Recent evacuations of Afghan staff who worked alongside Australian and other international forces in the wake of the Taliban’s extraordinary takeover of the Afghanistan government has shone a light on local staff – the roles that they play and the obligations that are owed to them. Within the rule of law field, increasing attention has been paid to local actors who act as ‘intermediaries’ or ‘counterparts’ within internationally-funded reform efforts. Most practitioners will tell you that local staff are critical to the success of programming – that they bring with them deep contextual knowledge, networks and an understanding of how to operate politically in difficult environments. Local staff are also key to sustainability and ensuring that the latest donor-funded program connects with what has come before, and supports changes that continue after its final report is delivered. Yet this recognition of the value of local staff often does not translate well into programming architecture. Often local staff are paired with or sit under international ‘experts’ and treated as a second-tier of programming. Local staff are routinely paid less, valued for the softer skills of local knowledge rather than technical skills and seen as subjects of capacity building, rather than as the experts and leaders of reform movements. 

 With continued calls for localisation – or working in more locally-led ways that cede power and ‘decolonise’ development – paying greater attention to, and valuing, the role of local staff in security and rule of law programming is more important than ever. But how to get beyond the niceties of saying this in program designs to actually delivering it on the ground? This seminar will bring together insights from rule of law and policing experts with experience from Myanmar, Papua New Guinea and the Pacific to better understand how local staff experience being part of international security and rule of law programming and how their contributions can be better valued.

Speakers:

• Dr. Kristina Simion, Research Fellow, Swedish Institute of International Affairs and Folke Bernadotte Academy

• Andrea Yaninen, Senior International Liaison Officer, National Maritime Safety Authority, PNG

• Lautoa Faletau, Team Leader, Pacific Community for Law Enforcement Cooperation, Australian Federal Police

Despite the persistence of injustice around the world, justice programming has experienced a decline in funding from many traditional donors, including Australia. This has triggered a search for new ways of financing justice support. In addition, the long-standing recognition of the importance of locally led justice programs has been compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic, prompting a significant shift to localisation of programming and remote management. This session will discuss the adaptations to new ways of working that these shifts require.

Moderator: Veronica Taylor, Co-Convenor, Australian Law and Justice Development Community of Practice

Speakers:

• Pilar Domingo, Overseas Development Institute: Leveraging sector financing in support of justice

• Erin Anderson, Australia Anti-Trafficking Program: Localising politically smart justice programming in the context of COVID (TBC)

Register Here

Australia, like many other donor countries, have made significant investments in combating violence against women through justice programming. While there are a range of common approaches supported to address this challenge, its global prevalence and persistence requires that our strategies are continually improved and diversified. This session will present novel approaches to addressing violence against women in the Asia-Pacific and discuss how new practices might best be shared.

Moderator: Karen Moore, Assistant Secretary, International Legal Assistance, Australian Attorney-General’s Department.

Speakers:

• Fiona Hukula, PNG National Research Institute: Beyond empowerment: working with perpetrators and on sorcery-related violence in PNG

• Hao Yang, The Asia Foundation China: Combating domestic violence and sexual harassment in China’s workplaces

• Megan Hirst, International human rights lawyers, Doughty Street Chambers, Beyond VAW: Violence against children in Timor-Leste

Register Here

Technological innovation has taken on even greater salience in 2020 with the COVID-19 pandemic pushing programs to gather data, engage justice seekers and providers, and deliver results at a distance. While technology can indeed offer an important platform for ensuring more people-centred justice, it can also be a costly and unsustainable investment that does not connect to local realities. This keynote presentation by global justice innovator, Sam Muller, will speak to the need for a transformation in our thinking about how best to meet people’s justice needs. It will be followed by a panel discussion providing two ‘windows into practice’ of how technological innovation is being used to improve access to justice in the Indo-Pacific region.

Moderator: Lisa Denney, Co-Convenor, Australian Law and Justice Development Community of Practice

Keynote speaker: Dr Sam Muller, CEO, The Hague Institute for Innovation of Law (HiiL)

Discussants:

• The Honourable Sir Albert Palmer, Chief Justice of the Solomon Islands

• Cate Sumner, Law and Development Partners

Register Here

Learning about what works in delivering aid programming has taken on increasing importance, with greater investment in monitoring, learning, and evaluation efforts. In this spirit, multiple reviews of Australia’s law and justice investments were undertaken in 2019, including in Indonesia and Vanuatu. But the findings and learning from such reviews tend to remain siloed within the specific program or post that commissioned them, limiting learning across programs and the wider law and justice community. This event will explore the headline findings of these two reviews, exploring what they tell us about what works (and what does not) in law and justice assistance, as well as how these reviews are contributing to learning, program practice, and the direction of Australian law and justice assistance.

Moderator: Gordon Peake

Speakers:

• Paul Nichols, Team Leader, Review Team for the Vanuatu Law and Justice Program

• Binziad Kadafi, Indonesia Justice Expert, Review Team for the Australia-Indonesia Justice Partnership

Discussant

• Clare Manuel, Independent Justice Expert

Register HERE

This event will look at how researchers, M&E staff, practitioners, and local partners are collecting data, researching, and ‘thinking and working politically’ in an environment shaped by COVID-19. It will explore the challenges, local impacts, and learnings from working at a distance during the current crisis.

