Description

Political institution development is assistance to build effective, responsive, formal democratic political institutions.

This profile includes official capacity-building, referring to measures to enhance public officials' skills and ability to administer and govern at the national, provincial and local levels. This profile will cover efforts to assist in developing the executive and legislature institutions and officials and the bureaucracy; separate profiles analyze the development the judicial and legal systems, the electoral process and party system and an independent press.

Objectives

Political institution-building programs intend to improve individual and institutional governance and administrative abilities.

Expected outcome or impact

Enhancing authorities’ professionalism in divided societies supports grassroots governance by increasing the stakes in local representation, thereby contributing to local stability.

Relationship to conflict prevention and mitigation

Capable, responsive governance and administration are critical elements in preventing conflict; the success or failure of democratic institutions depends on their responsiveness as institutions and their ability to mediate conflict by hearing, channeling, and mediating the multiple citizen demands that modern societies express through civil and political associations. By reducing the inefficiency that undermines public confidence in civilian institutions, capacity-building helps increase officials' capability to manage conflicts at an earlier stage. This increase in government effectiveness and accountability can reduce domestic opposition and increase legitimacy, which can help prevent or mitigate violent internal conflict.

Implementation

Organizers

Participants

Government officials participate in political institution-building programs, from senior to low-level at the national, provincial or local level.

Activities

Political institution-building targets the political system’s input and response mechanisms, meaning legislatures, local governments, political parties, judicial systems, and the electoral process. Interventions include training, political party training, legislative strengthening, local government programs, and civic and voter education.

Capacity-building. Programs to build the capacity and increase the professionalization of officials include:

· Training of officials—leadership skills, administrative skills, technical skills such as accounting, finance and budgeting, techniques for developing and managing a more effective taxation system, organizational skills, democracy, human rights, and conflict resolution.

· Strengthening executives' financial and managerial accountability.

· Improving legislators’ and staffs’ legal and technical ability to write legislation.

· Strengthening key functions—research support services, oversight, drafting and analyzing budgets, communicating and serving constituencies.

· Support for anticorruption efforts and accountability initiatives—improving auditing and management information systems, altering incentive structures.

· Providing training, capacity-building, infrastructure, and operational resources for political parties, legislatures, and local governments

Legislative assistance includes:

· Enhancing legislators’ professionalism.

· Strengthening legislative research, analysis, and drafting capabilities.

· Strengthening municipal and local governments’ accountability.

Local governments includes:

· Enhancing elected officials’ and their staffs’ skills.

· Improving communication between elected officials and their constituents.

· Crafting and managing budgets.

· Increasing local government officials’ ability to work with higher levels of government authority

· Dividing responsibilities between mayors and elected councils.

Cost considerations

"Democracy promotion programs tend to be unusually cost-efficient in financial terms, because the grants are typically small, and because they focus on transferring techniques, building capacities, and generating the institutions and policies for sustained good governance and development, rather than on providing an indefinite stream of resources for consumption."

Other resource considerations

Capacity-building may require experienced trainers. Officials may have to commit time away from professional responsibilities. Books, equipment, computers and technical assistance may also be required.

Set-up time

Individual interventions in political institution-building can be quickly planned and implemented.

Timeframe

to see results

Efforts to professionalize government officials generally impact a conflict situation gradually. Effects can be long-lasting when various levels of civil service become more representative and if trained officials continue their service for a long time.

Conflict context

Stages of conflict

Institution-building efforts offer particularly great potential for conflict prevention and mitigation during post-conflict transitions or political (democratic) transitions. "During negotiations, a number of confidence-building measures in the cultural, political, and military spheres can... give support to the building of enduring institutions."

Type of conflict

Efforts to professionalize the civil service and other government institutions which include making them more balanced and representative of ethnic and regional groups can be useful in ethnic conflicts. They are especially suitable for crises of governance.

Causes of conflict

Capacity-building programs attempt to remove some of the structural causes of conflict by trying to improve the quality and effectiveness of government.

Prerequisites

Some existing government structure is necessary as well as the means to support and sustain government institutions.

Past practice

Within the Greater Horn

Somalia. An attempt to recreate civil administrative authorities in a situation of state collapse took place in Somalia when the Life and Peace Institute, an international NGO, and UNOSOM attempted to implement the results of an agreement among the factions to allow the creation of District Councils. The Addis Ababa peace agreement staked out a "two-track" approach to peace in Somalia which was supposed to address grassroots peace-making with warlord accommodation on parallel tracks. The District Councils were envisioned as the lowest level of local administration in the reconstitution of the Somali state.

