FAAE Committee Report

As was observed at the beginning of Chapter 1, democracy has historically been a contested concept and one that continues to be in a state of evolution, including within our own societies. A similar observation applies to the controversial experience of “democracy promotion” by external state actors, which is essentially a post-Second World War phenomenon. The main reservations that have been expressed concern whether:

·        “Democracy promotion” becomes seen as a country narrowly trying to “export” its particular model of democracy as the “best”, when we know that democratization must be an inherently indigenous process.

·        “Democracy promotion” becomes narrowly associated with the great-power or national security interests of a particular state or group of states that are rich and powerful in the international system.

·        “Democracy promotion” becomes perceived as a form of “neo-colonialism” or coercive imposition of “foreign” ideas by more powerful on less powerful states. This is especially controversial if military intervention is involved.

The Committee is aware of these concerns which we elaborate further in this chapter’s review of key critical issues facing democracy assistance providers. We have also been careful in Chapter 1 and Recommendation 1 to outline a Canadian approach, consistent with Canadian values, that speaks to democracy assistance in global developmental terms. Supporting and nurturing such democratic development recognizes that it should be done in ways that fully respect the need for democratization processes to be domestically-led and not driven by outsiders. When we speak of assisting or promoting democratic development, that is what we have in mind.

Supporting democratic development is now a large-scale endeavour undertaken by most Western aid donors. This is in part because it has become associated with a wide agenda that includes promotion of human rights and the rule of law, good governance, development effectiveness, and peacebuilding. Democratization itself entails many elements. As Peter Burnell points out:

Democratization is not just a movement towards, and the building of, a democratic state — something that involves legal-constitutional principles and formal institutional structures — but also the development of a particular kind of political society, a plurality of competing political parties and appropriate styles of leadership. Attitudinal and behavioural dimensions (that is to say the cultural aspects) and forms of (civic) education are also included, as is the objective of an increasingly active and democratically-oriented civil society. The reach extends beyond central government and national politics to regional or provincial levels, the municipalities and local councils. This means that in total democracy assistance is multifaceted. Potentially it is an enormous undertaking.[45]

Interestingly, the post-Second World War origins of modern democracy assistance lie in a country that was democratized following military defeat. Germany’s “Stiftungen” or political party-related foundations led the way in devoting substantial funding to democracy support as well as promoting German interests and contacts abroad. By the 1990s, they had “resident representatives in more than 100 countries and field offices in some of them for well over 30 years.”[46]

In the United States, major initiatives did not begin until the late 1970s, although participatory politics was added as an official foreign assistance goal as early as 1966. A number of measures linking foreign aid and human rights were pursued during the Carter presidency. The Reagan administration made democracy promotion a primary goal of U.S. foreign policy, even if this was criticized as motivated by Cold War ideology and national security interests. Congress became heavily involved with the establishment in 1983 of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Partly inspired by the German example, it is a government-supported but private non-profit body which makes grants to implementing agencies that include the two major U.S. party foundations, the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs and the International Republican Institute.[47] In 1984, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) opened an Office for Democratic Initiatives. The Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands, and Canada also pursued democracy assistance initiatives during the 1980s. Canada’s role since the 1980s will be examined in detail in Part II.

Before the end of the Cold War, Germany and the U.S. had already developed well established and extensive programs of political development aid. But it was during the 1990s that the field of democracy support experienced explosive growth. Burnell attributes this mainly to four factors[48]:

·        First, new opportunities for democratization arose from the end of the Cold War and dissolution of the Soviet Union. And with no economic or strategic challenge from a Communist bloc, Western states could add new political conditionalities to their development aid programs, as well as offers of democracy assistance.

·        Second, democracy and human rights promotion offered a compelling and relatively low-cost rationale for foreign aid at a time of public scepticism about its benefits and flagging budgets. Supporting democracy was an attractive new mission for aid policymakers.

·        Third, there was increased demand for democracy assistance as a result of growing pro-democracy movements in a number of regions. Political reformers often looked to Western sources of support.

·        Fourth, there was “a sea change in the way we think about the relationship between economic development and political development.” Increasingly they were seen as interrelated, with democracy not a “luxury” but a positive factor in growth and development. International financial institutions such as the World Bank discovered better governance to be a crucial factor in development performance. (The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, created to assist the post-Communist transition countries of eastern and central Europe, made multiparty democracy an explicit criterion of its lending.)

One might add as a further factor the expanded grounds for international human rights and humanitarian interventions, including those related to “human security” and the “responsibility to protect”. It has become accepted that the interests of the international community are involved when human rights and political freedoms are not respected. Many donor states and international organizations have increasingly recognized their roles and responsibilities in supporting and safeguarding democracy. Some organizations require commitment to democracy as a condition of membership.

