Brendan Halloran
Virginia Tech
Abstract
The rise of participatory governance is the latest chapter in the history of democratization in Latin America. This article examines the impact of the United States Agency for International Development’s participation-oriented efforts, using evidence from Guatemala and Bolivia. Despite some successes, this article argues the effectiveness of the agency’s interventions was undermined by its failure to address the political underpinnings of important obstacles to further democratization. Evaluation efforts were equally blind to these factors. The article concludes by suggesting that international organizations must tackle these challenges in order for their democracy strengthening efforts to yield more significant and sustainable results.
Keywords: Bolivia, democratization, Guatemala, participatory governance, USAID
Introduction
Democratization has significantly altered the political landscape of Latin America. Yet, the process has had clear limitations given the frayed relationship between citizens and states in the region. In an effort to overcome these confines, scholars and activists have called for “deepening” democracy by creating spaces and mechanisms for direct citizen involvement, often referred to as participatory democracy. This article seeks to contribute to the understanding of efforts by international donors and development institutions—key players in the democratization process in Latin America over the past two decades—to strengthen participatory governance. The analysis focuses on recent initiatives on the part of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) aimed at securing increased citizen agency and democratic engagement in local governance in Guatemala and Bolivia. An investigation of relevant USAID program documents allowed for the exploration of objectives, approaches, and evaluations related to participatory governance in both countries and suggested important shortcomings and challenges faced by international aid agencies working on strengthening democratic governance.
What follows is a brief discussion of the participatory turn in Latin America’s democratization process and the role of international donors and organizations in democracy strengthening, focusing on USAID’s involvement in democratic local governance in the region. The article then continues with an analysis of USAID initiatives in Guatemala and Bolivia and closes with a discussion of the lessons that can be drawn from these two cases.
Participatory Democracy in Latin America
The tide of democratization that swept through Latin America between 1978 and 1992 drastically reshaped the region. Gone are the dark days of military dictatorships. Latin Americans have more say in how they are governed today than at any previous point in their history. Yet all is not well for Latin America’s democracies. According toLarry Diamond (2008), while elections have become entrenched in Latin America, other dimensions of democracy have not, leading him to suggest that “democracy is real but shallow” in the region (p. 177). Numerous observers of Latin American democracy (Dominguez & Shifter, 2008; Smith & Ziegler, 2009; Wiarda, 2005) also have noted the progress made toward securing increased democratic possibilities for the area’s citizens while highlighting the shortcomings and obstacles that remain.
The list of these challenges is long. Public accountability of elected leaders and state institutions is lacking throughout Latin America (Mainwaring & Welna, 2003). This situation in turn fuels corruption and clientelism (i.e., citizen-politician relationships “based on direct material inducements targeted to individuals and small groups…willing to surrender their vote for the right price” ((Kitschelt & Wilkinson, 2007, p. 2). Corruption undermines the legitimacy of public institutions (Rehren, 2009), while clientelism prevents the realization of full citizenship despite formal democratization and state reforms (Escobar, 2002; Fox, 1994). The combination of these two phenomena has undermined the effectiveness of public institutions and deepened exclusion and inequality in most of the countries in the region.
Given these realities, Latin Americans are ambivalent about democracy in their countries and (justifiably) suspicious of their public institutions. According to a 2010 public opinion survey, 44% of Latin Americans were dissatisfied with democracy, and nearly one third of respondents did not believe that democracy was the best form of government (Seligson & Smith, 2010). Overall, citizens responding displayed little trust in their public institutions.
Many scholars have sought to explain the difficulty of deepening democracy beyond formal elections in Latin America. Some analysts have noted that the region’s political culture contains many features that do not lend themselves to liberal democracy (Wiarda, 2001). Others have argued that the region’s high rates of social and income inequality (Lamounier, 2002) and persistent poverty (Diamond, 2008) undermine democratic governance.
Enrique Peruzzotti and Andrew Selee (2009) have suggested that the Latin American situation of weak but persevering democracies and accompanying public dissatisfaction with public institutions has led, among other outcomes, to institutional innovations aimed at promoting various forms of citizen participation, particularly at the local level. One of the earliest and best known experiments in participatory democracy in Latin America was the participatory budget in Porto Alegre, Brazil, pioneered by the PT (Workers’ Party) in the 1990s. Other left-leaning local governments in the region undertook similar participatory initiatives and amassed a mixed record of success and failure (Chavez & Goldfrank, 2004). Today, participatory innovations have become ubiquitous across Latin America as national governments and localities experiment with increased citizen involvement in governance in an effort to improve the legitimacy of public institutions and involve citizens in addressing the region’s many challenges.
The introduction of participatory initiatives throughout Latin America represents a potentially important improvement to the weak democratic institutions that currently exist and might constitute an important development in the “difficult transition from clientelism to citizenship” (Fox, 1994), an advance Latin American democracies have struggled mightily to attain definitively. There are likely limits to what these new participatory spaces and institutions can achieve in the face of a hostile political culture, persistently high rates of poverty, and pervasive social and economic inequality. Nonetheless, such efforts represent an important new chapter in the ongoing process of democratization in the region.
