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International Forum >> The Democracy Forum for East Asia>> Improving Governance and Accountability through Research: The Role of East Asian Think Tanks in the Policy Process
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Introduction
Session I: Think Tanks in East Asia: Who They Are and What They Do Session II: Think Tanks as Participants in the Policy Process Session III: The Role of Think Tanks in Improving Governance and Deepening Democracy Agenda Participants |
Introduction The conference on "Improving Governance and Accountability through Research: The Role of East Asian Think Tanks in the Policy Process," held in Seoul, South Korea, on November 12-13, 2002, was the eighth meeting (and seventh working conference) sponsored by the Democracy Forum for East Asia, a collaborative program of the Sejong Institute and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). The Democracy Forum was established in November 1998 to promote joint nongovernmental efforts to encourage democracy in East Asia. The inaugural conference was held in July 1999 in Seoul; it was followed by six working conferences in Seoul and Bangkok between 1999 and 2002. The seventh working conference focused on the contributions that public policy research institutes make toward improving governance, reforming and deepening democracy, and promoting more transparent and accountable political systems. Conference participants included policy researchers, managers and administrators of think tanks and of other nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and academic experts on democracy and public policy. Asian participants from Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Korea, Mongolia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Thailand were joined at the two-day meeting by their counterparts from Georgia, Ghana, Turkey, and the United States. Jong-Chun Baek, president of the Sejong Institute, welcomed participants to this conference devoted to the role of policy research institutes in the established and emerging democracies of East Asia. Mr. Baek said he was proud that his organization was cosponsoring such a meeting. As one of Korea's leading independent research institutes, the Sejong Institute has been actively involved in the country's policy process on such issues as national security, international relations, and Korean unification. Concurrent with the 1998 launching of the Democracy Forum for East Asia, the Institute created the Sejong Democracy Forum to sponsor research, conferences, and publications on the development of democracy and market economies in East Asia. Mr. Baek also praised the Sejong's partnership with the NED, which has produced the series of productive working conferences that culminated in this meeting. Carl Gershman, president of the National Endowment for Democracy, joined in welcoming the participants. He noted that although the original mission of the NED had been to support democratization worldwide through its grants program, he and his colleagues had learned early on that effective democracy assistance required close familiarity with contemporary scholarship on democracy. This insight led to the launching of the Journal of Democracy in 1990 and to the creation of the International Forum for Democratic Studies in 1994. More recently, Mr. Gershman said, the NED had established the Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellows Program, which brings both democracy activists and scholars to the International Forum for three-to-ten month periods of research, writing, and reflection, and the World Movement for Democracy, a large-scale effort to coordinate the work of activists, practitioners, and scholars through meetings, newsletters, networking projects, a Web site, and a biennial global assembly. Mr. Gershman also thanked Mr. Baek for Sejong's excellent partnership with the NED, and he expressed his confidence that this conference would be as successful as the preceeding meetings had been. |
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