The Reality of Aid – Asia Pacific (RoA-AP) and CSO Partnership for Development Effectiveness (CPDE) – Asia held their Regional Meeting and Workshop (RMW) 2025 last February 19 to 21 in Bangkok, Thailand. The three-day event convened RoA-AP and CPDE Asia members, as well as partners engaging international financial institutions (IFIs) and the development effectiveness agenda. A series of discussions and workshops were offered as space to 1) brainstorm emerging trends and key priorities for the region, 2) develop a locally-led development strategy that grounds the development cooperation agenda on social realities, and 3) conduct a visioning exercise toward the future of development cooperation.
Towards a locally-led future
A policy conference on RoA-AP’s CSO Aid Observatorio Deep Dive series kicked-off the first day of the event. Deep Dives are working papers that talk about trends and challenges in development cooperation, and how these affect marginalized communities and vulnerable sectors. Six (6) out of the seven (7) Deep Dives were presented, highlighting on one hand, how constituencies of recipient countries bear the consequences of public spending cuts (basic necessities such as healthcare, education, etc.; austerity programs in a nutshell) in order to pay for loans and on the other, the increasing militarization across the region to curb disputes on harmful “development” projects.
The conference was followed by a breakout session where participants identified key issues in Asia Pacific that CSOs could prioritize as advocacy areas for the next two years. The climate crisis, shrinking civic space, economic and debt crises, corporate capture of development, and digitalization, among others, were the glaring issues mentioned during the breakout.
As part of the overall objective to integrate locally-led development in the existing and future programs and direction of CSOs, RoA-AP presented its own efforts on locally-led agenda (LLA), where humanitarian-development-peace (HDP) nexus and effective development cooperation (EDC) principles of focus on results, country ownership, inclusive partnership, and transparency and accountability were also tackled as cross-cutting frameworks.
Participants were grouped again to strategize activities on how they will integrate the issues they identified in the previous breakout with EDC principles, and ensure that those are locally-led. Some highlights include integrating LLA in national strategies, particularly to address the triple planetary crises of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution; implementing free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC) as a prerequisite for projects and as an integral part of meaningful participation and consultation of communities; pushing for an enabling environment for CSOs and no tolerance towards reprisal; and maximizing the use of development effectiveness monitoring tools to amplify local challenges, narratives, and alternatives of communities.
Strategizing amidst multiple crises
The second day looked into major policy spaces where participants are engaging already—IFIs, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP), and the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA).
Participants exchanged and shared their experiences, mapping out their advocacy targets; the extent of their engagement over the years; and the responses they received and results they achieved from engaging these institutions. Despite some positive inputs, these multilateral bodies still fall short from their commitments. On top of these, CSO calls to always involve communities in consultations and to mainstream gender in their policies, among others, remain undelivered. Some lessons on integrating positive impacts achieved on gender, CSO coordinating mechanisms, and language reform across the aforementioned institutions opened new prospects on how to better strategize and learn from each other’s experiences.
After the mapping exercise, the groups were convened once again to develop a campaign plan that can be implemented in the next two years. The outputs were assembled as if in a gallery and groups went around to review, comment, and suggest on every campaign plan.
Recommendations on more binding agreements through UN-led processes, mobilizing grassroots movements, ensuring meaningful participation of communities, and holding IFIs and other UN-led institutions more accountable were identified in some of the campaign plans of the participants. Banner calls were created, such as “More Finance to Tackle Adaptation,” “Realize the Commitment,” and “Transparency is Not an Option,” to amplify the longstanding calls of CSOs and reflect the thesis of the campaigns the groups came up with. Overall, the participants were able to come up coherent plans that they can utilize and implement in their own respective organizations.
GPEDC and its fourth monitoring round (4MR)
Beyond the policy discussion and strategy workshops, the meeting also (re)introduced the Global Partnership for Effective Development Co-operation (GPEDC) to the participants, as part of the larger effort of CPDE to cascade and popularize locally-led agenda and EDC principles.
The GPEDC is a multi-stakeholder platform where actors are committed to integrate development effectiveness principles in development cooperation. The GPEDC launches monitoring rounds (currently on its 4th round, also known as 4MR) where partner countries voluntarily report to the GPEDC their progress against EDC principles.
On the third and last day of the RMW, the organizers invited its members from 4MR reporting countries to facilitate the discussion of GPEDC modules. Nepal, one of the 4MR reporting countries, introduced the first module. It outlines the evolution of the effectiveness agenda, the milestones achieved from Paris to Busan, and the four development effectiveness principles. Indonesia discussed the second module through sharing its experiences in engaging with its government, wherein a roadmap of the GPEDC monitoring exercise was presented in detail. The Philippines also shared its reporting and engagement experiences, tackling the monitoring framework and questionnaire, as well as the reporting toolkit and process, which are all covered by the third module.
A workshop followed, where participants identified how they could further engage with the GPEDC process through their national and local governments, considering the advocacy targets and strategy points they discussed during the first two days. Some action points from the groups include improving the CSO toolkit to better reflect community narratives, lesson-learning from existing processes of CSOs, and organizing multi-stakeholder dialogues to encourage government institutions to actively participate in the GPEDC process.
Relevant discussions on systemic issues in the region, campaign plans, and other workshop outputs, along with select country activities that promote the EDC agenda, will be compiled and synthesized to form a report that can be publicly shared with RoA-AP and CPDE Asia members, partners, and networks. Such a report is hoped to be useful in the policy and advocacy work of members and partners on LLA and EDC and in engaging IFIs and UN spaces. Stay tuned to our website and social media for more information.