USAID and Democratic Governance in Latin America
International donors, including the governments of countries from Europe and North America as well as international institutions, have played an active role in promoting and strengthening democracy in Latin America for the past several decades. Democratic and effective governance is now a central pillar of the international community’s development objectives in the region (Adams, 2003). USAID has been, and continues to be, a principal actor in this arena.
The agency has a long history of efforts to promote democratic and participatory local governance. The passage of Title VI of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 gave the agency a specific mandate to work toward building democratic institutions, with subsequent amendments making popular participation in local governance an explicit goal (Creative Associates, 1987). Although changes in the 1970s to the Foreign Assistance Act refocused USAID’s efforts away from political development toward human needs, the 1980s once again saw strengthening democratic local governance incorporated into USAID’s development agenda. The agency has addressed democratic local governance by encouraging legal reforms to ensure decentralization and democratic governance, promoting transparency in public decision-making, increasing local government institutional capacity, and taking steps aimed at eliciting greater citizen involvement in governance (USAID, 2000). Additionally, USAID has worked to strengthen the capacity of civil society organizations, so that such entities can play a stronger role in holding local governments accountable while also engaging more effectively in collaborative governance opportunities (ARD, 2009).
Enhancing local governance is a significant programmatic area for USAID efforts throughout Latin America. According to agency documents, local governments are “essential building blocks of democracy” and “a conduit to attract greater public participation to address root causes of poverty and underdevelopment” (USAID, 2004, p. 2). Although recent decades have witnessed a general refocusing on local governance issues in Latin America, the U.S. government has worked to strengthen local governments in the region since 1952. Coming before the mandate in the Foreign Assistance Act to build democratic institutions, USAID’s early efforts were technocratic and focused exclusively on increasing local governments’ service delivery capability (Creative Associates, 1987). The U.S. government’s efforts to strengthen participatory local governance have evolved considerably since.
USAID Efforts in Guatemala and Bolivia
This analysis provides evidence from Guatemala and Bolivia to illustrate how USAID has approached the challenge of strengthening citizen participation in local governance in Latin America. These countries were chosen for study because each has undertaken major decentralization reforms with significant citizen participation components in the last two decades. In both cases, USAID has sought to facilitate the implementation of these efforts. While there were several other countries in the region for which this is true, documentation for both the Guatemala and Bolivia programs was more extensive in late 2010 when this research began.
This study analyzed all documents available through USAID’s online document center related to democratic local governance in each country, including investigations and analysis of context and challenges, project proposals, evaluations, and final reports. Additional reports were obtained from individual USAID contractors. These documents shared a common audience—USAID personnel—but were written by authors from diverse organizations (USAID, project contractors, independent evaluators, academics) with varied purposes. The multiple organizations and objectives allowed for comparison and cross-checking of concepts and patterns. The author reviewed documents using qualitative content analysis, consisting of identifying and analyzing themes and patterns in order to reveal the meaning embedded within the text (Bowen, 2009). It should be noted that in the absence of triangulation with other sources of data (e.g., interviews, surveys, observation of communities targeted by USAID initiatives), it is impossible to determine the impacts of USAID’s programs using document analysis alone.
Thus, this analysis focuses on what the objectives, assumptions, and methods of intervention for each initiative reveal about USAID’s approach to strengthening participatory governance. Additionally, the initiatives under study were carried out with limited resources and in challenging political and economic environments. Thus, the specific outcomes achieved, constrained as they were by circumstances, are of less interest than attaining a more nuanced understanding of what such attempts reveal about the challenges faced by international organizations seeking to promote and strengthen democratic governance.
Guatemala
USAID first sought to strengthen local governments in Guatemala beginning in the 1960s and 1970s. The agency focused on building the capacity and autonomy of municipal governments by increasing the capacity of the mayors’ association and the central government institution charged with strengthening municipalities. These early efforts were technocratic and centralized in character (Creative Associates, 1987).
With the nation’s return to civilian rule in 1985, USAID shifted its focus, and in 1986 the agency began a project aimed at strengthening democratic institutions and civil society. In addition to other objectives, the project sought to:
Encourage citizens to participate in the political, economical, and social life of Guatemala through active, participatory democratic processes. The project will carry out workshops and other training activities for local NGOs [non-governmental organizations] and community-based organizations on the fundamentals of direct action organizing for social change and on the production and dissemination of civic education materials to mobilize citizen participation. (USAID, 1994b, p. 8)
Although USAID’s focus during the democratic transition was on the central government, a parallel emphasis on local governments soon emerged as well. In the 1990s the agency carried out a regional initiative, which included Guatemala, focused on technical assistance and training for local governments. The initiative was intended to facilitate the decentralization process and “improve local governments’ response to citizen demands for improved services and political enfranchisement” (Peterson, 1994, p. 8).
