• Regional initiatives of assessing governance
• Sub-Saharan Africa
  • Sub-Saharan Africa
  • Analysis, scores and results
  • African Peer Review Mechanism
• Latin America and Caribbean
  • Latin America and Caribbean
  • Analysis, scores and results

Regional initiatives of assessing governance

This paper presents a seven-step methodology designed to analyse violent conflict, assess democratic governance and understand the relationships between the two. It has been developed principally as a tool of analysis to study the nature and quality of democracy in relation to current and future conflicts in a specific world region: Latin America.

The methodology identifies forms of conflict that are protracted and corrosive to democratic institutions and civic participation over time. It also alerts international and national authorities to potential points. The methodology also seeks to serve as an innovative early warning system for the United Nations and other international bodies.

The seven steps involved in the methodology are:

• Step 1: Analyse violent conflict using an approach that measures violent conflict along two axes: unorganized-organized and non-political-political
  
• Step 2: After identifying and measuring violent conflict within each of the above categories identify and analyse tendencies and relationships among different forms of violent conflict
  
• Step 3: Once the nature of conflict has been outlined, proceed to assess democratic institutions and state capacity
  
• Step 4: Examine the impacts of different forms of violent conflict on democratic institutions and state capacity, that is, the interactions between the bottom-level game of violence and the top-level game of democracy
  
• Step 5: This step provides general guidelines to develop policy interventions best suited to strengthen democracy, expand state capacity and ameliorate the most threatening and destabilising areas of violent conflict
  
• Step 6: At this point, findings should be checked by convening (i) a series of focus groups in a few well-selected conflict areas to discuss the findings and proposed policy recommendations; (ii) a panel of national experts to discuss the research data and findings; (iii) interviews of political and social leaders
  
• Step 7: Having identified critical policy needs and areas of assistance, a filter needs to be applied. Based on this filter, the organization should proceed and develop a set of policy recommendations to guide its own programming and to share with the host government.

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