Improving Democracy Assistance Building Knowledge Through Evaluations and Research (2008) / Chapter Skim
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1 Democracy Assistance and USAID
1 Democracy Assistance and USAID
Pages 17-42
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From page 17... ...
U.S. efforts to assist the spread of democracy encompass a host of activities: diplomatic pressures, trade sanctions, economic development aid, military and political support for democratic forces, or in some cases (e.g., Zaire, Philippines)
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Role of the U.S. Agency for International Development The day-to-day tasks of working with groups and individuals on the ground to help build democratic institutions and offer training and support to citizens, officials, and civil society organizations are assigned primarily to the U.S.
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From page 19... ...
Bush has continued and in some cases expanded this aid as a key element in its policy of "transformational diplomacy." Behind efforts to support the spread of democracy promotion lies the belief that increasing democracy in developing nations will promote economic growth, diminish the risks of terrorism, and reduce the frequency of internal and international conflicts. Whether or not democracy actually has all of these effects, and under what conditions, is far from certain.
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From page 20... ...
In many countries, projects that are not strictly DG but that respond to related national needs may find a home under the DG umbrella, so the amount of effort actually focused on democracy building is smaller than may at first appear. Moreover, DG funds comprise only a small portion of what the United States spends on its international engagements. The total FY2008 budget request for foreign assistance, which includes DG programs, was $20.3 billion (CBJ 2008:1)
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From page 21... ...
. USAID's DG Programs USAID programs to promote DG focus on four distinct but related goals, which are now collectively called "Governing Justly and Demo Some of the other major organizations providing democracy assistance include the United Kingdom's Department for International Development (DfID)
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From page 22... ...
Yet many new governments fail to realize the long-term benefits of adopting effective governance policies. These four goals have remained remarkably constant since the first democracy assistance strategy was adopted in the early 1990s and then enshrined in USAID practice at the outset of the Clinton administration.
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From page 23... ...
Many DG missions are supporting activities to improve democratic practices within political parties, heighten women's participation in politics, provide technical support to judges or legislators, increase the number of active NGOs, and promote decentralization of government services. As discussed further in the next section, the design and implementation of all of these efforts depend on knowledge and assumptions about what causes, sustains, or hinders the process of democratization.
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From page 24... ...
This literature falls into three broad groupings. Cross-national quantitative analyses seek to identify the average impact of various factors -- income, education, culture, religion, or institutional background, for example -- on the frequency with which countries undergo democratic transitions or reversions or on the level of democracy as measured by widely used indicators such as the one developed by Freedom House (e.g., Bollen and Jackman 1985, Lewis-Beck and Burhart 1994, Muller and Modernization theory (Rostow 1960, Huntington 1968)
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. Comparative and historical analyses seek to identify the key elements in the democratic transitions or outcomes of specific states, usually in a particular region or particular type of transition.
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Policy professionals working in democracy assistance have therefore formed their own "practical wisdom," based on elements drawn from their readings of the academic and think tank literature, their own experiences, and what they glean from other practitioners. Policy professionals thus often describe democracy promotion as "more of an art than a science," where policy choices must depend on intuition and personal judgment as much or more than on any scientific guidelines.
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foreign assistance generally and in some specific cases has made a difference. Unfortunately, it is also true that in a number of highly important cases -- such as Haiti, Egypt, and post-Soviet Russia -- large volumes of democracy assistance have yielded disappointing results.
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The SORA effort has struggled with all of the difficulties of attempting retrospective, comparative analysis of complex foreign policy cases, with a welcome willingness to examine both program successes and failures. The first SORA effort consisted of a set of case studies of democracy programs across six countries, which identified a number of key data and methodological issues for retrospective work (Carter 2001, Carter et al 2003)
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. The first major piece of research sponsored by SORA in response to the SSRC recommendations was the large-scale, cross-national, quantitative analysis examining the effects of USAID democracy assistance on democracy building described above.
