Strengthening the building blocks of democratic legislatures – transparency, accountability, oversight, responsiveness and effective legislation – is among the goals of the House Democracy Partnership (HDP), an organization created by the U.S. House of Representatives to promote and support emerging democratic governments around the world.  HDP currently has 14 partner countries on five continents.

Members of Parliament and staff members from four of those countries – Georgia, Kosovo, Macedonia and Mongolia – were involved in two programs that NDI organized with HDP this fall.  Both focused on one of the backbones of legislative operations – the work of parliamentary committees.  The first program involved parliamentarians who traveled to Washington, DC, in September for a week-long seminar. The second trained parliamentary staff and took place in Macedonia, in one of the first HDP programs organized outside the United States. 

The Washington program featured a bipartisan group of members of Congress, senior congressional staff and representatives of the Congressional Research Service (CRS) who addressed the 23 parliamentarians on the importance of committee work and the nuts and bolts of carrying it out. 

For example, Rep. Jim McDermott, D-WA, chairman of the Ways and Means Subcommittee on Income Security, conducted a session on the role of committee chairs; Reps. Charles Boustany, R-LA, ranking member of the Ways and Means Subcommittee on Oversight, and Jeff Fortenberry, R-NE, of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, shared experiences on oversight hearings. Rep. David Price, D-NC, HDP chairman and chairman of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security, discussed the hearing and markup process.

Other sessions dealt with agenda setting, dealing with the press and public, and working with the executive branch.  The mission focused in particular on ways to strengthen and improve parliamentary oversight hearings, as well as ways to make hearings more transparent and inclusive of civil society organizations.

HDP Chairman David Price (D-NC) and Ranking Member David Dreier (R-CA) talk with delegates from a recent HDP study mission.

“This was a positive program for parliamentarians,” said the Honorable Petar Pop Arsov of Macedonia, chair of the Committee on European Issues. 

Part of HDP’s mission is to provide opportunities for program participants to learn from each other.  In both the Washington and Macedonia programs, participants were given opportunities to present information about their country’s parliamentary structure and functions. 

During the staff training program in Macedonia, the congressional staff delegation discussed effective ways to support committee operations. Topics included legislative-executive relations, committee staff and research, preparing for public hearings, writing committee reports, techniques for oversight hearings and organizing media coverage. 

The program also included a visit to the Macedonian parliament building, where several members of parliament took part in a question and answer session with the visitors.

Žarko Denkovski, Secretary General of the Assembly of the Republic of Macedonia, praised the personal development opportunities presented by the program and noted participants’ many “common denominators,” a recognition of the peer-to-peer aspect of the HDP program, which stresses the importance of participants sharing information.  “It was a very inspirational program,” he said. “I hope that we will meet again.”

Pictured at the top: A delegation of representatives from several HDP-participating countries visit the U.S. Capitol.

Published on December, 21, 2009