Assessing and enhancing the impact of democratic development projects: A practitioner's perspective

As political liberalization expands across the globe, a growing array of Western donor and exchange organizations are seeking to bolster fledgling democracies or to nudge authoritarian regimes toward greater openness. These efforts coincide with intensified academic scrutiny of transitions to democracy. Yet, scholars have paid surprisingly little attention to assessing the impact of these organizations' democratization projects, and development practitioners have had little success in formulating useful criteria and approaches for assessment. Better understanding of how to evaluate these activities could enhance their impact as well as inform political development theory. This article places the assessment problem in context by acknowledging a few of the key debates pertaining to political development and by summarizing the range of foreign assistance organizations and efforts aiming to promote democratization. It then describes why evaluation of these efforts is generally inadequate. Finally, the article presents some initial ideas on how this difficult problem can be addressed. Stephen Golub is an attorney and consultant who has been involved with democratic development work since 1985. The thoughts and impressions presented in this article spring from: his experience with the Asia Foundation from 1985 through 1990 as Program Officer for Law and Government, Philippines Assistant Representative, and consultant for Pakistan law projects and overall foundation directions in law programming; his work as a consultant for the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Philippines in 1991 regarding both law and A.I.D.'s Democracy Initiative, and, in 1993, evaluating legal services programs; research conducted on Philippine nongovernmental legal service groups as a Senior Fulbright Fellow in 1991 and subsequently while based in Manila in 1992 and 1993; and discussions with representatives of other organizations that support democratization projects, such as the Ford Foundation, the Institute of International Education, Germany's Naumann Foundation, and the Netherlands Organization for International Development Cooperation. Of course, the opinions expressed here are solely those of the author, and should not be attributed to any organizations with which he has been associated.