The NGO-Business Environmental Partnership, administered by The Asia Foundation (TAF), has received a one-year extension from US-AEP to sustain and replicate the most successful of the 53 grant-funded partnerships facilitated by the program. Launched in 1996, the program provides grants of up to $30,000 to Asian nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to encourage collaborative environmental improvement efforts with Asian industry. Through the extension, nine "flagship" project leaders will share their success stories and partnership tips with other Asian NGOs and businesses.

Flagship project leaders met for the first time May 24-26 in Bangkok, along with representatives of TAF and US-AEP. Among the topics discussed were the identification of cooperative activities and workshops for the coming year, long-term responsibility and strategy for the NGO-Business program, a joint proposal for future NGO-Business activity support, and invitations to visit each other�s projects. The results of the first meeting were impressive: the group formed a "co-secretariat" to help TAF develop a strategy to replicate and sustain the NGO-Business program; crafted a NGO-Business working group mission statement; and made recommendations for increasing the program�s visibility in Asia. In addition, project leaders shared their successes and ideas. For example, the Wisnu Foundation�s hotel waste management project in Bali, Indonesia, has become self-supporting through fees collected from the hotels, and the Society for Environment and Human Development in Bangladesh has published a report on pollution mitgation in the leather industry. The report is being sold in Bangla and English translations to raise funds. Satit Sanongphan, US-AEP technology representative in Thailand, and Suzanne Young, technical manager of US-AEP�s Clean Technology and Environmental Management (CTEM) program in Thailand, were on hand to inform NGOs about available US-AEP resources. The next flagship project meeting is scheduled for November in Taiwan.

In April, under its cooperative agreement with US-AEP, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) held training sessions for Thai government officials that will help them better assess environmental conditions and train their own enforcement staff. The first session was a follow-up to a session on reducing mobile source emissions, conducted last January by EPA and Kenan Institute Asia. The three-day workshop, "Communications for Environmental Results," provided a framework for developing a public outreach campaign to improve Bangkok�s air quality. The workshop drew over 30 participants from the Bangkok Metropolitan Authority (BMA), as well as NGOs and university faculty and students. Course participants developed plans to influence the behavior of drivers in one Bangkok district, such as reducing the amount of driving, improving vehicle maintenance, encouraging motorists to avoid certain streets at certain times, and increasing the driving public�s understanding of how they can reduce vehicle emissions. The session included presentations by Parichat Sanghiran, chief of BMA Public Relations Planning, and Kuhn Supapong, law enforcement chief in one of Bangkok�s districts.

The second April workshop�a "train-the-trainer" course on "Principles of Enforcement and Compliance"�was conducted by EPA officials in Pattaya, Chonburi province. BMA officials who had completed a June 1998 EPA course received two days of training, then worked with the EPA officials to teach a three-day version of the "Principles of Enforcement and Compliance" course to 60 BMA inspectors. The eight newly trained facilitators will also present an environmental awareness workshop to 500 police officers later this year.

Finally, EPA officials conducted a training module on "Principles of Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA)" in Bangkok for 28 Thai officials, including 19 from the Thai Office of Environmental Policy and Planning (OEPP) in the Ministry of Science, Technology, and Environment. Four Thai facilitators were trained and participated in the delivery of the course, which provided a model of how to conduct an EIA. The Thai facilitators will participate in one more EPA training session before administering the training themselves.