Good Practices and Innovations in Public Governance 2003-2011

Good Practices and InnovATIONS in Public Governance
sures that the clients have representation and input at every stage of BRIDGE programmes.
An example of such a group is the Pacific Island, Australia and New Zealand
Electoral Administrators (PIANZEA) Network’s advisory group. It selects
modules it thinks are most appropriate to the network, nominates candidates for facilitator
training and helps to customise workshops by providing materials and examples
from the Pacific context.
On a day-to-day basis, general queries and requests for support are dealt with through
a BRIDGE e-mail address (projectoffice@bridge-project.org). All BRIDGE office
staff are copied on all incoming messages, and protocols are in place to ensure that
there is no “doubling up” on answers and that no query goes unanswered.
The original intended target groups for BRIDGE were election commissioners
and other electoral personnel, particularly in post-conflict and developing democracies.
However, BRIDGE has been so successful and popular that the audience
has now broadened to include political parties, parliamentarians, civil society organisations,
election observers (international and domestic), and members of the
media and security forces. BRIDGE has also been taken up by the Australian
Electoral Commission as part of its induction and internal professional development
programmes, and other established election management bodies, such as
Elections Canada, have been exploring BRIDGE’s potential application for their
staff development programmes.
The Problem
The past 20 years have seen a rapid increase in the number of democratic states. As
a result, the number of elections worldwide has increased dramatically. Initially the
international community tended to deal with requests for electoral assistance by deploying
large numbers of electoral experts who played a very hands-on role in running
elections. There was very little emphasis on building the capacity of local electoral
staff, which had potentially deleterious implications for the independence and
sovereignty of the recipient countries.
At the time, no comprehensive curriculum for electoral administrators existed anywhere
in the world. So in December 1999, the Australian Electoral Commission
asked a group of experts to reflect on everything they wished they had known when
starting work on their first election. The knowledge, skills and values they identified
formed the basis for what has become the BRIDGE curriculum.
The need for such a curriculum was recognised in 2000 by the United Nations Transitional
Administration in East Timor (UNTAET). It was on that mission that, for the
first time, the UN established a Capacity Building Section as part of an Independent
Electoral Commission. The AEC and UNTAET worked together to use the earliest
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