A USAID report on municipal democracy in Central America written during the time of this project argued that “to further legitimize municipal government and consolidate democracy, existing participatory mechanisms must be refined and new participatory processes and systems need to be introduced” (Bidus, 1995, p. 22). This comment referenced the widespread practice of cabildo abierto, an open meeting of the mayor and municipal council during which citizens voiced their concerns. While the report noted the potential usefulness of such participatory spaces, it also acknowledged that citizens often felt their expressed needs were not factored into public decision-making or problem solving. Despite noting the need for strengthening and expanding citizen participation, the report did not acknowledge the political challenges, such as clientelism and authoritarianism, that other analysts have argued complicate efforts to encourage greater citizen influence in local governance decisions (Andersson & van Leirhoven, 2007; Diamond, 1999; Nickson, 1995).
The USAID commentary also mentioned that in Guatemalan municipalities, auxiliary mayors may be either elected by the community or chosen by the mayor and that this is “particularly valuable for providing a voice for those citizens in the remotest regions” (Bidus, 1995, p. 22). The report does not address questions of accountability related to appointed auxiliary mayors, nor the potential for elite capture of this post and concomitant exclusion of other sectors of the community. Finally, the USAID document discusses the results of a survey (Seligson, 1994) on municipal vs. central government effectiveness at resolving community problems in which 59% of respondents stated that neither level of government addressed their problems.. The report’s author did not acknowledge this mistrust of governments of any stripe, nor the challenges such suspicion implied for effective citizen participation.
In 1998 USAID initiated a democratic local governance program aimed at helping to ensure that the commitments to decentralization and citizen participation outlined in the Peace Accords that ended Guatemala’s 36-year civil war were successfully carried out. In a report prepared in the weeks before the formal signing of the peace agreement, USAID officials outlined several new possibilities offered by the nation’s new turn:
With the frequency of reference in the Peace Accords for increasing citizen participation and devolution of decision making and resources to the local governments, the time appears highly appropriate for the community of international donors to support activities that promote decentralization and greater citizen participation at the level of the municipality, as well as enhance the skills of mayors and councils in dealing with citizen groups. An opportunity exists for breakthrough reconstructions of municipal government and for a bona-fide “participatory enfranchisement” of communities that had been effectively disenfranchised for centuries. But unless help is given to mayors, councilpersons, others in municipal government and the NGOS that will structure input into their decision-making patterns, old habits of exclusion, secrecy and mutual suspicion will be hard to break. (MSI, 1996, pp. 37-38)
As this statement noted, the first phase of USAID’s local governance effort focused on promoting national policy related to decentralization (which bore fruit in the form of a package of three decentralization laws passed in 2002, including a system of community and municipal citizen’s committees), while also supporting municipalities’ initiatives to provide information, organize public meetings, and increase participatory planning and community outreach. A report written for USAID in 2002 analyzing this and other democracy-building programs highlighted the fact that the initiative provided training to both local government and community actors to increase capacities for participatory planning and decision-making (ARD, 2002). According to the report, success, where it was had, resulted from explicit attention to political factors in the design and implementation of democratic governance programs. Challenges included discrimination, inequality, and poverty, as well as the aftereffects of the civil war such as a citizenry wary of public participation. Overall, the analysis found that efforts to strengthen citizen engagement had a limited effect on patterns of participation, even in the region in which USAID’s efforts were concentrated. In considering this result, the report’s authors observed:
The program strategy adopted by USAID assumed that with technical assistance, citizens and municipal authorities would possess sufficient incentives to participate in the recommended planning and monitoring procedures once they saw how much better resources made available from the central government were used….USAID’s monitoring and evaluation system for the [democratic local governance] program has focused primarily on whether outputs (e.g., number of planning offices, mesas, citizen agendas, and accountability sessions) were produced rather than on generating outcome data (e.g., citizen participation levels and attitudes, municipal government performance). (p. 51-52)
Judging by this evaluation, the project’s success seems to have been limited by adopting an apolitical, technocratic framework for project design, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation, one that did not account for the complexities of power and politics ingrained in governance frameworks (see Chhotray & Stoker, 2009).
USAID completed another phase of its local governance program in Guatemala in 2009. This stage was designed to meet the objective of “more responsive and transparent governance,” with a specific goal of “greater transparency and accountability of governments” (DevTech, 2009, p. 1). The project’s final report claimed success on the basis of formation of citizen’s committees established by the 2002 legislation. The functionality or impact of those bodies, however, was not discussed. Further, the report suggested that citizen participation brings benefits only when “local governments…were committed to transparency and the rule of law” (p. 10). In the absence of any provision of evidence to the contrary, it seems optimistic to assume that municipal authorities shared such a commitment, given the prevailing political culture and history.