In conducting an international survey of democracy assistance in 2003, George Perlin outlined numerous donor activities under the rubrics of good governance, human rights, democratization, and civil society.[49] Professor Perlin estimated total global public-sector spending on democratic development as being in excess of $US 3 billion, with amounts in individual donor states ranging up to 11% of official development assistance (ODA) and averaging about 6%.[50] However, the numbers game, depending on what is counted as democracy assistance (under “democracy promotion”, “democratic governance”, “democratic development”, or some other broad “good governance”, human rights and rule of law category), indicates a wide range upwards of that. Most recently, Professor Perlin has indicated: “No one knows for sure how much money is being spent. The most careful analyses estimate annual public sector spending in the range of $US 8 to 9-billion. Private entities are an additional source of funding with expenditures at least in the range of $700 million.”[51]

Minister for CIDA, Josée Verner, told the Committee in October 2006 that CIDA, the largest source of Canadian funding, spent over $375 million on “democratic governance” programs in 2005, broken down by sector as accountable public institutions (46%), freedom and democracy (40%), human rights (8%), and rule of law (6%).[52]) Other figures suggested to the Committee since that testimony indicate substantially larger amounts. According to updated information received by the Committee from CIDA President Robert Greenhill on March 21, 2007, planned CIDA spending on democratic governance in 2006-2007 was $466 million, but “for planning purposes” peace and security expenditures were added to give a total of $584 million, or 21% of the Agency’s aid program. We will return to this uncertainty about the exact size of CIDA’s contribution in Chapter 4.

A 2005 study done by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) in 2005, using the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) category of “participatory development and good governance”, indicated that over the previous 15 years up to 10% of overall ODA has been devoted to democratic development support broadly defined.[53] Recently, a discussion paper prepared for the European Council of the European Union (EU) suggested even higher donor figures:

Though not always easily to identify as democracy assistance, the total volume of EC [European Community] support for democracy , human rights, judicial reform, governance and civil society during the period 2000-2004 is in the region of US$4.5 billion, complemented by nearly $9.5 billion from EU Member states. The EU total of about $14 billion compares with a total of about $10.5 billion for the US, $1 billion for Canada.[54]

This indicates a comprehensive global figure of US$25.5 billion over the first five years of this century, or an average of over $5 billion annually. The United States is by far the largest single-country donor, followed by Germany. (Using a narrower political calculus, Canadian Leslie Campbell, Senior Associate and Regional Director of Middle East and North Africa programs of the Washington-based National Democratic Institute, has indicated a figure of US$1.5 billion in total U.S. support for the political aspects of democracy promotion, noting as well that just one of Germany’s six political foundations spends €120 million, or about C$185 million, annually. In testimony before a Canadian Senate committee, he opined that Canada’s contributions in this regard are “even small compared to the Netherlands or Sweden.”[55])

However encompassing or restrictive the definition of democracy assistance, it is evident that very substantial amounts of ODA are now being spent in this area by Western donor governments as a whole. And with that, increasing questions are being raised about the nature and effectiveness of this aid. What are the better ways to provide democracy support that works? As Minister of Foreign Affairs Peter MacKay has himself stated: “Both the legitimacy and the effectiveness of democracy promotion depend very heavily on how democracy assistance is delivered.”[56] That concurs with the five principles cited by a leading expert in the field, Gordon Crawford, for guiding the efforts of external actors to engage positively in ‘democracy-building strategies’ — “country authorship; democratic dialogue; participation and inclusion; legitimacy; commitment” — and his conclusion that:

The latter two principles, legitimacy and commitment call on the democracy promoters to make sure that their approach is both genuine and serious, and not blighted either by association with regime change or by a rhetoric-reality gap. The first three principles, country authorship, democratic dialogue and participation and inclusion, pertain to the manner in which democracy is promoted, suggesting that democracy cannot be exported and that it is essential that external support for democratic reform is in accord with the very principles and processes of democratisation itself.[57]

The Committee agrees. But such principles raise the question of how they are to be applied in practice. Accordingly, the following elaborates on some of the critical issues overall that must be addressed by policymakers in this field, and leads up to how the continuing knowledge gap on achieving effective democratic development might be addressed by Canada.

1. Local leadership of the democratization process is crucial, as is the local dimension of democratic governance.

There is near consensus that democracy cannot be implanted from outside (except in very exceptional circumstances). Democratization is a long, difficult, and inherently indigenous process — one that should be supported but not imported from abroad. As Vidar Helgesen of International IDEA has put it: “Democratic political change does not happen by dropping supposedly independent technical institutional solutions from outside, be they in the form of constitutions, elections, or political party systems. Sustained democratic politics results from changes in the space and the climate for debate that can give local flavour and meaning to institutions, even if they are substantially inspired by experiences from abroad.”[58] IDEA’s approach to democracy assessment takes into account citizens’ views within countries and also stresses the importance of local government for democratic development. Gordon Crawford argues that democratic reform processes must be locally-driven and that this is better expressed as country “authorship” rather than “ownership”. As he puts it:

The rationale for domestic authorship of donors’ country assistance strategies is that local perspectives provide a better understanding of the distinctive problems of democratic reform faced in a particular context. Essentially, external actors must listen to local voices. These will be plural voices. There will be different and even contradictory voices, but such processes of deliberation and debate are themselves fundamental to what democracy is about.[59]

