With funding from the Clean Air Program of the U.S.-Asia Environmental Partnership (US-AEP), ICMA facilitated a nine-month partnership between the League of Cities Philippines (LCP) and the Florida League of Cities (FLC), with the goal of increasing LCP’s capacity to provide services to its members, especially in the League’s efforts to establish an environmental unit that would help enforce national policies related to cleaner air, water quality, solid waste, and other environmental issues. 

ICMA and FLC also served as mentors to LCP, providing technical guidance for the establishment of the environmental unit, as well as conducting training on organizational management, board roles, and staff responsibilities. 

A delegation from FLC visited the Philippines in 2005 to meet with LCP staff and other key stakeholders in order to achieve the following objectives:

• Deepen the understanding of key challenges that city governments face in addressing current environmental management concerns and identify the emerging good practices and tools that LCP can use to mitigate these challenges
• Revisit LCP’s Environmental Agenda and identify key progress and outstanding gaps  
• Identify emerging LCP strengths and opportunities to enhance LCP’s agenda to utilize league resources to support city environmental initiatives 
• Review selected promising practices (local and worldwide) on how peer networks can better support environmental programs, including models in establishing an environmental unit within local government associations and setting up an Environmental Knowledge Management Center  
• Identify priority action points that should be addressed by the LCP leadership and LCP’s Environmental Unit in developing its work program; concurrently identify action points where partners can provide support  to Environmental Unit initiatives.