However, the project analysis did exhibit a fairly nuanced grasp of the barriers to women’s participation in local governance. Yet, discussion of obstacles did not extend to the political barriers preventing active and authentic citizen participation more generally. This was manifest by the identification of weaknesses at the lowest level of citizen participation, the community development councils. The report noted that municipal governments did not display a commitment to organizing these groups, but its authors did not explore why this was the case. Rather, the analysis simply argued that more financial resources were needed, which could lead to “improved capacity to plan for and promote a substantive agenda” (DevTech, 2009, p. 9). The authors did not mention the frequency with which community councils were politicized or ignored (Fernandez, 2005). Nor did the report highlight the fact that councils are still limited to making requests to the mayor and hoping that the projects they have suggested for their community appear (Fernandez, 2008)—a result not so very different from the clientelist mode of governing USAID had hoped to eliminate with this initiative. Of the report’s nine final recommendations, only one related to citizen participation, and then only to suggest increased funding for municipal councils, thus implying that low citizen participation levels in council activities were due to insufficient financing rather than any other (political) reasons.
USAID’s work on local democratic governance in Guatemala did not demonstrate an understanding of the political nature of the agency’s interventions. The resulting technocratic approach insufficiently addressed the local power dynamics involved in citizen participation and government accountability. Examining USAID’s local governance programs in another context, Bolivia, will shed further light on the agency’s efforts and the lessons that can be drawn from them.
Bolivia
USAID efforts to strengthen democratic local governance in Bolivia began in earnest following passage of a radical national decentralization law, the Law of Popular Participation (LPP), in 1994. The LPP reorganized Bolivia’s local government framework, establishing popular election of mayors and municipal councils, creating community organizations (COs) and vigilance committees (VCs), and transferring 20% of the national budget to municipalities. The COs and VCs were set up to ensure the incorporation of community priorities in municipal budgets and to monitor their execution, respectively. As originally envisioned, the COs and VCs were to be populated by representatives of existing local civil society organizations (CSOs) and would thus provide an important new element of citizen participation and oversight in local governance.
Seeing the opportunity this new institutional framework presented, USAID quickly initiated a project entitled Democratic Development and Citizen Participation (DDCP) aimed at strengthening LPP implementation. This long-term effort (phase 1: 1996-2000, phase 2: 2001-2003) encompassed a dual bottom-up, top-down approach to achieving the goal of reinforcing citizen participation and government responsiveness at the local and national levels.
The DDCP project sought to address three key problems that have continually plagued Bolivia’s shallow democracy: the exclusion of the majority of the population from political processes and public benefits; detached national democratic institutions; and a political culture oriented toward confrontation rather than collaboration (USAID, 1994a). Yet in describing these obstacles, no mention is made in the DDCP proposal of the structures and culture of patronage and clientelism that underpin and enforce vertical power relationships in Latin America generally (Escobar, 2002), especially at the local and community level, nor the impediment to CSOs that this structural situation entails (Leonard et al., 2010; Waisman, 2006).
The DDCP project proposed to support more substantial citizen participation by means of several interventions. The Effective Citizenship component sought to educate and register voters to ensure legitimate municipal, VC, and CO representatives, while the Municipal Governance component aimed to establish new participatory planning procedures and to ensure transparent resource distribution by organizing and legalizing VCs and COs. However, just as in Guatemala, USAID’s evaluative criteria for these components were focused on outputs and indicators that were insufficient to measure citizen participation and governance responsiveness meaningfully. Criteria related to citizen participation specified targets for voter registration and voting, as well as establishment and functioning of VCs and OCs. Broadening enfranchisement was indeed an important minimum step for Bolivia’s democracy, as was the legal establishment of the new participatory organizations specified by the LPP. However, voting can be co-opted by manipulation, vote buying, and other forms of clientelism, thereby undermining citizenship rights. Furthermore, the establishment of legalized spaces for citizen participation does not necessarily protect against marginalization by local elites (Blair, 2000; Cornwall & Coelho, 2007; Selee, 2009). These spaces may simply replicate the inequality and exclusion found in society at large (Cornwall, 2004). Raw numbers of voters registered, votes, and VCs and OCs established say little about the strengthening of citizenship and the ability of citizens to influence decisions that affect them.
The DDCP proposal document demonstrated recognition of these obstacles and specifically cited the dangers of cooptation by local elites and political insiders. An analysis of the LPP carried out for USAID prior to the DDCP specifically mentioned this possibility, noting that local political bosses and elites are those most likely to lose power and influence given the proposed decentralization framework and thus were the most likely political participants to attempt to undermine community participation (Evans, 1994). The DDCP proposal claimed the project adequately accounted for these threats through technical training of municipal authorities and their staffs, as well as members of CSOs, so as to ensure transparent and inclusive governance processes. This approach implies significant optimism concerning the willingness of local political elites to relinquish considerable authority, just at the moment when significant resources were being provided them by the central government. The DDCP proposal does not explain what evidence from Bolivia’s political history or from ongoing efforts would lead to such optimism. It also ignores the important, and widely discussed at the time, conclusion from Robert Putnam’s (1993) study of institutions and political culture in Italy, that new institutions tend to adapt to existing political cultures rather than the opposite.
