The Chief of Governance and Thematic Group at ADB, Mr. Gambhir Bhatta, visited UNPOG on 14 February to discuss about future cooperation. The meeting was made as further follow-up to the first meeting in Seoul in November 2016 (http://unpog.org/media/media01_02.php?seq=448). Both sides briefly introduced their overall work areas and priority work programmes in 2017, and then exchanged views on collaboration, particularly focusing on organisation of the Forum on Governance and Institution to be held by ADB on 9-11 August 2017 in Seoul, Republic of Korea.

Mr. Bhatta informed that the Forum was launched in Tokyo in 2016 with an ambition to develop it to ADB's flagship activity on governance, by enabling various related stakeholders in Asia to meet and discuss current issues on governance and public administration on an annual basis, and furthermore suggest innovative ways to enhance governance capacity in the region through dissemination of good country practices. He shared that this year's Forum will focus on local service delivery for implementing SDGs and some Korean organisations already expressed their keen interests in contributing to this Forum, such as Korea Development Institute, the Ministry of Finance, Korea Research Institute of Local Administration and so on. In this regard, he asked UNPOG for firm support to make the Forum successful, as discussed before.

Mr. Chung shared same understanding with ADB in regards to necessity of capacity enhancement of public administration in Asia and expressed his support to ADB’s firm commitment to launch this Forum as an effective venue of implementation. In particular, he emphasized that UNPOG which has accumulated various experiences and expertise in this field for the past ten years could be a good partner with ADB, not only in organizing the upcoming Forum but also collaborating in other projects to be conducted in the region later on. As for the overall theme of this year's Forum - local service delivery, UNPOG agreed on ADB’s timely and appropriate selection of the theme, considering that local governance plays crucial role in accelerating achievement of SDGs because it is local governments which could effectively address multi-faceted issues due to their closeness to citizens. UNPOG also emphasized that policy coherence between local governments and central governments is of critical importance in SDG implementation.

More concretely, it was discussed between two sides that UNPOG could be substantively engaged in organization of one-day study tour during the three-day Forum by helping to identify places to visit in Korea and liaise with relevant government officials based on UNPOG’s network. It was also discussed that UNPOG could help mobilize resource persons from UNPOG as well as local partners, and possibly by inviting an expert from DPADM. UNPOG also suggested ADB to invite Least Developed Countries (LDCs) including Small Island Developing States (SIDS) in Asia and the Pacific which UNPOG has targeted for creating mutual beneficial outcomes.

As a follow-up to this meeting, ADB will visit again UNPOG in late March for further discussion on collaboration.