The Life and Peace Institute has District Council training centers in Garowe, Jowhar and Baidoa, with international trainers paired with Somali counterparts. District Councilors undergo roughly a week of training in administration and management. Training sessions usually include Council members from a number of different locations, stimulating cross-communal interchange and communication. According to a requirement agreed to by the factions at the Addis conference, at leased one woman must be on the District Council in every location.

The District Councils are a new development in Somali political structure-building and arguably allow a new approach to participation. They are also a foreign entity whose structure was determined externally. In some places, the new form of participation may work, and communities may come to own their Councils. In others, the Councils threaten existing interests; parallel structures have already formed, the District Council has been marginalized and rejected as an external imposition.

UNOSOM's haste in implementing the District Councils has also undermined their validity. At the time of elections in many places, displacement was too great to allow truly representative institutions. "We are disenfranchising people," observes a Somali activist. One observer attributes what he sees as the District Council's failure to UNOSOM's bureaucratic centralism:

Constituted by governments, its mandate is to establish centralized governmental structures, albeit with some emphasis on decentralized regional structures. Centralized government is the very thing that many Somalis have been fighting against. As implemented by the UN, approaches to peace-making in Somalia reveal the dangers of trying to impose an outside solution to the Somali conflict.

Other concerns include the legitimacy of the districts, the fairness and extent of external manipulation of the council elections, including by UNOSOM Political Affairs Director Leonard Kapungo, the current councils' questionable representativeness, given mass displacement, the replacement of existing local governmental structures, the tokenism of the one-woman requirement, uncertainty over council jurisdiction and authority, the lack of resources, the inadequate time both for UNOSOM to form the Councils and for training Councilors (less than a week), and the uncertainty of the role of elders in forming the Councils.

In some locations, such as Bardera, District Councils grossly overrepresent the dominant sub-clan of that locale, and training sessions for those Councils arguably buttress the legitimacy of those imbalances.

Even more fundamental are questions about the sense of ownership which communities have of these District Councils. In Bay and Bakool before Aidid's September 1995 invasion of Baidoa, the creation of a clan-based Supreme Council had rendered the local District Councils largely irrelevant, as has the resumption of elder authority in Absame areas of the Juba Valley. "The Digil-Mirifle have developed a protective structure based on human affinities," says one observer. "The sense of communal responsibility is toward the clan. That's what needs to be mobilized."

"Clan-based institutions offer more credible partners than the District Councils," asserts one diplomat. "Some clan-based systems and some District Councils will likely emerge as credible authorities. In reality, the District Councils that work are essentially clan-based and not trying to reconcile hostile communities." Where District Councils do remain, they are being reoriented and reconstituted by the true authority structure of the area.

The Supreme Council in the Digil-Mirifle areas was envisioned as the civil administration in Bay and Bakool, at least until Aidid's invasion. A compelling argument existed before Aidid's invention to work through the Council, building its capacity and constantly challenging it on good governance issues.

In another miscalculated move in Somalia, UNOSOM put money into local administration without considering the transition beyond UNOSOM. More recently, the European Union (EU) proposed food for work for District Councils and other local authority functionaries—police, medical staff, prison workers—but other donors have hesitated, realizing that before taking such steps to build local structures, the sustainability of government resources to support them without outsider assistance must be considered. Local government institutions which are highly dependent on outside resources have less legitimacy and therefore less effectiveness.

Ethiopia. UNDP is supporting the capacity-building of woreda (district) councils to undertake food security, human resources, natural resources and disaster prevention. These councils can also play other roles, including conflict resolution. The government has developed a "National Program for Disaster Prevention, Preparedness and Mitigation," whose objective is to increase the ability of communities to withstand emergencies through information management, improved preparedness and a stress on household food security.

Other examples. In several dozen new or partial democracies in Central and Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, the Middle East, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) family provides training, capacity-building, infrastructure, and operational resources for democratic political parties, legislatures, and local governments. The National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI) and Search for Common Ground have sent political leaders to South Africa for training.

In various countries, USAID has funded a range of programs, including leadership training and legislative assistance, efforts to strengthen executives' financial and managerial accountability such as improving and integrating financial management systems, training in democratic values, enhancing legislators’ professionalism, strengthening legislative research, analysis, and drafting capabilities, and strengthening municipal and local government accountability.

NDI has provided professional skills training to parliamentarians and staff in Burundi such as constituency relations and parliamentary oversight of government. Search for Common Ground has been involved in giving high-level parliamentarians from both ethnic groups in Burundi (Hutus and Tutsis) training in negotiation skills. The Africa Leadership Forum is engaged in discussions in Burundi at all levels from head of state to local organizations. Parliamentarians for Global Action sent a delegation of African parliamentary members who had gone through transitions in their own countries to Burundi after the president was killed in April 1994, to work with their counterparts, discuss what they had gone through and share ideas on how to get through the crisis. This group helped broker several accords, including one over the Speaker in January 1995. The Congressional Human Rights Foundation planned to mobilize its International Parliamentary Network to also work with political leaders in Burundi.

The National Endowment for Democracy provides training, infrastructure, and operational resources for political parties, legislatures, election monitoring and administration, and local governments.

USAID supported an agenda in Rwanda which aimed to build up the government as quickly as possible after the Rwandan Patriotic Front's (RPF) assumption to power. USAID provided vehicles, computers and other inputs to key ministries.

Evaluation

Strengths

Strengthening civilian government institutions through capacity-building can help reduce their susceptibility to domestic military domination.

International donors such as USAID are effective at long-term institution-building, particularly with respect to the governmental structures of democracy and large-scale assistance projects. NGOs can be cost-effective in providing small grants for a wide range of projects and have more latitude in providing assistance in countries where governments have come to power through coups, are in arrears to the US, lack diplomatic relations with the US, or in some of the more economically developed, newly emerging democracies such as South Korea and Taiwan.

Weaknesses

Official capacity-building efforts can be countered when international agencies hire the best and brightest away from government service, reducing the quality and skills of personnel available to serve in the government.

Lessons learned

New democracies are typically institutionally weak, and critical national political institutions are underdeveloped in many African countries. Governance is dominated by the executive; legislatures have little autonomous power, resources, or experience; local governments have scant financial resources or administrative capacity. Majoritarian democracy provides a general incentive for self-sustaining inter-group cooperation, acting as a key preventative and self-enforcing mechanism during the post-agreement peacebuilding phase.

Outside organizers must take steps to assure that their assistance will help more in advancing democracy than to legitimize and sustain authoritarian rule prior to offering assistance to develop nascent representative institutions of an authoritarian regime that appears to be liberalizing.

Meaningful capacity-building requires long-term planning horizons and liberal allowance for mistakes and problems.

At the national level, independent monitoring bodies can be set up to regulate the civil service; these should be answerable to a democratically elected legislature.

To help prevent or mitigate conflict at the local level, local leaders could be trained in community-building skills and conflict resolution skills and taught how to identify and deal with the root causes of conflict in their areas.

For some international agencies and organizations, capacity-building of officials is a high priority early on, while others prefer to maintain total control of projects and circumvent use of authorities wherever possible. Circumvention of authorities by NGOs has become a major issue in the Greater Horn, especially in areas where governments or authorities believe NGOs should not be replacing authorities in their capacities as planners, assessors, implementors and evaluators.

Donors and external agencies should consider whether the government institutions they help to build up will be sustainable without continued major outside financing. A tax base which can finance government services requires that wealth be generated in the society. One method of generating wealth is by supporting community development initiatives in the private sector, which can then be taxed by authorities; the government must be providing legitimate and effective services to justify the tax and reduce opposition to it. The various levels of government may require outside assistance in developing and sustaining a viable taxation system in tandem with capacity-building of government officials.

Steps to increase the capacity of local sectoral officials can increase the ability of communities to manage their response to chronic crises. Capacity-building of officials to increase their capability to respond to emergency and development priorities can be integrated into the planning process of each sector (food, water, sanitation, health, veterinary, and so on). For example, in anticipation of re-developing a collapsed health service, capacity-building can take the form of training medical personnel, standardizing health guidelines, and consideration of how to restructure health provision in a manner relevant to limited-resource, highly unstable environments.

Training by experienced professionals from the country, region or local area may be more effective and better received by trainees. Outsiders training host country officials to be trainers themselves is a cost-effective approach.

References and resources

Larry Diamond, Promoting Democracy in the 1990s: Actors and Instruments, Issues and Imperatives, December 1995, A Report to the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict.

Heather McHugh.

The two party institutes of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) family—the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI) and the International Republican Institute (IRI)—which fund a wide variety of grants that aim to consolidate democratic political institutions in post-Communist and developing countries. The two NED party institutes are heavily involved in institutional development in new and emerging democracies.

The Asia Foundation, with a presence in 14 countries, sponsors activities such as building the institutional capacities of legislatures and promoting more effective citizen participation in and monitoring of legislative processes; training and technical support for governmental institutions; aiding the development of NGOs through start-up support, staff training and technical assistance, and programs to strengthen democratic governance in several dimensions, including local government and public accountability at all levels.