An evaluation of the DDCP initiative carried out a year and a half into the project underscored several of these concerns (Chemonics, 1997). Specific indicators of success for citizen participation included percentages of communities sending representatives to training and completing community diagnostics and the percentage of municipal projects drawn from those efforts. Whether the community representatives and evaluations were representative and inclusive cannot be determined by this metric, nor do these measures gauge the relative equity with which projects were distributed. The indicators of citizen monitoring of the budget similarly neglected outcomes and impacts. A Participation Support Fund (PSF), which was added to the DDCP project, was similarly evaluated not on its impact on strengthening the capacities of grassroots organizations, but rather on the amount of money USAID granted for it, the number of organizations involved, and the number of municipalities in which those organizations carried out projects.
The authors of the evaluation noted heavy attrition in the VCs, often leaving only the VC president and perhaps one other member to carry out monitoring functions. The report’s authors also presented evidence suggesting that municipal authorities were approving budgets at the last moment, leaving VCs little time to analyze them and disseminate pertinent information to COs, resulting in high levels of frustration and loss of interest among many VC members. The evaluation did not explore whether these delays arose because of a lack of technical capacity on the part of municipal authorities or as an intentional tactic to avoid accountability to local citizens.
The DDCP evaluation was also critical of the project’s focus, mentioning a lack of attention to civil society. Chemonics (1997) cites as evidence the lack of capacity on the part of COs, which had a detrimental effect on their ability to carry out their functions. The authors also noted the prevalence of political conflicts within COs, which suggested that observers should be cautious concerning assumptions regarding the representativeness and inclusiveness of these bodies. Despite these concerns, in the end the evaluation scored the DDCP project as “satisfactory” across every measure relating to citizen participation.
An assessment of democratic local governance in Bolivia carried out for USAID during the first phase of the DDCP project demonstrated further ambiguity about the agency’s efforts to strengthen citizen participation. The report claimed the agency was adequately addressing both government and civil society factors in participatory governance (Blair, 1998). Yet the report’s author also argued that increased participation and representation do not necessarily entail empowerment or even tangible benefits for citizens. The analysis also noted that the LPP reforms, which the DDCP sought to strengthen, involved shifting power and therefore faced resistance. The assessment reiterated the potential threat of local elites monopolizing the benefits of decentralization by reducing the influence of the poor and marginalized through the incorporation of new spaces for participation within existing patron-client networks. Finally, the report proposed actions including strengthening possible mechanisms by which to secure increased official accountability, including elections, the media, political parties, and VCs, while working to build civil society capacity over the long term.
Further evidence came from two investigations (Oulahan & Behrendt, 1999; USAID, 2001) carried out for USAID Bolivia during the DDCP project. Each expressed concern about several threats to the nation’s civil society. Among these were clientelism, a weak democratic culture, and the marginalization of the influence of women and indigenous peoples in decision-making despite formal structures for inclusion. The authors of one of the reports (USAID, 2001) cited improvements in the VCs promoted by USAID, such as the inclusion of subcommittees and commissions to expand representation to include a broader spectrum of civil society voices. However, the other study noted that many public and private actors regularly ignored the formal rules that had been adopted and reiterated that formal representation should not be confused with empowerment. Both assessments pointed to the important role that civil society must play in democratization, given the fact that political parties in Bolivia have not adequately fulfilled their role of transmitting the concerns of society and mediating among competing interests.
An independent evaluation of the DDCP project carried out in 2003 (DAI, 2003) after the first two phases of the initiative had been completed was revealing for what it discussed and what it did not address. The assessment’s authors noted the second stage of the project focused less on directly strengthening citizen participation and called for increased attention to this important domain of activity. The evaluation discussed concerns raised in previous reports regarding the possibility of elites and political insiders gaining control of the organizations supported by the DDCP project. The authors questioned the accessibility of the participatory spaces promoted by the DDCP and noted that efforts to overcome gender barriers to participation had been incorporated late in the effort. The evaluation also mentioned the general failure of VCs to carry out their assigned roles due to problems of representation, dependence on government resources, and a lack of capacity and interest on the part of members. The training and support provided by the DDCP project had not been sufficient to ensure the proper functioning of a critical mechanism of citizen participation and government accountability. The report highlighted a principal flaw of the DDCP approach when it assessed the project’s initiatives in participatory planning, in which “the prioritization of technical preparation of norms and plans has not been congruent with the local and regional realities. Therefore, perhaps less technical neatness but more social participation is required” (DAI, 2003, p. D 10).
The evaluation’s authors raised the question of measurement and indicators once again, yet they themselves seemed to commit the same errors to which they pointed. For example, the authors called for results/impact-oriented indicators, a call repeated by a General Accounting Office (GAO, 2003) report on democracy strengthening programs in Bolivia released soon after this evaluation. The DDCP evaluation’s authors noted that in the absence of these, the simple statistical surveys carried out in DDCP localities did not confirm increased responsiveness in these municipalities. Indicators such as the percentage of COs participating in municipal planning activities (80%), revealed nothing about the results of participation nor about the representativeness of the COs engaging in participatory activities.
