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December 06, 2003
Arab States Local Governance Forum
Participants in this conference came from the region and beyond and included academics, analysts, politicians, and UN representatives. His Excellency The Prime Minister of Yemen, Mr. Abdel Qader Ba Jammal, gave a welcoming speech to kick off the event and Mr. James W. Rawley, the UN Resident Coordinator and the UNDP Resident Representative in Yemen, held an evening reception for participants. The conference was made up of plenary sessions and workshops dealing with topics such as Arab national legal frameworks, regional disparities, international innovations, local governance, decentralization, development, and advocacy around these issues.
Local governance workshops were organized around the themes of democratization and empowerment, fiscal decentralization, institutional capacity and development and service delivery. Morocco, Lebanon and Palestine were used as country case studies in these workshops; The Moroccan case considered reform and modernization experiences of Moroccan municipalities in the 1990s, the Lebanese case looked at the experience of municipal federations, and the Palestinian case examined the local rural development program in the Palestinian Territories. The Yemeni experience in local governance was also presented in a plenary session.
This conference was managed and coordinated with The Regional Bureau for Arab States (RBAS) of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). It was hosted by the UNDP Yemen Country Office and was co-sponsored by the United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF and a variety of UNDP agencies including the RBAS, the Democratic Governance Thematic Trust Fund, the Decentralized Governance Programme at the Bureau for Development Policy, the UNDP Yemen Country Office, the Programme on Governance in the Arab Region, and the Arab States Sub- Regional Resource Facility.
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