We have held two meetings of the informal coordination group of the China Council Working Groups. Our first meeting lasted for two and a half hours on Thursday afternoon, and the second was held for nearly two hours on Friday evening.
These meetings were attended by the Co-Chairs of the seven Working Groups. We were also joined by the persons in charge of the proposed Project Group, as well as several members of the Council. This is an "Informal Mechanism". I don't actually recall how I have ended up with the honor of chairing it, but I assure you t hat the spirit behind this exercise is to provide a positive input to the process of the Council.
We began on Thursday afternoon with a report from each Working Group of accomplishments and providing information about future plans, and as we needed more time for discussion we arranged to meet again last night.
As a result of these discussions, I submitted the following recommendations to t he Council. There are clearly not intended for the Chinese Government, but are s imply for our own business in order to help our future work:
(1) We took note of the Secretariat arrangements provided by NEPA and the Vancouver Office and appreciate the assistance the Working Groups have received from these over the years. We now request the Secretariat to provide guidelines for the uniform presentation of reports to next year's Council. We would also like to receive a list of all of the members of the Council and of the Working Groups wit h full addresses including e-mail details. We are also asking the Secretariat to provide the Working Groups with information as to budgets available to them for the coming year, so that this can be clearly included in the reports to next year's Council in order to ensure uniform and transparent presentation. Finally, w e would like to be able to suggest names of participants for any new Working Group or Task Force.
(2) We had a long discussion on ways to communicate between sessions of the Council and we suggest the Secretariat establish Internet connections for the Council, initially by setting up a simple File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and later with a World Wide Web Site. The generous offer of the International Institute for Sustainable Development to help with this was noted and accepted, but we also agree d that it would be most desirable to have the FTP and Web Site originate in Chin a, notably at NEPA. Several ideas of local expertise were given and will hopefully be used. If the Bureau agrees to this, the Working Groups hope to be able to communicate with each other by e-mail very soon. To help with this project, Council members are asked to give their e-mail addresses to the Secretariat before leaving.
(3) We also discussed the need to reach out with the results of our work beyond this Council, and request the Bureau to set up a Publications Committee. This Committee should be charged with considering the desirability of setting up a standardized format for China Council publications and seek a publisher for these. Such a committee might be expanded at a later date to include other channels of getting the Council's message out.
(4) Finally, we discussed the usefulness of our coordination meetings in order to gain a deeper understanding of the substantive interfaces between the working Groups, and to seek ways of increased cross-fertilization, if this appropriate. If we are able to communicate electronically, we felt that we need not meet between sessions of the Council, but would request to have a full day set aside immediately before the next China Council Meeting as well as a full day immediately after the Council.
If we have sufficient time, such a meeting could be used not only to discuss coordination issues between the Working Groups, but also cross-cutting areas, such a s public awareness and institutional mechanisms. We could also use these occasions to have a dialogue with on-going international programmes which are related to our work, but which are outside of the China Council's agenda.