Yet although the evaluators criticized the indicators employed, the report (DAI, 2003) nonetheless went on to proclaim the program a success on the basis of those same measures. This perceived success seemed to rest on the creation and dissemination of a model (whose effectiveness was not questioned) and its adoption by Bolivian government agencies. Aside from the gender dimensions of citizen participation, which the evaluation analyzed and critiqued, the DDCP’s overall purported success was not demonstrated by a rigorous assessment of enhanced citizen influence and empowerment in either the municipalities in which the project was directly carried out or those utilizing the participatory model promoted by the initiative. Indeed, surveys undertaken in DDCP municipalities contained only six (of 50) questions relating to citizen participation, and few of these addressed the issues of clientelism, representation, and cooptation raised repeatedly by project evaluators and academic studies. Instead, pertinent survey questions simply obtained data regarding numbers of VC members and the length of their service.
Although the independent DDCP evaluation noted some concerns with the first two phases of the DDCP project, the final report delivered to USAID offered no doubts about the initiative’s achievements (Chemonics, 2003). The document stated the DDCP initiative strengthened participatory processes by guaranteeing their inclusivity, ensuring residents’ demands were met, certifying transparent municipal governance with citizen oversight, and improving the management and administrative capacities of municipalities. The DDCP created a model that called for a yearlong schedule of activities including meetings and spaces for participatory planning, decision-making, and monitoring of government activities. The framework also mandated training of municipal government officials and VC staff and members. The model was described as “essentially a capacity-building mechanism—a process, which, if implemented, brings transparency, accountability, and true participation to local governance. This capacity-building process includes all municipal actors, including citizens, their civil society representatives, and their elected officials” (Chemonics, 2003, p. 5).
The DDCP final report also mentioned the need for continued training for CO leaders and admitted the initiative did not focus on the “nature and extent of citizen participation” (Chemonics, 2003, p. 76) within the COs. Participation of COs was defined simply as attendance at planning meetings and training sessions, rather than active involvement in these spaces or influence on outcomes linked to their deliberations. The document concluded that the criteria for successful VCs (quantitative, output-based) in DDCP project municipalities were almost universally met, a claim contradicted by the earlier independent evaluation.
The final report based many of its claims concerning the project’s putatively positive outcomes for democratic participation on surveys carried out from 1998 to 2002 (Seligson, 2002). The document cites the survey findings that citizen participation, satisfaction with local government performance, and ratings of municipal responsiveness were higher in DDCP municipalities (including those that had utilized the project’s model, but were not part of the program directly) than the national average (urbanization, income, and education were controlled), by a modest but significant margin. The document’s authors noted that this result was particularly impressive given that citizens in the DDCP pilot municipalities were poorer, less educated, and less engaged in governance processes less than the national average at the start of the project.
While increased citizen satisfaction with municipal responsiveness is encouraging, some cautions about these findings are warranted. First, the survey team’s definition for participation was once again simple attendance. A second concern is linked to the discovery that the rates of male participation and demand-making were significantly higher in DDCP municipalities than those of females, a much greater gap than that evidenced on average among all municipalities. Thus, despite an increased focus on gender and ensuring opportunities for women to participate politically, the DDCP model and interventions seemed to be reaching primarily men. Finally, the statistical evidence provided does not reveal the actual impacts of increased participation or whether that participation occurred within a framework dominated by elite interests. In general, these concerns suggest that the DDCP model should not be accepted on its face as a comprehensive intervention to strengthen citizen influence in, and control of, municipal government, because, in the end, it was municipal authorities who chose whether and to what extent to implement the initiative’s provisions. Despite many expressions of concern from the authors of the evaluations cited above, the DDCP program documents made no mention of the possibility that the model could be co-opted by elites, promoting a hollow participation that appeared democratic while nonetheless preserving status quo power relations.
At the recommendation of both the independent evaluation and the final report of the first two phases of the DDCP project, a third phase of the effort was implemented from 2003 to 2006 with a vision of citizen participation that went beyond submitting priorities and receiving information on budgets to include joint management of public services. Technical assistance for municipal governments and civil society stakeholders focused on a model for participatory management. This training sought to increase the participation of COs and other CSOs in participatory planning and oversight, while also increasing the management capacities of municipal authorities and VCs. The project specifically focused on gender and indigenous communities to ensure greater participation by, and increased municipal investment targeting for, underrepresented groups.
This third phase showed improvements in many areas, without deviating from the technical framework of previous DDCP initiatives. The final project report for this last stage discussed gains in participation and capacity, particularly by women and indigenous communities (ICMA, 2006). The report’s authors noted the need for political will in order to implement joint management.
While it seems that important positive steps occurred in the DDCP’s third phase, concerns still linger. Despite a renewed focus on COs and VCs, and some reported improvements, it remains unclear whether the representativeness of these bodies was addressed. Nor is there evidence that project activities directly tackled the threat of cooptation of participation by existing elites and power brokers.