A leading critical analyst of democracy assistance, Thomas Carothers of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, identified “greater localism” as one of the main improvements along the democracy promotion “learning curve”, adding that “increasing localism in democracy aid requires changing the mindset of providers away from the view that democracy building is something ‘we’ do to ‘them’, toward the idea that it is something people in other countries do, sometimes with our help.” [60] Roel von Meijenfeldt, executive director of the Netherlands Institute for Multiparty Democracy, noted in a January lecture at Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT): “Ghandi already observed that: ‘the spirit of democracy cannot be imposed from without. It must come from within. For democracy to become consolidated, it has to grow from within countries, step by step institutionalizing and constructing the political processes, corresponding to the values which are intrinsic to plural democracy.”[61] Former Canadian MP, Ross Reid, has offered the further thought that: “Local practice is often the best place to start. We too often reject traditional processes as failures or in the name of modernity and try to deny societies of processes already in place and often best suited to their needs.”[62]

Witnesses before the Committee were in strong agreement with these views. As Paul Larose-Edwards of CANADEM put it succinctly, paraphrasing the statement that “all politics is local” — “All democratic development is local” — … even though Canada can and should assist, the future of any democratic development lies with the local civil societies and governments in question.”[63] This was recognized by Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay when he told the Committee:

We should start by acknowledging that democracy is not something that outsiders can impose; it is part of the logic of democracy that it needs to be chosen and pursued by citizens themselves. Citizens around the world aspire to democracy, and assistance provided by outsiders should be driven by its recipients.[64]

The indigenous and context-specific nature of democratic development was also stressed by Jean-Louis Roy of Rights and Democracy: “A number of national and international institutions working in the development field have recently understood that it was absolutely necessary to have staff members who speak the language and are from countries in which those institutions are active. Some work can only be done from inside the country, not outside.”[65] The submission from the Canadian Bar Association listed “local engagement and ownership” among its “best practices in promoting the rule of law”:

Projects and programs supported by Canada must engage all stakeholders, be responsive to local needs, and have ownership or they are likely to fail. Local expertise must be consulted and involved in all stages of the planning, implementation and monitoring process. The most successful approach is one where local actors and decision-makers are empowered to make choices.[66]

Emphasizing localism in even more specific terms, Thomas Axworthy outlined as one of the lessons from case studies undertaken by the Queen’s University Centre for the Study of Democracy that: “Local government, municipalities, is the building block of democracy. … In democracy transitions we tend to almost instantly race towards national elections. In virtually every study I have looked at, I’m convinced that the investment in local municipalities, local government, and local elections, is the way to allow the arts of democracy to foster and build.”[67] The testimony and submission by the Federation of Canadian Municipalities added detail to what is already being done in partnerships with local entities in other countries and outlined its proposal for a further five-year CIDA-funded “Global Program for Local Governance.”[68]

Some witnesses keyed on the role of local civil society in democratic development. John Foster also testified as to how international civil society networks, such as Social Watch, can provide support to that all-important local level: “With regard to local government, Social Watch India is a particularly salient example of how civil society is essential to the construction of democracy from the ground up.”[69]

The message overall was that locals, not outsiders, should always drive the democratic development process. Based on his experience with Rights and Democracy, Ed Broadbent put it bluntly that: “At no time should the priority of agendas for any category of rights implementation by a developing country be determined by outsiders, whether these outsiders be other NGOs or established democratic governments.”[70]

2. Democracy promotion objectives remain contested, especially when they are associated with the strategic interests of powerful Western states. Moreover, strategies are needed that take into account the recent pushback against democracy assistance providers. Democracy promotion must be seen as a global endeavour.

The suspicions aroused by association with donor national security, economic or other interests are especially true of the pro-democracy interventions of the United States and other big powers, leading to charges of a return to “neo-colonialism” in the application of Western models of democracy. In the case of U.S. policies toward the Middle East, there is a controversial connection between democracy promotion and the “war on terrorism.”[71] Some argue that the unfortunate consequences of the Iraq war have set back the cause of democracy promotion more generally.

However, a significant pushback against democracy assistance from outside sources goes back to the 1990s and well beyond just U.S. policies. As described by Carl Gersham (president of the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy) and Michael Allen:

The backlash against democracy promotion is largely a by-product of the proliferation of so-called hybrid regimes in the aftermath of democracy’s third wave. The third wave has not been followed by a reverse wave of authoritarianism, but it has left behind many stalled or failed transitions. In these cases, autocrats have either replaced reformists after a brief interval of unsuccessful democratization, or have held on to power while accepting superficial liberalization and a modestly more open political space for democratic opposition. Hybrid regimes often retain certain formally democratic procedures, including relatively free (if not fair) elections, and permit civil society organizations to function and receive foreign assistance. But the underlying political realities are manipulated elections, a weak parliament, an overweening executive branch, state-controlled media, rampant corruption, and no recourse to an independent judiciary.[72]

In some cases, legal restrictions are being placed on the activities of NGOs and on foreign funding. According to Gersham and Allen, democracy-assistance organizations “are finding it necessary to invest more time and effort in quasi-diplomatic activities; explaining their programs to local authorities; providing guarantees — through communication and transparency — that their work has no partisan or oppositional agenda; and engaging members of ruling parties in programs. Confidence-building measures of this kind may help to insulate democracy-assistance programs from political pressures and give a degree of protection to local activists while preserving the integrity of the relationship between international NGOs and their local, grassroots partners. Another way to insulate democracy assistance from political pressures is to strengthen its international and multilateral character.”[73]

The internationalization of democracy promotion, beyond the foreign policy objectives of any single state, is strongly backed by other analysts and Committee witnesses. Apart from democracy promotion groups needing “to refine strategies for pushing back against pushback”, Thomas Carothers concluded in testimony before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, that: “If a ‘freedom agenda’ is to be effective, it must not be a U.S. agenda but a global one.”[74] Other American analysts have called for a global coalition of democracies.[75] With the negative experience of the Iraq case in mind, Gersham and Allen assert that “regime change” —

is not the goal of democracy promotion, nor is supporting free, fair, and competitive elections its only dimension. Democracy promotion also means strengthening independent media; promoting the rule of law and an independent judiciary; defending human rights and the fundamental freedoms of expression, conscience, and association; and supporting civil society, including women’s organizations, labor and business associations, and nongovernmental groups that educate citizens about democracy and empower them to participate in the political process and monitor government performance.

