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Session Title: Contextual Challenges of Evaluating Democracy Assistance
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Panel Session 467 to be held in Sebastian Section L1 on Friday, Nov 13, 9:15 AM to 10:45 AM
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Sponsored by the International and Cross-cultural Evaluation TIG
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| Chair(s): |
| Rebekah Usatin, National Endowment for Democracy, rebekahu@ned.org
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| Abstract:
Democracy assistance presents a particular set of difficulties to the field of evaluation at both the macro and micro levels. Often, the conditions under which democracy assistance projects and programs take place are challenging for political reasons. By their very nature, these types of projects and programs are extremely difficult to evaluate and attributing causality is virtually impossible. Nonetheless, both donors and implementers of democracy assistance make considerable attempts to utilize qualitative and quantitative data to determine what difference their projects and programs are making. This panel will explore the challenges of context faced by evaluation staff at three different organizations working abroad.
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Evaluating Democracy Assistance Grantmaking: Challenges and Opportunities
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| Rebekah Usatin, National Endowment for Democracy, rebekahu@ned.org
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The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is a private, nonprofit organization created in 1983 and funded through an annual congressional appropriation to strengthen democratic institutions around the world through nongovernmental efforts. NED's grants program provides support to grassroots organizations in more than 80 countries to conduct projects of their own design. The varied political and cultural contexts of NED grantees coupled with the difficulties of attributing programmatic success to a single small grant make for a challenging evaluation context. The panelist is the sole staff member devoted to evaluation at NED. She will discuss strategies and methods employed by NED to evaluate its grants program at the micro and meso levels.
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Evaluating Market-Based Democratic Reforms: The Case of the Center for International Private Enterprise
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| Nigina Malikova, Center for International Private Enterprise, nmalikova@cipe.org
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The Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE) strengthens democracy around the globe through private-enterprise and market-oriented reform. Through a grassroots grants program, an award-winning communications strategy, and capacity and technical assistance, CIPE works to help the business community to become a leading advocate for market-oriented reform and democratic governance. A single partner grant project generally combines a mix of common functional project design components. The challenge for program officers is to disentangle separate components to eliminate unnecessary overlap among project objectives, as well as the context of CIPE's work, which makes evaluation of impact extremely difficult. For example: Is it possible to measure success through enacted reform in national laws and regulations that effect the business communities? Or, is it better to make a link with larger social changes, such as market-based democratic reforms? How do we make those links? What other societal changes do we consider? CIPE value added?
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Evaluation of Democracy and Governance Programs in Post-Conflict Environments
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| Abigail Lewis, National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, alewis@ndi.org
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Post-conflict environments present special challenges to those conducting monitoring and evaluation of democracy and governance programs where beneficiary groups could be put at increased risk during M&E processes. Sensitive political contexts, vulnerable beneficiary groups and interruptions in activities are a very real part of programming in emerging or nascent democracies. In these situations, it is crucial to be specific and clear with risk analysis and critical assumptions that must happen within the operating environment for programming to continue, let alone be successful. Extra funding must be allotted for security precautions in data collection and alternative methods may need to be employed. M&E specialists must weigh the risk to themselves and beneficiary groups when choosing such methods. This presentation will look at the available literature and case studies to draw upon best practices and lessons learned for future monitoring and evaluation of democracy and governance programs in these contexts.
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