1970s, at a time when donor
agencies considered working with parliaments to strengthen their capacities to
be an intrusion in a national political institution and, therefore, too sensitive.
Since those early days, this area of activity has grown considerably and
provides today a major focus for IPU’s work to promote democracy.
A growing number of institutions joined in these efforts in the early 1990s.
These include the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association (CPA), the
Francophone Parliamentary Assembly (APF) and networks of parliamentarians
such as the Association of European Parliamentarians for Africa