CDI’s Political Party Development program seeks to strengthen political parties via engagement with both elected representatives and relevant party secretariats and officials. Like CDI’s other main focus area, parliamentary governance, our political party programme works in partnership with our focus countries in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific to strengthen democratic capacity. Ongoing training, research, networking and other linkages are key to this work:
Each year we conduct the CDI Political Party Development Course (PPD) in Canberra. This flagship training course aims to give party officials the skills to build stronger and more responsible party organisations. Working closely with the major Australian parties, the PPD course covers issues of party functioning such as candidate selection, membership, campaigning, finance, media relations, issue management, the role of parliamentary parties, and ensuring party discipline. PPD also feeds into a range of more targeted, in-country programs working with political parties in Indonesia, Timor-Leste and Melanesia.
The provision of in-country advice and assistance is another part of CDI’s political party development activities. CDI conducts roundtables for party leaders and provides apolitical technical advice to focus countries on issues of party reform. For example, CDI has advised the governments of Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands on the implementation of their political party integrity laws. Like all CDI activities, such advice is demand-driven and non-partisan, involving all significant parties and representatives of both government and opposition groups.
Policy-focussed applied research on issues of political party performance is another important part of CDI’s mandate. Key areas include internal party governance, party and gender issues, the regulation of parties, and political party development in conflict-prone societies.
Many of activities properly combine our two major and related sectoral concerns of Political Party Development and Parliamentary Strengthening. Accordingly, listed below are all our activities which both focus primarily on, or include significant elements of, Political Party Development work:
