CHOGM 2018 OUTCOMES: THE UNITED KINGDOM AS CHAIR-IN-OFFICE
CHOGM 2018 OUTCOMES: THE UNITED KINGDOM AS CHAIR-IN-OFFICE
Lord Chidgey of Hamble-leRice is a Member of
the UK Parliament’s House of Lords where he is Liberal Democrat Spokesman for African Affairs. He has previously served on the Select Committee for Foreign Affairs, International Development and Defence and he is Co-Chair of the Commonwealth AllParty Parliamentary Group in the UK Parliament. He is Chairman of the Commonwealth Policy Studies Centre and a Trustee of the Africa Europe Parliamentary Initiative.He was previously an MP in the UK House of Commons between 1994 to 2005.
As a precursor to the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) 2018 in London, the UK Branch of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association organised a Commonwealth Parliamentary Forum, which took place in London in late February 2018. Parliamentary representatives were invited from across the CPA’s nine regions to a week-long Forum and in all, 80 delegates attended including the CPA Chairperson, Hon. Emilia Lifaka, MP, Deputy Speaker of the National Assembly of Cameroon; and the Commonwealth Secretary-General, Rt Hon, Patricia Scotland, QC. The principal aim was to facilitate engagement on the London CHOGM, to get Parliamentarians focused on that agenda, to shape their countries’ priorities and approach, and then scrutinise and support their countries’ performance against the commitments in the CHOGM final Communique. This envisaged an important on-going role of monitoring their Executive’s input as part of their accountability to Parliament. The CPA UK Branch has for some years regularly organised Commonwealth Seminars and Forums offering opportunities for Parliamentarians and officers to expand their experience and skills in democratic process. These reflected processes developing for the engagement of Parliamentarians in cooperation towards social, political, and economic development inclusively
and sustainably, on a global scale, under the auspices of the UN and OECD. Since the Paris Declaration for Aid Effectiveness was endorsed in 2005, leading to the agreement in Accra of an Agenda for Action, there has been a steady increase in the recognition of the need to coordinate and to a degree regulate international development investment. The Fourth High Level Forum held in Busan in South Korea in 2011 consolidated a global ‘Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation’ and established key principles of common goals of transparency and shared responsibility. Included in the Busan Agenda was a Parliamentary Forum attended by Parliamentarians drawn from throughout the UN spectrum which met under my Chairmanship. At the end of our deliberations, a Parliamentarian Memorandum1 was produced, stressing the importance of engaging Parliamentarians in the process. I had the privilege of presenting the memorandum to the closing plenary session of the High-Level Forum. The Busan global partnership agreed performance indicators, put forward by the UK and Rwanda, based on the Paris Declaration. The sixth indicator states that development assistance should be on budgets subject to parliamentary scrutiny. A target was set for 85% of development cooperation funding scheduled for disbursement to be recorded in the annual budgets
approved by the Parliaments of developing countries. Thus, the Global Partnership recognised, not without opposition, that Parliaments and Parliamentarians had a significant role to play in monitoring the progress in effective development. In 2017, the indicators were refined to better reflect the challenges of the SDGs 2030
“The principal aim was to facilitate engagement on the London CHOGM, to get Parliamentarians focused on that agenda, to shape their countries’ priorities and approach, and then scrutinise and support their countries’ performance against the commitments in the CHOGM final Communique. This envisaged an important on-going role of monitoring their Executive’s input as part of their accountability to Parliament.”
The Parliamentarian | 2019: Issue Two | 100th year of publishing | 139