International IDEA will co-host a three-day Asian-African practitioners meeting on political finance regulation in Bandung, Indonesia, October 20-22. The aim is to bring people from two regions that have been hit hard by electoral corruption together to address some of the burning issues that confront social distortion because of corruption and influence of money on the political decision-making process.
The meeting is organized jointly but IDEA’s Africa, Asia and Wana programs, Indonesian Ministry for Foreign Affairs and Non-Aligned Movement Centre for South-South Technical Cooperation (NAM-CSST) and will enhance participants understanding of the nexus between political finance and corruption, increase their knowledge on best practices on political finance regulation and help identify potential political finance reform actions to reduce corruption by exchanging valuable country experiences.
Political Finance is a topic that has long engaged multiple teams within International IDEA. The Institute has for years been a leading actor in this topic globally, providing technical assistance to national reform processes and producing several knowledge resources with a focus on political finance regulation. In light of challenges related to corruption and linkages between politicians and organized crime, the Institute has, under the umbrella name of Protecting Politics, also started to look at the topic from the perspective of illicit funding. In addition, the Global Commission on Elections, Security and Democracy has actively started organizing activities around this topic.
Due to growing demand on the need for strong regulations on political finance, IDEA has been building expertise in the field to assist the countries in building political finance legislation and battling the corruption linked to political finance and electoral campaigns. Since 2012, IDEA’s Asia and the Pacific Regional Programme has worked on the topic of political finance in Mongolia and is steadily building up its engagement on the topic in Myanmar.
Money in politics is now becoming not only a regional but a truly global collaborative issue for IDEA, one in which it has a proven track-record of being a global leader. In the long run, this project aims to set a string of activities in motion. Starting from the Political Finance Database and a range of studies on political finance as well as regional publications about the nexus between organized crime and politics, it ultimately works toward the development of policy inputs, tools and technical cooperation that support key reforms carried out at regional and country level. There is an additional dimension of EMB capacity building for political finance enforcement, which was highlighted as an urgent need during the Electoral Processes strategy consultations.
As an inter-governmental organization with the mission to support sustainable democratic change through providing comparative knowledge, assisting in democratic reform and influencing policies and politics, it is believed that a cross regional workshops on political finance regulations with strong focus on combating corruption be conducted for Asian-African countries.
