Elected representatives and parliamentary and ministry staff constitute the primary actors in the lawmaking process. These trainings enhance the capacity of legislators, parliamentary staff, and civil servants to develop effectively implementable and socially beneficial legislative and regulatory proposals.

Introduction to the Legislative Method for Participatory Problem Solving

This course is designed to introduce participants to a logical problem-solving method that will help them rethink their beliefs and solutions based on a more comprehensive understanding of the facts.

The beauty and power of the Legislative Method for Participatory Problem Solving lies in its simplicity.

1. Identify whose and what behaviors constitute the underlying social problem;

2. Explain why people, and institutions, are engaging in the repetitive patterns of problematic

behaviors;

3. Propose a solution (or policy) that addresses the causes of the problematic behaviors; and

4. Devise monitoring criterion, and evaluation protocols, to enable policy-makers to assess whether

the policy is being implemented and, if so, if it is having the desired effect.

Program participants typically embrace the problem-solving method because it gives them a simple, logical framework through which they can differentiate between effective and ineffective policies. Legis consultants do not come in and tell country-nationals which solutions to pursue; we provide them with tools that they can use to identify effective policies, and provide them with support as they learn to use those tools.

Socio-Legal Research Methods for Parliamentary and Ministry Staff

This course teaches the basics of legislative problem solving, beginning with the importance of policy development and lawmaking. Participants learn to use the Legislative Method for Participatory Problem Solving as a guide to providing decision-makers with the facts necessary to choose effective legislative solutions. At each step, participants will learn and practice a number of research and presentation strategies for providing evidence to decision-makers in a useful form.

The primary objective of this course is to strengthen the capacity of parliamentary and ministry staff to support decision-makers with the necessary facts, logically organized, to design legislative solutions likely to solve problems in a cost-effective way. The training is designed to enhance parliamentary and ministry staff members’ knowledge of, and ability to effectively use, a range of executive research and presentation tools.

Legislative and Regulatory Drafting Techniques

A law is supposed to be an instrument to bring about desired social changes. Through law, we not only state our values and aspirations — but we clarify the concrete steps that individuals must take to achieve the stated goals. A law is an action plan.

Frequently drafters (1) draft vague bills which will neither be interpreted nor implemented in a predictable manner, (2) rely on personal values to fill policy gaps, or (3) copy another jurisdiction’s law, uncritically importing a set of institutional preferences and reflecting extra-jurisdictional priorities. These drafting strategies are fundamentally undemocratic and ineffective.

An implementable law contains commands, permissions and prohibitions that are unambiguous and that address the causes of problematic behaviors. Translating a policy into an implementable and transformative legislate schema entails specifying the circumstances under which the government will deliver a service or impose a sanction, specifying who will make subsequent policy decisions and clarifying how government officials will balance divergent interests. A well-drafted law makes it possible to hold an implementing agency accountable for performing mandated functions and to prohibit the agency from engaging in unauthorized activities.

This course introduces the art of legislative drafting. The course begins by providing an overview of the hierarchy of laws and challenging participants to identify ways to address a problem at different levels of the national legal system via different normative instruments. The course then introduces participants to the parts of the law and teaches them how to read a law. Finally, the course introduces a series of legislative drafting rules and guides participants through a series of exercises that require participants to:

1. identify how drafting errors might affect a bill’s interpretation and implementation; and

2. revise legislative provisions to improve clarity and to reduce opportunities for the law’s addressees

to engage in arbitrary or capricious abuses of power.

By the end of this course, participants will understand the hierarchy of laws and the structure of a legislative act. Participants will also be familiar with the dominant rules of judicial interpretation and legislative drafting. Participants should be able to identify drafting errors, different ways that poorly drafted legislative provisions might be interpreted, and probable implementation/accountability problems that might arise from a variety of drafting errors. Participants should also be able to draft clear and concise legislative provisions that abide by the limitations established by the Constitution, other statutes and policymakers.

Legislative Analysis and Processes

The primary purpose of a legislative assessment is to determine whether the enactment and implementation of the draft law will solve an identified social, economic or environmental problem. In this course, we explore how the Legislative Method for Participatory Problem-Solving can serve as a guide to assessing (1) whether a legislative proposal addresses an actual problem, and (2) whether passage of the legislative proposal would resolve that problem. Finally, this course features an anti-corruption checklist (comprised of a list of behaviors that frequently undermine implementation efforts, produce cost overruns or revenue shortfalls, and introduce unnecessary degrees of environmental or social risk). Participants assess a legislative proposal’s provisions, to ensure that the legislative proposal is drafted defensively against corruption.

Legislative Impacts Assessment

Legislative Impacts Assessment (LIA) projects the costs, benefits and distributional affects of different policy alternatives. A LIA helps policy-makers select between multiple policy options. In this course, we prepare legal experts to identify and, where possible, quantify a draft law’s financial, economic, social, and environmental impacts. During this portion of the course we also assess the draft law’s consistency with other laws and regulations. This course outlines a LIA approach that captures the differential impact that a proposal will have on different groups.

Collaborative Input Processes

This course provides elected representatives and civil servants with strategies they can employ to shift the public’s focus from personal manifestations of problems to the broad causes (and harms associated with) those problems.

By structuring public input sessions with the Participatory Problem-Solving approach, constituents are better able to understand the different factors that policy-makers must consider, and are able to constructively participate in formulating policy suggestions that have a high likelihood of proving effectively implemented. Logically-structured public-input processes help reveal inequitable or biased allocations of scarce resources, inaccurate assumptions about the nature and causes of problems, and unnecessary negative externalities that are likely to stem from solutions under consideration.

Logically-structured input processes also communicate the elected/government officials’ interest in developing effective solutions to key community concerns. Collaborative policy-making, conducted in the transparent, logical manner suggested by the Participatory Problem-Solving approach, can reduce ideological and interest-based policy rifts between voters.