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!The English version of this site is a short version of the German website containing only the main articles of the first three issues on the left menu bar!

The North-South Dialogue of Parliaments is a project of the Austrian Development Co-operation with the main goal of strengthening the political and societal support for development politics and international co-operation on national and bi-lateral levels. In this regard, a discourse and dialogue between the North and the South on the levels of parliaments is being regarded as a fundamentally important element.

The project has three focal points:

• Informing parliamentarians and personnel of the Austrian Parliament about relevant and up-to-date topics and trends regarding development politics and development co-operations by the medium of this Website, regularly issued print- and electronic newsletters and events in the parliament.

• Strengthening of the AWEPA-Section (European Parliamentarians for Africa) within the Austrian Parliament.

• Building of a parliamentarian partnership, respectively a political and technical co-operation between the parliaments of Austria and Mozambique.

Within the ambit of the project, a central concern relates to the institutionalisation of the initiated dialogue and to the establishment of a sustainable inter-parliamentarian co-operation.

Questions of policy coherence for development are one of the central patterns of this project. This idea specifically focuses on the awareness of a dialectics between development in the South and legislative measures in the North. European Trade-, Tax-, Agricultural-, Environmental-, Armament-Export- or Immigration-Policies can have various negative social, economic and political impacts on the populations of “Southern countries”. Raising the consciousness of the Austrian parliamentarians for these causal relations is one of the main focuses of the project.

The enhancement of the effectiveness of measures and instruments of bi- and multilateral development co-operation is another core topic of the project. The Paris Declaration of Aid Effectiveness serves as basis of a reorientation of international development politics. The goal is to make development cooperation more effective. This should be reached through the formulation of targets and indicators and well as through the fact, that development co-operation is more seen as a partnership with mutual accountabilities and obligations.

The project finds backing in the board of presidents of the Austrian parliament, the spokespersons on development policy of the parliamentary political parties as well as the international department of the Parliament. The self-evident involvement of all political parties into the project and its all-party representation in all of its phases are the prerequisites for its successful conduct.