Heinrich Boell Foundation
	Where we come from: HBF in Southeast Asia
	Our current program in Southeast Asia

To achieve our goals, we seek strategic partnerships with others who share our values. We are an independent organisation, that is, we determine our own priorities and policies.

We are based in the Federal Republic of Germany, yet we are an international actor in both ideal and practical terms.

Our namesake, the writer and Nobel Prize laureate Heinrich Böll, personifies the values we stand for: defence of freedom, civic courage, tolerance, open debate, and the valuation of art and culture as independent spheres of thought and action.

HBF's ‘Mission Statement’
Heinrich Boell Foundation's homepage: http://www.boell.de/
power point presentation on the Greens’ history as pdf
power point presentation on HBF's history as pdf

Where we come from: HBF in Southeast Asia

From the beginning, the Chiang Mai and Phnom Penh offices have committed themselves to translating HBF’s values, objectives, and areas of concern into the particular contexts of Southeast Asian societies. This has taken place in an open dialogue with like-minded partners in the region.

The strengthening of both traditional and modern civil societies has been the core element of our approach to politics and society in Southeast Asia. Issues of gender democracy and ecological and economic sustainability have been top-ranked on our agenda, respecting and taking into account the diverse cultures of the region.
HBF has aimed at finding a balance between projects that promote good (global) governance, and projects that focus on empowerment at the grassroots level. Networking and exchange between those micro- and macro-levels have been enhanced in order to more strongly link the local to the global and vice versa. An example of Southeast Asian participation in HBF’s global network is the EcoFair Trade Dialogue that proposes a coherent reform for agricultural trade which responds to the 21st century's social and ecological challenges, developing alternatives both within the framework of the WTO and beyond.

In Southeast Asian countries we have been working with a variety of long- and short-term civil society partners. In Cambodia, we built on institutions of traditional civil society (like the Buddhist Institute or the Association of Nuns and Lay Women) for capacity building and empowerment. We have further contributed to the development of social and environmental sciences and a research culture (in our cooperations with the Royal University of Phnom Penh). In Thailand we have, for example, continuously worked with a variety of groups of the environmental movement.

Within the scope of our short term initiatives we have tried to support the search for sustainable development alternatives in Thailand and Southeast Asia. Key aspects of our activities have been gender issues and women’s empowerment, globalization and its local impacts, and the monitoring of public policies.

With our own and also partners’ exhibition projects we have given space to the arts as a medium for critical reflection and positioning towards a range of social problems in culturally diverse Southeast Asia, for example the interaction of globalization and identities.

 for a selection of our past activities visit our archive

Our current program in Southeast Asia

Our present overall program in mainland Southeast Asia draws on our past experiences and adjusts our activities to current realities. It is located in two main areas: 

• Democratisation
• Ecology/Sustainable Development

We concentrate our efforts on a smaller range of issues to achieve even greater impacts – for example in the realm of renewable energy promotion as a response to the pressing global challenge of climate change.

Our democratisation program comprises:

• a ‘Media for Democracy’ component in Thailand
• a transversal gender democracy approach to all of our activities, with particular emphasis on women’s empowerment in Cambodia.

In the field of ecology and sustainable development we focus on:

• Thailand’s energy policies, from a perspective that takes into account that climate change/global warming demands a complete overhaul of energy policies worldwide.
• In Cambodia, we aim to strenghten civil society participation in debates on policy priorities in the governance of natural resources. 

With regard to Myanmar/Burma we have established a scholarship program at Thai universities that aims at capacity building for students and journalists from inside the country.