First Meeting of Working Group IV, Tunis, 28-29 June 2005

The first meeting of the GfD Initiative’s Regional Working Group IV on Public Service Delivery, Public-Private Partnership and Regulatory Reform took place in Tunis, Tunisia, on 28-29 June 2005. This meeting was organised under the thematic leadership of UNDP. The OECD Secretariat thematically contributed to the meeting, in particular on the theme of regulatory reform.

Participants

The meeting was chaired by H. E. Zuheir M’Dhaffar, Minister for Administrative Development of Tunisia and co-chaired by Wendy Thomson, Cabinet Office, United Kingdom.

Ministers and high-level representatives from Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Greece, Lebanon, Libya, Jordan, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Syria, Tunisia, United Kingdom and Yemen attended the meeting. In addition, international organisations participated in the meeting, including the Arab Administrative Development Organisation (ARADO) and UN-DESA..

The meeting was opened by H. E. Zuheir M’Dhaffar, Minister for Administrative Development of Tunisia. He gave a strong support to the implementation of the Initiative, emphasized the commitment of Tunisia and the other participating MENA countries to public service reform and good governance and explored key challenges to the reform agenda.

Outcomes

Key outcomes of the meeting include the agreement to:

Implement the stocktaking of current reform initiatives on the basis of a focused questionnaire to be developed jointly by OECD and UNDP.
Hold a second meeting on regulatory reform and management for the MENA Working Group back-to-back with the OECD Working Group on Regulatory Management on the 28th of September 2005.
Identify national priorities for reform in public services as framework for discussion.
Call for the involvement of more Arab countries in Regional Working Group IV.
Continue the close co-operation with other international organisations including ARADO and UN-DESA, in particular with regard to the TA assistance projects of those organisations.

Documentation