End of Project Report SOUTHEAST ASIA REGIONAL COOPERATION IN HUMAN DEVELOPMENT (SEARCH) Prepared for the Canadian International Development Agency Submitted by GeoSpatial/SALASAN Consulting Inc. In association with International Institute for Child Rights and Development Four Directions International Inc. TABLE OF CONTENTS EXECUTIVE SUMMARY .............................................................................................. 3 ACRONYMS ................................................................................................................. 5 1. INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................... 8 1.1 Background to The Project ..................................................................... 8 1.2 The Human Rights Environment in Southeast Asia ................................ 8 1.3 Search Milestones, 2004 - 2010 ........................................................ 12 2 CUMULATIVE PROGRESS TOWARDS RESULTS ............................................ 20 2.1 Outcome 100 ....................................................................................... 20 2.2 Outcome 200 ....................................................................................... 33 2.3 Outcome 300 ....................................................................................... 44 2.4 Outcome 400 .................................................................................. 54 2.5 Gender Results .................................................................................... 67 2.6 Contribution of The Gender Fund to Search Results ............................ 69 2.7 Results of AFI Fund ........................................................................ 71 2.8 Conclusions ................................................................................... 76 3. FACTORS AFFECTING PERFORMANCE ......................................................... 80 3.1 Issues and Concerns ........................................................................... 80 3.2 Lessons Learned .................................................................................. 82 3.3 Best Practices ...................................................................................... 85 3.4 Changes in Assumptions and Risks ..................................................... 88 3.5 Looking Ahead .................................................................................... 91 4. PROJECT MANAGEMENT SUMMARY ............................................................. 94 4.1 Management for Results ...................................................................... 94 4.2 Managing the Project to Achieve Value for Money ............................... 96 4.3 Managing the Project’s Capacity Development Function ...................... 98 4.4 Regional Office Management .............................................................. 98 4.5 Managing the Project Exit for Sustainability .......................................... 99 4.6 Managing Project Communications .....................................................100 Appendix A: Results Chain ....................................................................................102 Appendix B: Logical Framework Analysis ............................................................103 Appendix C: The Emergent ASEAN Human Rights Architecture ........................110 Appendix D: SEARCH Partners .............................................................................111 Appendix E: SEARCH Knowledge Products .........................................................112 Appendix F: SEARCH Timeline .............................................................................113 2 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY SEARCH was a six-year (November 2004-December 2010) human rights and rule of law program implemented in seven Southeast Asian countries: Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao PDR, the Philippines, Thailand, Timor Leste and Vietnam. The SEARCH project goals were to: (i) promote and uphold the rule of law in Southeast Asia; and (ii) to improve the legal and institutional mechanisms for the promotion and protection of the rights of children, ethnic minorities and migrant workers in the Southeast Asia region with gender equality as a cross-cutting theme. The project’s original implementation budget was $7.7 million; in July 2008 this amount was increased by $2.3 million, bringing the total resources available for SEARCH programming to $10 million. As originally conceived SEARCH was to be a mechanism for creating and supporting national human rights networks in each of its 7 target countries and then linking them together into a transnational regional human rights network. Instead, what it became was a partnership with three already existing regional human rights organizations: FORUM-Asia, a regional human rights advocacy organization; the Working Group for an ASEAN Human Rights Mechanism, a dialogue mechanism between senior government officials and human rights experts, and the UN Inter-Agency Project against Trafficking, a UN-led project aimed at building an inter-governmental capacity for cooperation amongst Mekong governments on cross-border human trafficking. Fortuitously, what these three diverse organizations had in common was that they all approached human rights promotion through a developmental lens - not simply as the formal task of getting states to ratify the relevant universal legal instrument but as a process of building institutional capacities, empowering vulnerable groups, supporting networks of NGOs, creating space for constructive civil-society-governmental dialogue and promoting human rights education – all on a long term basis taking into account the complexity of social change. By working together over the last six years each in their own way but with SEARCH support and the support of other donors, these three organizations have been able to play a significant role in helping the region to take three giant steps forward in promoting human rights with: (i) the creation of an ASEAN Inter-governmental Human Rights Commission; (ii) the creation of an ASEAN Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Women and Children; and (iii) the creation of a Coordinated Mekong Ministerial Initiative Against Trafficking. In the process of supporting the creation of these three inter-governmental human rights related institutions, they have also created a parallel system of non-governmental human rights organizations: a regional peoples’ centre for human rights, a regional university-based human rights research and educational centre and a series of regional working groups for promoting and protecting the rights of children, ethnic minorities and migrant workers. Now as SEARCH comes to an end, the task is changing from one of building this new human rights architecture to making it work. SEARCH as a network encompassed a wide range of partners and stakeholders in helping to build this regional human rights capacity across ASEAN. SEARCH as a project used a diversity of tools and collaborative capacity development processes for delivering its supportive programming. These included: (i) the provision of budgetary support to its three main partners to pursue their own agendas; (ii) the operation of a small project funding mechanism to promote human rights related programming innovations and make SEARCH socially inclusive; (iii) the provision of technical 3 assistance aimed at mainstreaming the human rights concerns of the region’s ethnic minorities, migrant workers, children and women in the regional human rights development process; (iv) support for the launching non-governmental human rights regional organizations to parallel those that were being created at the inter-governmental level; (v) the provision of an opportunity for facilitating dialogue and collaboration in a free and open forum amongst the many non-governmental players in the human rights arena in Southeast Asia and connecting them with the inter-governmental institution building process that was underway; and (vi) an experiment with the potential to harness the power of digital social networking to build human rights based, ethnic minority and youth communities and have their voices heard in the regional human rights dialogue. In October 2009, the member states ratified a new Association Charter granting ASEAN full legal standing. The new charter sought to transform ASEAN into a more people oriented body and to that end speaks to the creation of an internationally recognized regional inter-governmental human rights commission. As events have transpired, SEARCH as a regional human rights support mechanism was uniquely situated to take advantage of the multi-stakeholder capacity of the three regional partners to facilitate the capacity development processes, dialogues and learning opportunities required to move that ASEAN agenda forward. This was because the flexibility built into the project’s multi-stakeholder approach allowed it to plan iteratively, to take advantage of emerging opportunities, to learn and to solve problems, to work across different human rights planes and to program around power differences and conflicts. As SEARCH is ending, the human rights development process in the ASEAN region is transitioning to a new phase. For the last several years that process has been about building a new ASEAN human rights architecture. Annex D of this report presents a map of what has been accomplished. Now the task has shifted to making those structures work requiring a new