USAID carried out a final project to strengthen Bolivian local governance from 2006 to 2009. That initiative, dubbed Strengthening Democratic Institutions (SDI), included a significant civil society-strengthening component. SDI activities related to democracy, conflict resolution, and organizational strengthening reached NGOs, grassroots organizations, and individuals (more than half of whom were women). This project represented a significant effort to build civil society capacity, yet documents did not indicate how it integrated with previous DDCP efforts. Finally, SDI’s institutional strengthening activities for CSOs were oriented toward technical competence in administering funds and projects rather than toward the kinds of political competencies that are required to democratize participatory spaces for the poor (Williams, 2004).
Discussion
The participatory turn in Latin America has gained momentum over the course of the last two decades and the role of international organizations in supporting this shift has been significant. This trend is promising, for in order to overcome the region’s continuing poverty and inequality, the need for collaboration between actors from civil society and the state is acute (Oxhorn, 2006). Successful cases of democratic and participatory local governance suggest that citizen participation channels more resources to the poor and thus works to undermine the poverty and inequality that present an ongoing challenge to the fragile, but real, democratic gains made in the region over the past decades (Abers, 1998).
In both Guatemala and Bolivia, USAID recognized the critical need to strengthen citizen participation in order to solidify new democratic openings at the local level and to ensure that decentralization reforms led to improvements in the lives of the long-excluded poor majorities in those nations. In both countries, USAID carried out programs with the goal of deepening local democracy and empowering marginalized actors. The agency sought to address those aims by increasing the capacity and responsiveness of local governments and building the wherewithal of communities and CSOs to influence local government decision-making and to monitor municipal investments.
In both countries, USAID successfully increased participation in the spaces that legal reforms opened. As its efforts proceeded, the agency acknowledged that women and indigenous persons face additional barriers to participation and targeted those populations with specific strategies and support. USAID also recognized that both local governments and civil society and community leaders lacked the capacity to take on the new responsibilities assigned them by the decentralization reforms. Thus, the agency designed interventions that operated in both the state and society spheres, aimed at working to build the capacity of actors in each sector. While more attention was given to governments, later projects in Bolivia aimed to build the capacity of CSOs as well.
Despite an accurate reading of the need to support the democratization of local governance and some important successes, this analysis has raised concerns about USAID’s approach in both countries. The shortcomings noted provide valuable lessons about the challenges of interventions to strengthen local democracy and point to some potentially systemic obstacles faced by organizations (including USAID) that are involved in this work.
In both Guatemala and Bolivia, USAID programs sought to facilitate the democratization of local governance, as mandated by new legislation. In both countries, the design of such interventions appears to indicate that USAID policy-makers accepted that the new laws promoting democratic decentralization provided an adequate framework for accountable governance driven by citizen participation. Project proposals and other analyses do not contain any discussion of limitations of legal spaces for citizen participation. Yet in both countries, the laws promoting participation contained a lack of incentives, carrots or sticks, for local authorities to accept new arrangements that reduced their power and discretion. Thus, the implementation of newly legalized mechanisms of transparency and citizen participation was frequently tokenistic, or absent entirely.
Additionally, in many cases, USAID programs promoting citizen participation claimed success based on individuals attending meetings. When aggregate numbers of individuals involved in local participatory spaces and institutions increased, project reports and evaluations claimed that citizen participation had been strengthened. Thus, while significant attention was given to gender in each country’s democratic local governance programs, the end result was simply to ensure that more women attended meetings. This despite evidence that women’s attendance in participatory spaces may or may not represent active involvement in decision making and that women may act as proxies for their husbands’ interests (Mohanty, 2007). Thus, contrary to USAID claims, attendance in participatory spaces actually revealed little about an actor’s influence on decisions. Even demand-making in participatory spaces does not ensure influence or beneficial outcomes. In Guatemala and Bolivia ample evidence suggests that citizen demands may be acted upon, ignored or otherwise integrated into a broader patronage-based system of favors and support.
To overcome existing structural barriers within participatory spaces, such as inequalities of wealth, power, experience with participation, and capacity for expression and debate, scholars have emphasized the importance of facilitation (Abers, 2003; Fung, 2004). This is even more important in participatory spaces created by the state and to which civil society actors are invited (Gaventa, 2004, 2006). USAID’s projects did provide training for actors in participatory spaces, with the stated goal of ensuring all participants’ capacity to engage. However, questions exist concerning whether the facilitation offered by USAID programs addressed the above concerns. USAID Bolivia documents showed that the DDCP project was not attentive to representation and participation within the COs, suggesting that inequalities within these bodies remained unchecked. As mentioned above, more attention was (eventually) given to ensuring more participation (that is, attendance) by women than to ensuring they had equal voice and influence within participatory spaces. Similarly, in Guatemala, USAID projects focused much more on the creation of participatory bodies than on the inequalities likely reproduced within them. The failure to take active steps to ensure democratic practices and representation within participatory spaces ignores warnings from the literature that such inaction can lead to participation that reproduces the status quo rather than empowering change (Cornwall, 2004; Fung & Wright, 2003; Hordijk, 2005).
