Successful start-up meeting in the Southern Voices Programme at COP16

In the context of the COP16 Climate Summit in Cancun Mexico, a start-up meeting was held on December 3rd in the conference area at the Cancun-Messe, for the climate policy networks to receive support from the Southern Voices Capacity Building Programme. The meeting had a great turn-out: 24 participants from climate networks and 6 representatives from organisations in the Climate Capacity Consortium behind the programme; of national networks only those in Cambodia and Vietnam were not present, as they did not attend the COP16.

The key elements in the new programme were presented - the background and the rationale for supporting climate policy networks (by Poul Erik Lauridsen, Care DK), the opportunities and requirements for networks participating in the programme (by Peter With, programme coordinator) - and the outline for the country assessment reports to be prepared on the implementation of climate policies and programmes by donors and governments (by Hannah Reid, IIED). There was time for questions, clarifications and useful feed-back. Among the questions raised were What if there are several networks in the same region or more actors in one country - then how to prepare the network capacity analsysis or the country assessment reports?