In June 2000, democracy promotion — understood as a cooperative international effort designed to strengthen these and other dimensions of the democratic process — received the endorsement of more than a hundred sovereign governments meeting in Warsaw to found the Community of Democracies.[76]

Referring to the recent backlash against democracies, Professor Jeffrey Kopstein of the University of Toronto observed to the Committee: “In the past several years a new group of nations have formed what I would call a new authoritarian international.”  This trend must be resisted since democracy promotion is not only in Canada’s national interests but in the global interest. He cautioned that “democracy promotion is not something that will yield rapid results. It should be a long-term multi-pronged policy that should mesh with the other tools of statecraft.” Beyond learning as much as possible from both European and U.S. experiences, he hoped Canada might also exert a leadership role multilaterally:

If we want to think big for a moment what I would propose is a caucus or a community of democracies, either within or outside the United Nations. Canada might potentially have great credibility in putting this forward. The UN itself is one venue for this, but it may be discredited regarding democracy promotion — we should be honest with ourselves — especially after the debacle with the Human Rights Council. An alternative, one that I and many of my colleagues have been discussing for quite some time, is an attempt to breathe life into a formal organization, the Community of Democracies, which was initiated in Warsaw in the year 2000.[77]

Other witnesses stressed that Canada should continue to pursue a distinctively multilateralist approach to democracy assistance. The Committee met with both UN and Community of Democracies officials in New York and Washington in February 2007, and we will examine multilateral roles further in chapter 8. Multilateralism was a factor in Canada’s favour in a 2002 “defending democracy” survey produced by the Democracy Coalition Project created in 2001 under the auspices of the Community of Democracies. (The Committee met with the Project’s executive director, and co-author of this study, Theodore Piccone, in Washington on February 6, 2007.) Canada was praised for its pluralistic “flexible and holistic approach to democratization”. In the survey’s sample of 40 donor countries, Canada was among only three (the others being the Netherlands and Sweden) to receive a “very good” rating on its “support of democracy abroad, as evidenced by its willingness to provide electoral assistance to fledgling democracies, to support grassroots democracy programs through bilateral aid and to criticize regimes engaged in the most egregious abuses of democracy. Canada has preferred to work through multilateral forums in these efforts, in the belief that a middle-ranking power acting unilaterally would have limited influence. Within these organizations, Canada has played a leadership role in encouraging electoral reform and democratic development.”[78]

3. Democratic development is linked to the processes of social and economic development as a whole. Support for democratization should be seen as positively correlated with efforts to reduce poverty and raise the capacities of all citizens to exercise their democratic rights.

In our first recommendation, the Committee advocated an expansive definition of democratic development that included progress on socio-economic human rights along with progress on the quality and sustainability of democracy. The connection between democracy aid, development, and tackling poverty was underlined by Minister of International Cooperation, Josée Verner, when she told the Committee that “because we have learned just how important democratic development is to the overall development agenda, we will be doing more of it. In future, all of CIDA’s major country programs will assess and support democratic governance… Democratic governance is essential for progress in developing countries and for ending poverty in the long run.”[79] The accompanying written submission of CIDA affirmed up front: “Democratic governance is essential for poverty reduction and long-term sustainable development. CIDA’s work in this area aims to make states more effective in tackling poverty by enhancing the degree to which all people, particularly the poor and marginalized, can influence policy and improve their livelihoods.”

A number of witnesses called for a holistic approach to democracy building and societal development. For example, former Chief Electoral Officer of Canada, and incoming president of the Washington-based IFES (formerly the International Foundation for Electoral Systems), Jean-Pierre Kingsley told the Committee: “What is needed is support for the entire process of democracy building and for the system as a whole, based on each country’s values, history and culture.”[80] Other witnesses, including the Canadian Bar Association, argued strongly for seeing democratic development and poverty-reducing development as complementary, not either/or sequential processes. Bernard Wood made similar points to the Ottawa “Dialogue on Canada’s Approach to Democratic Development” sponsored by the Democracy Council in February 2007:

For once and for all, it is important to get beyond “sectarian” arguments and build a synthesis of approach and strategies to advance economic and social development and democracy in tandem…

Sustainable democratization requires parallel progress on expanding equity and opportunity, as well as participation, to give all a sufficient stake in the democratic project.[81]

Two witnesses took a somewhat different and more sceptical view of the prospects for any sustainable democratization occurring in low-income societies. Jeffrey Kopstein, of the University of Toronto, described the “especially poor countries” as “the toughest nuts to crack”. He went on to state: “In political science, we have very few findings to report to you. We have two. The first is that democracies don’t fight each other. The second is that countries that become democracies tend to stay democracies if — and there’s a big if — they have a gross domestic product per capita in excess of $6,000 in 1993 dollars.”[82]

Professor Diane Éthier was even more definitive in discounting the possibility of democratization occurring in countries that have not already achieved a certain level of development —

For more than 50 years now, all theories on democracy have supported the view that democracy cannot flourish in a poor and underdeveloped country. This means that socio-economic development and democratization cannot be achieved simultaneously, as democratization is born of socio-economic development.

