A Regional vision on SCP policies
The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) will implement the regional part of the SWITCH-Asia Policy Support Component. UNEP is the leading UN agency working worldwide on Sustainable Consumption and Production and it is mandated by the UN to support the UN member countries to develop the “10 Year Framework of Programmes on SCP” (the Marrakech Process). Stefanos Fotiou works in UNEP’s Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific, in Bangkok, and belongs to the team that will co-ordinate and implement the regional part of the SWITCH-Asia Policy Support Component (PSC):
What is the Policy Support Component according to Stefanos Fotiou?
The Policy Support Component is about uptake of results from the SWITCH-Asia programme by policy-makers, leading to the establishment of an enabling policy environment that will allow SCP to be mainstreamed in governmental activity.
It will allow SWITCH-funded projects to have a much greater impact especially in locations where the PSC is implemented. It is also about making efforts on the harmonisation of regional and or sub-regional initiatives and the drawing up of guidelines and benchmarks for policy making on regional and sub-regional level.
What is UNEP’s role in the Policy Support Component?
The regional part of the policy component will target two two levels: regional/sub-regional, and one and a national one. Given the fact that the EU has already selected four countries for direct implementation of PSC projects, UNEP’s role is to focus more on the regional/sub-regional level but there is enough space to also include activities at the country level. Both our interventions at the regional/sub-regional and country level will deal with policy-making approaches such as establishing standards, developing guidelines and building capacity with policy-makers. This focus has been agreed with the European Commission. We have identified countries where we will develop a closer working relationship at the national level. We will work with them to support any initiatives they have already started, or assist them in starting some SCP activity at the national level.
How do you intend to promote the shift towards sustainability?
The project follows a well-structured but also “open” methodology in order to build upon work that has already been done and upscale, mainstream efforts on SCP at the regional and national level. While the main work packages of the project are defined, we have kept a certain degree of flexibility so we can adapt to the specific context of a country. In order to be sure that we will respond to real needs we start with a work package on "Assessing Needs and Balances". We want to assess the real policy related needs of the countries at the policy level ie. on macro / national level and not the ones related to individual SWITCH-project level because that is not our scope. We will define those policy needs by using a number of tools like for example the UNEP framework on developing a 10 Years Framework of Programmes on SCP and the systematic policy matrix that the UNEP/Wuppertal Institute Collaborating Centre (CSCP) developed for SCP. We want to identify those policy instruments that are best to be implemented in the respective country. Once we have done that with
all countries we aim to sum up the results and develop a kind of grouping on sub regional level to focus issues and target groups. Having done this we will start working with policy makers at the country and regional level and focusing on the individual and regional/sub-regional needs. We plan to implement a number of capacity building workshops at the regional level and create a pool of trainers that will take the knowledge back to their national level. In a parallel stream of work we will start to identify specific policy tools that are representing a good opportunity for implementation in each country. We want to give the lead to the countries to decide which tools they would like to develop. Our intention is to guide nd educate the policy makers but not to take decisions on behalf of them. At this level, we will mainly work with the 8 preselected countries.