Another
Wroxton Workshop (the 14th) for Parliamentarians and Practitioners was successfully concluded in the last weekend of July 2019! And again organiser
Professor The Lord Norton of Louth gave his best to deliver a high level workshop experience to the dozens that responded to his biennial call.
The great scenery of the Wroxton abbey, home of Lord North, Prime Minister of Great Britain from 1770 to 1782, gave food for countless discussions among the many international participants. This year there were special sections on parliamentary development, post legislative scrutiny, legislatures in China and many more. An additional special late night program left nobody unsatisfied! It is worth mentioning that according to my estimations almost half of the scholars were “repeated offenders”, a fact that speaks for the success of the event. It was my second time attending the Wroxton workshop and it was great to meet again with great friends, dedicated MPs and creative scholars who share a passion for science and parliamentarism. This year, I presented a paper on:
Parliamentary Oversight of Sustainable Development Goals and the Application of Post-Legislative Scrutiny Principles
Jointly developed with Franklin De Vrieze, this contribution can be now found on
SSRN. We are further developing it for a special issue of the Journal of Legislative Studies coming out in 2020. It is based on my own 2-year study of parliamentary involvement on SDGs, which resulted in an open data set to be found on
figshare. The first announcement of this data set to researchers and practitioners was made in Yangon, Myanmar, in June 2019 at the
Academic Conference on Post-Legislative Scrutiny in Asia. The paper abstract, the slides from my presentation at Wroxton and a few photos can be found below.
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Abstract
The United Nations 2030 Agenda is a global framework for sustainable development. While the Executive in each country has a mandate to implement the respective measures, parliaments are entrusted with passing the related legislation as well as overseeing its implementation. This paper sheds light on the engagement of parliaments to control implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). For this purpose, institutional and non-institutional measures from a wide range of parliaments were evaluated and a general assessment framework has been developed, leading to the determination of a set of basic types of dedicated parliamentary bodies that handle SDG related issues and the nature of their cooperation with extra-parliamentary stakeholders. In this context, the Post-Legislative Scrutiny concept, which assesses both legal and impact dimensions of law implementation, has been studied, in order to prove whether it constitutes a viable long-term contribution to accelerate the achievement of the SDGs. Based on examples of good practice, the paper presents tangible recommendations and urges parliaments to upscale action related to the achievement of the SDGs, as an additional means to strengthen their own position in the institutional system.
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Wroxton 2019 group photograph
Below a couple of photos from my presentation.
On the job
Full panel, with Franklin de Vrieze, Juan de Dios Cincunegui (chair) and Katsuhiro Musashi (from left to right)
The slides from the presentation may be found on
slideshare. See
here more photos from the event
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