I believe experts would say that if you want to help countries become democracies, first help them achieve economic and social development, and later you will be able to focus on establishing democratic political institutions.[83]

In fact, the Committee’s research reveals that matters are more complicated than that, and that democracy may even be an important factor in creating the conditions for development and poverty reduction to occur. The detailed empirical work of the Economist Intelligence Unit undertaken for The World in 2007 concludes that: “The relationship between the level of development (income per head) and democracy is not clear-cut. There is an apparent association, although even in the full democracy category there are a few that are not rich OECD countries.” Moreover, “the direction of causality between democracy and income is debatable. The standard modernisation hypothesis that economic development leads to — and is a necessary pre-condition for — democracy, is no longer universally accepted. Instead it has been argued that the primary direction of causation runs from democracy to income …”[84]

The latest thinking of development agencies, practitioners and analysts of democracy assistance also supports the view that democratic progress is, or at least ought to be, integral to the overall development and poverty reduction process. This is particularly true if one agrees with former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan when he stated on October 30, 2006 that “democracy is a universal right that does not belong to any country or region, and that participatory governance, based on the will of the people, is the best path to freedom, growth and development”.[85] In a major policy speech delivered just a few days earlier, Hilary Benn, the UK’s Secretary of State for International Development, affirmed that:

Development, if it is to mean anything… has also to be about what Sen calls the “freedoms to”: the freedom to choose — to choose people to represent your views; the freedom to make your views heard; to associate freely with others; to join a political party or a trade union; the freedom to worship and practice your own religion. If you ask poor people, they’ll tell you how much these things mean to them. … I want to argue that it is democratic politics, and yes, it is indeed democracy, that is how we achieve these things. Development has to be about getting the politics right because development and progress cannot be achieved if the political system excludes the majority and denies them their birthright.[86]

Roel von Meijenfeldt of the Netherlands Institute for Multiparty Democracy made a similar argument when speaking in Canada in January 2007:

Amartya Sen was one of the first to challenge the old paradigm that countries have to develop economically first before they become fit for democracy with a new paradigm that countries become fit (economically speaking) through democracy.

For example, the Dutch Minister for Development Cooperation, Mrs Agnes van Ardenne, recently cited a number of academic studies … [including a book The Democracy Advantage co-authored by Morton Halperin], that democracies and democratizing countries outperform their authoritarian counterparts on the full range of development indicators. It led her to conclude that democracy is a condition for development. Based on statistical analysis over the past 40 years, there is no evidence of an authoritarian advantage when it comes to economic growth. Democracies have a 30% positive edge. Poor democracies have been much better at avoiding economic disasters.[87]

Thomas Carothers, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, with whom the Committee met in Washington D.C., concludes in his seminal book Aiding Democracy Abroad, that “democracy promoters should push to build a relationship between aid for democracy and the larger, more established world of aid for social and economic development. Most democracy promoters believe that economic development and democratization reinforce each other. They have not, however, made many efforts to connect their work to other parts of the development picture.”[88]

Carothers goes on to argue that extra attention should be devoted to the links between democratization and socio-economic development, between democratic development aid and other kinds of development aid. He indicates that more work is needed on making critical connections between the two involving “citizens’ participation”, including of the poorest people, and also on “the role of women in democratization”.[89] Jean-Louis Roy of Rights and Democracy was among other witnesses who referred to this gender dimension. Rights and Democracy’s presentation also noted the striking demographic social trends that must be taken into account by democracy assistance today and in the future. “Two billion people will be born in the next 20 years, 90 percent of them in the south of the world.”[90] Mr. Roy added to the Committee:

I believe we have to recall something that we all know — sometimes, it is better to repeat things — that half, or exactly 50% of the world population, is under 25 years of age. There are 1.2 billion humans between the ages of 10 and 19. In all those countries where we work, in all those countries in the South, populations will increase over the next few years, and the dominant age group will be composed of people between the ages of 10 and 25. We have to speak to these young people about democracy, we have to find innovative means and have real programs to give them.[91]

As a last point, Carothers cautions that achieving both democracy and overall development demands more than assertions or declarations of good intent. The Committee agrees with his assessment that: “This is a potentially rich area of inquiry, holding out the tantalizing but formidable challenge of creating a synthesis of political and socioeconomic development work”.[92] Aiding democratic development can and must be allied to achieving effective pro-poor development assistance as a whole. In this way, democracy need not take a back seat in the development endeavour.[93]

4. Democratic development assistance still lacks coherence and coordination by donor countries, both internationally and within the donor countries themselves. This weakness must be addressed by democracy aid providers.

