The Role of the RCEM
The idea to establish an Asia-Pacific Regional Civil Society Engagement Mechanism (AP- RCEM) derives from engagement experiences in processes leading up to the 2012 Rio+20 conference on sustainable development. A group of Asia-Pacific regional CSOs, who had been cooperating in this context, got together to share good and bad experiences from their engagement in the processes leading up to the global conference.
The wish to have a better and more effective way of engaging ‘upwards’ with governments and international organizations as well as ‘downwards’ with national and subnational civil society and grassroots movements turned into a process of learning-by- doing and experimenting with more systematic engagement. Today, the AP-RCEM fully exists and has drawn considerable attention from the global level and from other regions, where CSOs equally aspire to improve their engagement. This is especially important in the light of the upcoming post 2015 development agenda and the forthcoming sustainable development goals, which can only be implemented with full and fair participation from society at large, including the AP-RCEM.