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While it is tempting for a committee such as this one to draw guidance from current democracy research to advise USAID on how best to pursue democracy assistance in varied circumstances, it is the committee's firm view, based on its review of the evidence, that any such advice would be premature. As already discussed, the current state of the academic literature on democratization is highly contested, and the topic of democracy assistance has only very recently become a focus of academic research.
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Given this uncertainty on broad matters of strategy, the committee has focused on the second question, for there the committee believes it can suggest procedures by which USAID can draw on the work of the academic and policy communities, as well as its own experience in democracy assistance, to make substantial advances in learning which of its DG assistance programs are most effective. Moreover, the committee would go so far as to argue that in the current state of scientific research, answering the second question is likely the best way to also answer the first.
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From page 32... ...
Collecting the information needed to most clearly determine the impact of DG projects -- including before and after measurements on key outcome variables, documentation of changes in policy-relevant outcomes rather than activities completed, and measurements on both the groups receiving assistance and control or comparison groups that did not -- is not currently part of most monitoring and evaluation plans for DG programs. • USAID needs to gain experience with impact evaluations, including those using randomized designs, to learn whether they could improve its ability to more accurately ascertain the effects of its DG programs.
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From page 33... ...
This initiative should include randomized studies and focus on DG projects that are in wide use or represent major investments for USAID; it should also offer expertise and support to missions and DG officers who wish to conduct varied forms of impact evaluations suited to learning about the impact of their programs. • To better track democratic changes in countries for strategic assessment and policy planning, USAID and other national and international organizations providing democracy assistance should explore making a substantial investment in the systematic collection of democracy indicators at a disaggregated, sectoral level -- focused on the components of democracy rather than (or in addition to)
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From page 34... ...
This should include conferences, panels, and other creative and active learning opportunities. These should include discussion of its own program evaluations and other research; debate on the work of academics, think tanks, and other donor organizations; and sharing of experiences among DG officers and implementers and other DG assistance providers.
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From page 35... ...
recommends have not been widely employed in some sectors of the development community, especially in the area of democracy and governance. In fact, as noted above, the committee is aware of significant skepticism among policy professionals and academics regarding the feasibility and appropriateness of applying so-called scientific or randomized evaluation procedures to democracy assistance programming.12 Perhaps the most important source of skepticism is the belief that applying rigorous impact evaluation procedures to DG programs is impractical given the actual conditions of designing and implementing DG assistance.
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Finally, because only actual experience with using the methods in the field on actual DG projects can truly address the skepticism and concerns about more rigorous evaluations, and because current USAID and implementer capabilities to undertake these methods are limited and would need to be developed, the committee's actual recommendations are modest and cautious. The committee proposes that a number of impact evaluations, particularly randomized designs, be tested initially through a special initiative aimed at a limited number of thoughtfully chosen DG projects to demonstrate the feasibility and value of such impact evaluations for guiding DG programming.
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It examines a variety of designs for impact evaluations, ranging from those suited to projects that involve large numbers of cases with the possibility of randomized assignments to assistance and control groups, to designs where randomization is not possible and for circumstances involving small numbers of cases and even programs with but a single case. As mentioned above, Chapters 6 and 7 focus on the feasibility of using various evaluation designs to determine the impact of current USAID DG projects, based on lessons from the committee's field visits to DG missions in Albania, Peru, and Uganda.
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Chapters 8 and 9 look at USAID's overall organization. Chapter 8 offers proposals for how USAID could adapt its own organizational procedures, either through new efforts or the adjustment of current practices, to reduce the barriers to conducting impact evaluations and, just as important, become more of a "learning organization" that systematically benefits from its own assessments and evaluations and also absorbs lessons from outside researchers and other organizations involved in or studying democracy assistance.
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2001. On the Crest of the Third Wave: Linking USAID Democracy Program Impact to Political Change.
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American Political Science Review 88:903-910. Lijphart, A
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2006. Impact Evaluation -- The Experience of the Independent Evaluation Group of the World Bank.
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