Notwithstanding the expressed preference for approaches to democracy promotion that are multilaterally coordinated (or at least compatible with each other), this is still rarely achieved in practice. As described by George Perlin: “Complexity on the delivery side of democracy assistance is widely described by service providers in the field and aid recipients as having serious negative consequences… there are no concerted country strategies. Aid is delivered in bits and pieces, reflecting the preferences and specific competencies of donors… some forms of aid are offered by multiple donors (duplication of programming), while areas of important need get no support.”[94] Professor Perlin added in his testimony to the Committee that donors need to make sure that there own programs are more coherent, and that Canada could lead by example:

Another criticism of work in this field is fragmentation of effort by donors' lack of coherence in the programs taken into particular countries. We could do work in Canada to develop strategic plans for democracy assistance in the particular countries where we want to intervene. Again, I stress that in my view there's a need for a kind of whole-of-governance strategy based upon research on the peculiar circumstances of a particular country: its characteristics, where it stands in the process of democratization, where it's coming from, and what kind of experience it had before entering into the process of attempting to develop democracy.[95]

Minister of International Cooperation, Josée Verner, acknowledged that one of the lessons that CIDA has learned from its activities in the field is “that achieving democratic governance is a complex, knowledge-based endeavour. It requires a comprehensive strategy and vision. It also requires a concerted and coordinated effort — nationally and globally.”[96]

Several witnesses, notably Thomas Axworthy, David Donovan, and Kevin Deveaux, urged the Committee to consider a more centrally coordinated approach to democratic development support by Canada which would involve the establishment of a new institution. Other witnesses advocated more modest ways of achieving greater coordination among existing Canadian bodies doing democratic development activities, leading to greater impact overall. In our view, both are needed. We will examine this question in much more detail in Chapter 7 of Part III of this report on new directions for Canadian policy.

At this point, we want to point out that coherence and coordination remain issues that democracy aid providers still need to address. This is just as true for the United States, with its much greater levels of funding and array of agencies. Thomas Melia (deputy executive director of Freedom House and professor at the Georgetown University Walsh School of Foreign Service), with whom the Committee met in Washington, has observed that there is in the US:

A rather decentralized, cooperating community of several thousand men and women — inside and outside of the U.S. Government, working in an array of government agencies, multinational bodies and private organizations, centered in the U.S. though extending through a variety of multinational networks around the globe — who have in the past 20 years or so developed experience (and in some cases real expertise) in programs and policies that can contribute to democratic development in other countries.

There is, however, no “command and control” center of the democracy promotion policy, no single place where overarching strategy is developed or coordinated, even within the sub-community that is the United States Government. Over the years, there has been regular communication and mostly fruitful cooperation between this array of actors, inside the U.S. Government and outside it, Americans and non-Americans. Most of the practical cooperation emerges tactically, “on the ground,” in urgent situations where a variety of actors are active and the needs of the potential beneficiaries in a dynamic, fast-moving situation require that would-be providers of assistance find a way to cooperate. They often do find ways to do so, but experience indicates that it is much more difficult (indeed, it has proven to be impossible in any meaningful way) to achieve strategic cooperation or convergence on approaches to democratization more broadly… there are recurring efforts to impose coherence, yet none have succeeded to date.[97]

Ian Smillie, of Partnership Africa-Canada, told the Committee that: “Good governance is unlikely to flow from a collection of disparate, time-bound projects offered by a dozen ill-coordinated donors”[98] At the same time, he cautioned that more coherence and coordination are not sufficient to produce better outcomes without more shared learning in such a complex field of policy.

Some critics of Canada’s approach to governance lament the absence of coherent policies tying all aspects of the agenda together. A patchy, project-by-project approach with no obvious central policy and no central management, they say, is unlikely to yield coherent results. This may be true, but given the overwhelming size of the governance agenda, and the limited track record in its promotion by any donor, healthy doses of humility and caution are warranted, along with a good set of brakes in the expectations department. Given the complexity of the challenge, a case can be made for selective interventions in concert with other donors, aimed at learning what works and what does not. The apparent absence in Canada, however, of a place where the lessons can be rolled up, spelled out, shared and remembered, works against the learning that is so badly needed in this field.[99]

5. The effects of democracy assistance in general and of specific democratization projects and programs are not easily evaluated. Moreover, there is often little attempt at donor evaluation. Greater effort is needed to pursue realistic results-based objectives, to learn from ongoing donor experience in practice, and to conduct research with a view to making democratic development aid more effective.

Writing in 1999, Thomas Carothers, concluded that:

Of the many facets of democracy aid, evaluation has advanced the least. Democracy programs present a challenge for evaluators because of the difficulty of agreeing on precise criteria of success in the political domain and of establishing clear causal links between specific projects and larger political trends. In most cases, during the 1990s democracy promoters either did not evaluate their programs at all or commissioned superficial evaluations by investigators lacking real independence. Only in the past several years, with the end of the post-1989 honeymoon for democratization and growing pressure to justify budgets, have aid providers begun to take the subject of evaluations more seriously.[100]

Carothers was sceptical of the United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID’s) efforts to introduce “results-based” management and quantifiable performance measures into the field. “The laborious, inflexible nature of the system leads to projects that are designed to fit the system — to produce ‘good numbers’ — rather than to fit the needs of democratizing countries.”[101] And he was also very realistic about potential aid results.[102] Commenting on the situation five years later, Carothers did not see much improvement, stating that “even though democracy promotion activities keep multiplying, the amount of distilled, accumulated, and organized knowledge about this domain remains quite limited… overall, democracy promotion remains remarkably understudied, and the gap between what we want to accomplish and what we really know about how to accomplish it remains dauntingly wide.”[103]

Other analysts, who have looked closely at this issue, have reached similar conclusions. For example, Andrew Green and Richard Kohl underline this growing gap when they observe: “The emergence of democracy assistance as a key element of foreign aid since the mid-1980s has matured into a topic for donor agencies of all types around the world. What is lacking from this progress, however, is a credible body of research analysing the impact of democracy assistance.”[104]

The Committee believes that Canada can and should make an important contribution in this area, as outlined in the next section of this chapter.

