Capacity and field-building program to develop an Asia-Pacific knowledge network on ICT policy regulation
The task of capacity building has always been an important component of LIRNEasia’s mission that of its parent network LIRNE.NET. LIRNEasia’s mission to build capacity requires field building. There should be a sustainable system for producing and reproducing such policy intellectuals. This requires the active participation of universities, especially at the post-graduate levels and the emergence of a field as the larger environment within which university-based programs flourish, both in terms of the essential function of peer review and in terms of intellectual exchange and support.
The urgency of grappling with the emerging challenges of alleviating poverty and improving life chances in a rapidly globalizing economy requires active field building. LIRNEasia, with its structured form, can play an important role in field building, as long as the organization is not conflated with the field.
LIRNEasia intends to engage in a systematic approach to field building, starting from a more thorough and comprehensive knowledge mapping (using a broader sieve than was used in the in a pilot version of this project) to identify current and potential ICT policy and regulation researchers in universities, research organizations and elsewhere. The baseline will include new components such as the identification of fresh PhDs and graduate students in major Asian and other universities and measures of quality.
The exercise will be centered around an annual research conference, “Communication Policy Research: South (CPRsouth)” that will provide a focus for intra-Asian (and intra-South) connections among scholars engaged in ICT policy and regulation research. While LIRNEasia will provide the required support functions for three years (subject to availability of resources), the governance of the conference and the associated field-building activities will be in the hands of a self-perpetuating but changing Board of Directors (modeled on the Telecommunications Policy Research Conference, TPRC).
In TPRC and Euro CPR, the tradition is to limit the number of papers strictly and to privilege plenary sessions over parallel sessions. In the case of TPRC, chairs of sessions are given discretion (and in some years, funds) to invite papers as well as accept proposals, leading to highly coherent sessions that include the leading researchers in the sub-field. CPRsouth will adopt similar practices to ensure optimal contribution to field building. While the focus will be on Asia-Pacific, a limited number of invitations will be issued to the sister networks in Africa and Latin America, in the hope of broadening the scope of the event in the future.
In this project, it is hoped that a partnership can be made with an Asian university with regional ambitions and that is willing to commit resources to research and teaching on ICT policy and regulation. An executive training course on regulation and reform will also be held. Similar courses (those held by LIRNE.NET as well as that convened by LIRNEasia in 2005) have attracted participants from government as well as from the private sector.
LIRNEasia will also commence an active research and implementation program on to further develop LIRNEasia into a virtual organization that will on one hand support and enable the above capacity building activities and on the other produce usable research on the best use of ICTs and organizational practices to facilitate decentralized conduct of research and its management.
This project is funded by IDRC of Canada
Project Team: Sujata Gamage, Nilusha Kapugama and Tahani Iqbal
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