Moderator: Nicola Nixon - Director of Governance, The Asia Foundation

Discussants: 

• Carolyn O’Donnell - Director of M&E, Research & Learning, The Asia Foundation - Nepal

• Allan Mua Illingworth - Manager MEL, Solomon Islands Resource Facility

• Prof. Veronica Taylor ANU – School of Regulation and Global Governance - Myanmar Experience

• Prof. Chris Roche Institute for Human Security & Social Change La Trobe University

Resources available here

This event, co-hosted by DCAF, Monash GPS, and the Law and Justice Development Community of Practice, launched the new DCAF, OSCE/ODIHR, UN Women Gender, and Security Toolkit which draws together key lessons of the past decade in promoting gender equality in security and justice. The Toolkit provides new and emerging good practices and reflects on how they have been developed.

The Toolkit is available here.

The law, development and governance field is replete with good ideas that are intended to inform programming and ensure improved outcomes. Research, piloting, reviews, and monitoring and evaluation are all intended to advance and test such ideas within donor-funded programs. Too often, we find that these good ideas (and the normative concepts and research that underlies them) do not translate into good practice. Or they produce unintended consequences. Or the structures into which the ideas are released actively undermine them. 

 In a similar way, we also find good practice that exists in particular sites and projects of law and justice interventions fails to surface to the the ‘animating ideas’ level, or to be translated in ways that might allow it to travel or be replicated elsewhere. 

The 2019 annual workshop for the Law and Justice Development Community of Practice will explore this relationship between ideas and practice, examining how the structure and politics of our industry and the professional communities we occupy, produce this disjuncture. Discussions will focus on unpacking how ideas translate (or fail to translate) into practice and how practice is evolving – both locally and internationally – in ways that require our thinking to change.

The end of year workshop is a full-day event in the style of the COP’s previous three-years of workshops, bringing together practitioners, policy makers and researchers from across the government, policing, non-profit, commercial, and academic communities. View the program here.

Sustainable Development Goal 16.3 promises to ensure equal access to justice for all by 2030. Without increased justice, the world will not be able to end poverty, reduce inequality, reach the furthest behind, create conditions for shared and sustainable development, or promote peace and inclusion.

Currently, 5.1 billion people – two-thirds of the world’s population – lack meaningful access to justice, with women, children, the poor, people with disabilities and minority ethnic groups disproportionately affected. In low-income countries, it would cost just $20 per person to provide access to basic justice services. Yet, two billion people live in countries that cannot afford even half that cost. At the same time, donor investment in justice has declined by 40 percent over the past four years and just 1.5 percent of official development assistance is spent on justice in fragile contexts. 

It is clear that closing the justice gap requires a transformation in ambition, with both development and foreign policy communities engaged, alongside the private sector. It requires confronting political obstacles to change and moving beyond a focus on institutions that are distant from people and fail to serve their needs.

Join us for a discussion with David Steven, Associate Director of the Center for International Cooperation at New York University and Head of the Secretariat of the Task Force on Justice – an initiative of the Pathfinders for Peaceful, Just and Inclusive Societies. David will discuss the findings of the Task Force’s report on taking a different approach to delivering on SDG 16.3 by putting people at the centre of justice systems and justice at the heart of sustainable development. The final Task Force report is to be presented at the High-Level Political Forum on SDG 16 at the United Nations in July.

Justice for the Poor (J4P) began more than ten years ago as an experimental program that aimed to address critical gaps in the theory and practice of promoting justice reform in developing countries.  In particular, the program looked beyond technical forms of justice sector institutions to engage with the broader ‘rules of the game’ that shape how people in fact experience dispute resolution, claim their rights and pursue their interests. Recognizing that all development is ultimately about the distribution of rights, resources and responsibilities, and is inherently conflictual, the program focused on the role of law and norms in shaping the effectiveness and fairness of outcomes related to security and justice, development of land and natural resources, and service delivery.  With support from DFAT, J4P supported analytical and operational engagements in Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Timor Leste, Papua New Guinea and Indonesia. In addition, the program engaged in Cambodia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Kenya and Liberia.  The program was also influential in shaping World Development Reports: in 2006, Equity; in 2011, Conflict, Security and Development; in 2012, Gender; and 2017, Governance and the Law.
 
This session will feature an open conversation, moderated by Veronica Taylor, with World Bank staff involved with J4P and counterparts from Australian government and academia to reflect on the principles, engagements and lessons of the program. It will examine the evolution of the program’s conceptual foundation, the efforts to put this in practice, and emerging applications in justice, governance and social development programming. It will also launch and on-line repository of J4P program materials.

Amidst the ongoing uncertainties of Myanmar’s political transition and efforts to build peace, rule of law rhetoric continues to dominate public debate, despite a broad silence around acknowledging both past and ongoing impunity and injustice. The MyJustice programme has sought to navigate the space in between, working to provoke public discussion and support community justice initiatives, and prompting policy-makers to take account of evidence of local realities. 

Join us for an evening in conversation with Caitlin Reiger (Team Leader, MyJustice, British Council) to hear her insights for practice in a politically complex setting.

Join us for this year’s annual workshop at the Crawford School of Public Policy, ANU.

Our keynote speaker, Marcus Cox (Agulhas, UK) will lead us through debate on Looking Forward: What are the law and justice issues on the development horizon? Marcus’ keynote address is here.

Lively panels of Australian and local practitioners from the region will present on: 

Adapting to Change: How well are we using problem solving and adaptive management approaches in law and justice?

• Policing and Security Update

• Practising Support for Regulation and Business

• Access to Justice and the Pacific: What next? 

• Anti-corruption: gender and next generation approaches