2.1 Canadian Support for Addressing the Knowledge and Evaluation Gap

Witnesses had quite a lot to say about the perils of evaluation and the persistence of knowledge gaps. Professor Diane Ethier stated bluntly: “There are limits to the USAID evaluations because there aren’t enough experts going into the field, and they only stay for three weeks, which isn’t long enough, and they don’t meet with enough local stakeholders. So the USAID evaluations could be better, but at least they are better than what CIDA is doing, which is no evaluation.”[105] This may be somewhat overstated. CIDA President, Robert Greenhill, told the Committee that CIDA does do program evaluations, often country-wide, which are public, and has a department responsible for evaluation and audit. In addition: “After putting a new emphasis on accounting, we’ll also have a chief audit executive, who will conduct audits for me on specific programs in order to ensure that the money is being well spent.”[106] (At the same time, Ian Smillie cautioned the Committee against what he called the “fog” of “results-based programming… This has become a kind of programming tyranny, one that has led CIDA and its grantees into an excess of planning and risk aversion, in what is essentially an emergent and risk-prone business.”[107])

In its October 2006 written submission to the Committee, CIDA also offered the following “lessons from experience”:

·        Strengthening democratic governance is neither simple nor quick. It involves the development of skills, processes, and institutions while promoting and consolidating the complex interconnection between law, rights, administration, and politics.

·        Progress demands a strong sense of universal values underlying democratic governance and the political will to put them into practice.

·        Development partners don’t want foreign models, they want practical knowledge.

·        Donors are more successful when they are knowledgeable about how democratic governance operates and when their assistance is focused and adaptable to local circumstances.

·        Assistance efforts are more effective when they extend beyond events, such as elections, to processes, institutions, and the surrounding democratic culture.

Beyond CIDA, the Canadian-based International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development (Rights and Democracy) is subject to statutory five-year evaluations that are referred to Parliament, though these have rarely received much political attention.[108] In Europe, the Netherlands Institute for Multiparty Democracy seems to be the most advanced in terms of its commitment to regular evaluation of its country programs.[109]

The problem remains that too little is known about what really works and in what specific contexts. George Perlin told the Committee “that there is a significant need for research on how to maximize the effectiveness of democracy assistance. We don’t have effective tools for evaluating democracy assistance. We have tools for evaluating how we manage projects, but we don’t have categories of analysis or tools for doing the research we need to deal with and to establish desired outcomes.”[110] He added, “… I think we could contribute something by Canada becoming a centre of research.”[111] In a subsequent submission to the Committee, Mr. Perlin elaborated on the issues of chronic lack of coordination, strategic planning, and of knowledge of lessons learned, noting as well that “assessments of needs should be based on comprehensive country-centred plans reflecting evaluations through systematic research in which local experts are active participants.”[112]

The Committee is intrigued by Mr. Perlin’s suggestion that Canada could take a lead role internationally in addressing these problems through setting up a “centre for policy in democratic development.” As he outlines it:

The Centre’s broad objective would be to promote more effective policy and delivery practices. It would do this both by example through its contribution to Canadian policy and administrative practices and by providing resources to support reform of international policy and practices. Among other things its activities would include:

·        Establishment of an international data base of programs and projects that could be used by donors and practitioners to facilitate coordination of their activities;

·        Establishment of a data base of lessons learned;

·        Creation of assessment protocols and instruments that would help build an international body of knowledge about lessons learned;

·        Creation of comprehensive democratic development strategies for the countries in which Canada is delivering assistance, employing research teams that paired groups of local and international experts, including representatives from other donors working in those countries;

·        Provision of assistance for creation of similar country-centred strategic plans for other countries where intervention is occurring;

·        Provision of support to academic research on policy and best practices for the delivery of assistance to democratic development;

·        Establishment of training programs for administrators and practitioners that would provide them with the knowledge they need to make effective strategic decisions.[113]

Mr. Perlin stated that the proposed Centre “could be established either as an agency within the executive branch or an arms-length agency reporting to Parliament through a Minister, as IDRC [International Development Research Centre] does.” The Committee’s strong preference would be for an arms-length body conducting independent research that is accessible to both those working within and outside of governments. Moreover, public funding for this activity should also come through instruments that, like IDRC, can be independent of government.

