Membership

The ASEA platform will operate based on the following membership principles:

• Open coalition: ASEA platform is an open coalition of research and higher education institutions active on Agroecology within the Greater Mekong Sub-region; any institution willing to join the platform has to send a letter of intention to the platform secretariat. In this letter, the institution specify which staff(s) will be involved in the network and on which research and training axis(s) the(se) staff(s) intend to be involved.
• Voluntary basis: members participate to the platform on a voluntary basis.
• Memorandum of Understanding (MoU): A MoU will be drafted by the secretariat of the platform and signed by the members of the platform who wants to make official the partnership; the signing of the MoU is not compulsory (yet) for institutions to become member of the platform.

Platform secretariat 

As for the facilitators, the secretariat of the platform will be insured by one of the member of the platform who is elected by the other members for 2 years (renewable).

The role of the secretariat is to:

• Insure information fluxes between members (e.g. update platform website, share news about coming events or funding opportunities).
• Insure platform communication and visibility with outsiders (e.g. donors, decision makers, other platforms).
• Facilitate the organization and insure the reporting of annual workshops and steering committees.

Steering committee

The steering committee is made up of 5 members: 4 representatives coming from facilitators home institutions, and 1 ASEA platform secretariat. The steering committee meets once a year (along with the annual scientific workshop) and is in charge to:

• Assess the activities and commitment of the facilitators based on their annual activity reports that will be consolidated by the secretariat.
• Approve (or not) the tentative annual work plans (and possible financial requests) prepared by each facilitator for their respective research and training axis.
• Approve the tentative work plan related to platform governance (e.g. renewal of facilitators, secretariat, possible addendum to MoU, invited scientific advisers, platform external evaluation) prepared by the secretariat.