Second Critical Study on Co-operative Policy Development and Legislation Reforms - Executive Summary

Abstract

This second critical study is a successor to the first critical study on cooperative legislation and competitive strength of select countries in Asia and the Pacific. Mr Ibnoe Soedjono and Mr Mariana Cordero made the first study in early 1996. Their report was published by ICAROAP in July 1997 and it served as an important instrument in the 5th cooperative ministers conference held in Beijing in October 1999. The basic objective of this study is to build on the work already carried out by the first study and offer a report that could facilitate quality deliberations in the 6,h ministerial conference scheduled to bo-held in March 2002 at Kathmandu, Nepal. This report attempts to analyse how some of the rapid and significant changes in the socio-economic and socio-political landscape since 1996 have impacted cooperative policy and legislation. This report also tries to assess the extent to which ICA members and their corresponding governments have implemented follow up actions on the Beijing Joint Declaration (BJD)'.Legislation is considered necessary because it helps society organise itself along efficient lines and generally provides for matters that are socially appropriate and morally desirable. Good legislation is supposed to direct activities having a great deal of community interface such as voluntary association, commerce, manufacturing, and public services into orderly modes, provide a non-contextual framework for decision making and enable effective conflict resolution. On the other hand, legislation is often considered as an instrument that stifles spontaneity and creativity. They are frowned upon as impediments to the development of both the individual and society. Legislation also has this tendency to place people and institutions in situations where they hesitate to set precedence, even as they eagerly hope that someone else would come along and do just that.A complex society offers innumerable instances in every day life where routine responses become necessary. As a consequence, legislation is considered to be one of the best instruments for handling large-scale human interaction. While, in the final analysis, society cannot avoid having legislation, the matter of essence is that they ought to be designed well and structured such that they can be implemented effectively and efficiently. It is also generally recognised that legislation is never perfect. They are always dose approximations. Therefore, there is this need to continuously scrutinise legislation - through the application of collective intelligence, based on on-going experiences at different levels and by being abreast of the judiciary's interpretation of legislation. Such processes offer tremendous potential to improve the quality of legislation to better serve both individual and collective human purposes. For these reasons, the initiative of ICAROAP to hold ministerial level conferences on cooperative policy and legislation since 1991 is indeed a laudable objective.