We note that Canada has had a successful internationally-recognized experience in its creation (in 1970) of the Ottawa-based IDRC which seeks out the participation of developing countries in tackling their own knowledge needs. As its president Maureen O’Neil emphasized to the Committee, “research in developing countries can foster democratic development.”[114] She elaborated that “research is the foundation for open inquiry and debate”, that it “expands the range of practical solutions to enduring problems”, that it “helps hold governments to account”, and that it “is the basis for evidence-based policy-making.”[115] Yet she concluded tellingly that: “Democracy assistance policies should be based on sound research, but rarely are.”[116]

Ms. O’Neil noted that IDRC has worked cooperatively with the Parliamentary Centre and other members of the existing “Democracy Council”[117] in this regard, about which we will have more to say in Parts II and III of the report that are devoted specifically to Canadian policies. At this point, we note the relevant recommendations put forward by Robert Miller, president of the Parliamentary Centre. In his testimony of October 2006, he called for “the government [to] invest in building a network of Canadian centres of excellence in international democratic development. An initiative of this kind would invest in competitively selected Canadian organizations to strengthen their capacity to innovate, apply, and share knowledge in key areas of democratic development.”[118] In a further written submission to the Committee, the Parliamentary Centre proposed that the government fund a “new Democracy Partners Research and Study Program” and give IDRC a mandate “to design and run a program of this kind.”[119] In making this proposal,
the Parliamentary Centre had in mind that knowledge must be “locally
owned” — “developing countries need to strengthen their capacity to support study and undertake research that is grounded in local realities.”[120]

So we come back to the first crucial issue we identified in democracy assistance of the need for local engagement. Canadians can help to provide assistance, but as Paul Larose-Edwards put it: “If you want anything to be sustainable, you’d better be training the locals.”[121] The Committee notes as well that the transfer of knowledge to the local level was one of the early lessons of Thomas Carother’s “learning curve”:

Democracy promoters must help recipient countries better understand and use democracy aid. …Locally oriented methods of design, implementation, and evaluation are a step in the right direction. Yet they have an effect only project by project. Democracy promoters must mount efforts that tackle the subject as a whole… Donors need to make information about their democracy programs much more widely known and available in recipient countries, in the local language, fully explaining what programs are being carried out for what purposes and with whom.[122]

In short, there remains a large unfinished agenda of key issues that must be confronted in order to move forward in the field of international democracy assistance. All of these require greater knowledge from the donor to the local level. The need for such knowledge crosses all types and fields of democracy support, including those involving parliaments and political party development which the Committee will address in detail in Chapter 7.

An important point to emphasize is that, whatever the amount of resources that Canada commits to democratic development in future, and concomitant with the new Canadian initiatives which we will put forward in Part III of this report, it is essential to strengthen the knowledge base about the most effective uses of democracy assistance funding. We agree with George Perlin that Canada can and should lead in that regard.

Recommendation 2

Canada should invest more in practical knowledge generation and research on effective democratic development assistance. This should be available to inform the work of the Canadian government itself — notably involving DFAIT’s Democracy Unit and CIDA’s Office of Democratic Governance — and that of other donors as well as of non-governmental practitioners. To that end, several options should be considered for supporting independent research in a coordinated way that can benefit policymakers and practitioners. These options could include a Democracy Partners Research and Study Program under the International Development Research Centre along the lines suggested by the Parliamentary Centre and a centre for policy in democratic development along the lines suggested by George Perlin.

In particular, policy-relevant research should focus on issues of continuing critical importance in the democratic development field, notably:

·        The need for local leadership of the democratization process and attention to the local dimensions of democratic development;

·        The need to ensure that democratic development is affirmed as a universal right and value consistent with the International Bill of Human Rights;

·        The need to integrate democratic development assistance within the larger processes of social and economic development in other countries, and to a poverty reduction agenda in those countries receiving ODA;

·        The need to benefit from the experience and expertise of non-governmental organizations active in the field of democratic development assistance;

·        The need to improve the coherence and coordination of democratic development assistance both within donor countries and on a multilateral basis;

·        The need for more regular, and realistic, evaluations of the effectiveness of democracy assistance funding and the need to evaluate in a more regular and realistic manner the effectiveness of the democratic development assistance strategies being pursued.

The Committee acknowledges that Canadian support for international democratic development has progressed considerably since its beginnings in the 1980s. We will elaborate further on this evolution in Chapter 4. At the same time, the testimony of witnesses clearly indicates that there is a need for a thorough review of all existing Government of Canada funding for the purposes of democratic development, most of which ultimately comes through the CIDA budget. Lack of credible evaluation has been identified as a particular weakness. We therefore believe that there is a need for a comprehensive independent evaluation of this current funding and its effectiveness.

One way to do this would be to convene a small independent panel of experts chosen following consultations with all parties represented in the House of Commons and approval by this Committee. The mandate of the independent panel should be to investigate all channels of funding as to their effectiveness in achieving their stated objectives, and to advise on which types of Canadian assistance have proved to be most effective, and where Canada can have the most positive impact. We will refer to this again in several subsequent recommendations. The Committee suggests that the timeline for the report of the independent panel be one year and that the report be tabled in Parliament and referred to this Committee.

Recommendation 3

Given the weaknesses that have been identified in evaluating the effectiveness of Canada’s existing democracy assistance funding, the government should commission an independent evaluation within one year of all public funding provided for this purpose, with the results to be tabled in Parliament and referred to this Committee. The proposed evaluation could be undertaken by an independent panel of experts selected following consultations with all parties in the House of Commons and the approval of this Committee.