Thomas Carothers :
(From previous issue)
This approach, however, soon showed its flaws. The growing heterogeneity of political paths among those countries striving to leave authoritarianism behind obliged providers of democracy aid to think about strategies more carefully and develop a wider array of them. For countries whose exit from authoritarian rule has led them only to semiauthoritarian stasis, for instance, the standard menu is clearly inadequate. Realizing that in this kind of setting a focus on institutions such as electoral commissions, parliaments, and judiciaries is likely to be of scant value, democracy-aid providers worth their strategic salt will concentrate instead on trying to keep some independent civil society and media organs alive. In a semi-authoritarian country with a dynamic, growing economy, democracy support may work for greater pluralism and a fuller rule of law by backing the efforts of independent businesspeople who want fairer, more transparent rules and a greater say in major political decisions.
The standard menu is also inadequate in countries that have exited authoritarianism only to end up cycling in and out of civil conflict. Aid providers may instead try to concentrate on activities such as bridge-building among contending groups, constitutional reform, security-sector reform, and support for those parts of civil society actively contributing to reconciliation efforts. Still other countries have become stuck in shallow forms of democracy where there is some formal alternation of power but elites remain so deeply entrenched that the turnover is mainly a matter of offices changing hands within unchanging circles while most citizens’ concerns go ignored. In such places, the smartest democracy support tries to look beyond conventional programming. The search instead is for ways to encourage new entrants into the stagnant political-party scene, to help citizens convert their anger at corruption and disempowerment into serious pressure for reform, to create positive links between socioeconomic advocacy campaigns and political reforms, and to assist social movements that reach a wide base.
Another area of positive evolution based on learning from experience involves the growing relationship between democracy assistance and other parts of the international-aid domain, above all the dominant area of socioeconomic aid. The first generation of democracy-aid practitioners often wanted to stay apart from the world of socioeconomic aid. Their mission, they felt, was fundamentally different-not poverty reduction or economic growth, but political transformation. They were wary of traditional aid providers’ willingness often to work cooperatively with corrupt, repressive governments, and were put off by what they perceived as the rigid, bureaucratized structures of socioeconomic aid. Traditional aid providers, meanwhile, returned the favor: They feared that allowing socioeconomic assistance to become linked to explicitly political activities would damage their relations with aid-receiving governments. Some were also put off by what they saw as the improvised, even “cowboy” methods of democracy promoters who were suddenly racing around the world talking about bringing large-scale changes to countries they seemed scarcely to know.
Hesitantly at first, but more concertedly over the past ten years, practitioners on both sides of the aid divide have taken steps to narrow it and to create positive synergies between the two domains. Increasingly faced with the threat that poor socioeconomic performance poses to fledgling democratic transitions, some democracy promoters are actively exploring how strengthening democracy can more directly advance socioeconomic progress. At the same time, many developmentalists have embraced the idea that political pathologies such as systematic corruption and excessive power concentrations create basic problems for socioeconomic development. At first, this embrace gave rise to governance programs that focused in mainly technocratic ways on efficiency and capability. But over time, socioeconomic-aid providers have broadened their view to take on relations between powerholders and citizens, emphasizing relational concepts such as accountability, transparency, participation, and inclusion. In addition, the rising focus on governance has led some socioeconomic-aid providers to work closely with institutions that democracy aid has long worked with, such as judiciaries, parliaments, and local councils.
The positive evolution of democracy aid based on learning from experience is an important trend, but sadly still only a partial and inconsistent one. Alongside the progress that one can find in each of the main lines of democracy programming, one also still encounters aid efforts that are seemingly untouched by learning and rely on weak methods from decades past. In election monitoring, for example, some organizations exhibit bad habits such as failures of objectivity and lack of attention to the risk of legitimating flawed elections. A recent European Stability Initiative report highlighting serious deficiencies in the election-monitoring work that the European Parliament and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe have done in Azerbaijan makes discouraging reading.
Some funders of civil society development still channel most of their aid to a limited circle of favored NGOs in the capital city, organizations that carry out technocratic advocacy efforts based on externally determined agendas. In the rule-of-law area, some aid providers have failed to move beyond stale judicial-strengthening efforts that rely on rote best-practices training while ignoring the broader array of entrenched obstacles that prevent ordinary citizens from achieving justice.
The picture is similarly mixed with regard to the diversification of strategies. Some groups engaged in democracy work, especially the smaller ones that focus exclusively on it, are trying hard to think strategically and to move beyond the standard menu of approaches. Yet others, especially some of the larger organizations for which democracy work is only a small part of their overall portfolio, still sometimes operate on strategic autopilot, carrying out many types of programs in any one setting with little careful thought about which among them offer the most fruitful avenues for change. These autopilot approaches not only produce poorly conceived programs that fail to pinpoint key issues in troubled transitions, they also undercut the efforts of those actors that are trying to be more strategic. For example, some aid groups may attempt to pursue rule-of-law change in a thoughtful way, working with citizens’ groups pushing for change and avoiding official institutions dominated by those benefiting from the system as it is. Yet other aid providers may then come in to swath the official institutions in blankets of loans or technical assistance that effectively insulate these institutions against the efforts of those pushing from below.
(To be continued)
(Thomas Carothers is vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is the founder and director of the Democracy and Rule of Law Program and oversees Carnegie Europe in Brussels.)
