Evaluating democracy support:methods and experiences

Development programmes aimed at supporting democracy are difficult to evaluate as a result of diverse concepts of democracy, the complex nature of the democratisation process and problems in attributing change to individual development projects. This book based on the proceedings of a workshop on Methods and Experiences of Supporting Democracy Support held in April 2006. It attempts to shed light on recent experience with such evaluations, particularly focusing on the challenges of causality and attribution.

Chapters cover problems with evaluating democracy support, analyses of programme evaluations by USAID, Sida , Rights & Democracy and the Community Action Investment Programme in Tajikistan, exploration of human rights-based approaches as a framework for analysis, and using the FORES Evaluation Toolkit when looking at conceptual and methodological difficulties around rule-of-law programmes.

The book’s concluding chapter calls for a global indicator for the evaluation of democracy assistance programme. This would involve developing a simple and accessible tool, both quantitative and qualitative. Scores would be allocated to performance in the rule of law, freedom of speech, media freedom and so on, leading to a composite index that could be calculated along lines similar to Transparency International’s Corruption Index or the UNDP’s HDI index.