The above concerns reflect the first potentially systemic challenge faced by USAID (and likely other organizations as well) in intervening to strengthen democracy. In documents produced by or for USAID in order to justify and assess the democratic governance programs developed in Guatemala and Bolivia, the need for USAID involvement was rationalized by the existence of obstacles related to power and politics, such as persistent clientelism, authoritarian political culture, and structural inequality. Yet in practice, rather than address these concerns head-on, USAID programs adopted a technical, apolitical approach. This mismatch between political obstacles and assiduously non-political interventions seriously undermined the potential for positive outcomes of the projects carried out in both countries.
Why then this disconnect between the understanding of political realities and successful integration of that understanding into actual interventions? In part, this may point to systemic impediments for an organization such as USAID. As an agency of government-to-government technical assistance, USAID is limited in the degree to which it can overtly address political issues. While strengthening the technical capacity of community organizations may apparently be unproblematic, providing assistance to such organizations when their aims are more specifically political (e.g., undermining a local municipal boss) may, in practice, overstep USAID’s mandate. Thus, the agency designed specifically apolitical technical interventions, even while acknowledging the political nature of many of the challenges it sought to confront. It would seem obvious that evaluations of these initiatives would reveal the problems inherent in such an approach. That in fact, they did not, suggests a second systematic barrier to successful democratization.
Monitoring and evaluation was a part of each phase of the programs USAID carried out in Guatemala and Bolivia, but these efforts were undermined systematically by two failures. First, although several reports did raise the issue of co-optation of democratic spaces by clientelistic structures, inadequate, if any, actions were taken to address that challenge. Second, as already noted, the indicators used to evaluate program success were insufficient to determine what real social and political changes occurred. Tallying numbers of community councils created or numbers attending council meetings revealed very little about whether such spaces were democratic and inclusive. The reliance on indicators reporting outputs from projects rather than outcomes obscured any failures to challenge existing, undemocratic power structures within project municipalities and beyond. This weakness may be attributed to inadequate conceptual frameworks on the part of evaluation designers. Yet it may also reflect the demands for simplistic indicators of success in order to justify USAID budgets to the U.S. Congress. It may be that the need to aggregate the results of numerous projects so as to demonstrate (seeming) impact compromises the possibility of monitoring and evaluation programs that point out ambiguity and possible failure, and would thus lead to questioning about a program’s approach (and claimed successes).
The above obstacles suggest the challenges faced by organizations such as USAID when engaging in interventions that seek to strengthen democratic governance (not discussed here, but of equal importance, is the conflict between the three- and four-year timelines of USAID project phases and the long-term processes of cultural and institutional change necessary to achieve deep and lasting democratic change). The approach that undergirds the above programs is challenged by assertions from scholars that strengthening participation and democratic governance is an inherently political process intimately related to considerations of power (Chhotray & Stoker, 2009; Cornwall & Coelho, 2007; Gaventa, 2006). Particularly in Latin America, with its long traditions of vertical power structures and exclusionary politics, assuming formal laws and institutions would be sufficient to democratize local governance ignores evidence and scholarship that demonstrates the opposite. Perhaps if USAID had chosen to operate in municipalities controlled by political reformers committed to participation and transparency, a technical strategy would have been more justifiable. However, both in Bolivia and Guatemala, the municipalities in which USAID was directly involved had conditions that favored the continuation of clientelist relationships despite the introduction of new participatory institutions. This raises real questions about the effectiveness of USAID’s interventions, questions the agency’s evaluations of those interventions are unable to address.
It would seem that USAID is caught between the proverbial rock and hard place. Agency staff seemed to recognize the political nature of efforts to strengthen citizen participation in local governance. Yet USAID’s mandate and general orientation, not to mention reporting requirements, toward showing simplistically positive outcomes for millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars invested led to technical, apolitical interventions. Such interventions were likely seen as acceptable and perhaps desirable by local elites and political authorities that would have been hostile to more overtly political interventions aimed at undermining unequal power structures. This combination of factors undermined the successes claimed by USAID in both Guatemala and Bolivia and highlights the difficulties associated with international efforts to strengthen and deepen local democracy in countries with ingrained power structures that resist such changes.
Conclusion
Latin America’s transition to democracy is far from complete. Although concrete positive steps forward have occurred, most importantly in the transitions from dictatorship to formal democratic rule, challenges remain. Reforms and the opening of new participatory spaces for democratic local governance represent another potentially important step forward, but one made difficult by the region’s heritage of inequality and lingering authoritarianism.
Because of the challenges that have obstructed democratization in Latin America, international donors have played an active role. USAID has been a major actor, and in the wake of decentralization reforms in Guatemala and Bolivia, the agency implemented significant programs aimed at strengthening local democracy. Despite successes in building capacity among government and civil society actors, the impacts of USAID’s programs were limited by a technical approach that did not directly address underlying obstacles to democratic progress. Further, monitoring efforts focused on quantitative project outputs failed to capture the initiatives’ limitations. These failures point to the accountability and program design challenges faced by international agencies working to strengthen democratic governance and must be addressed if future interventions are to be more successful in generating enduring democratic change.
That USAID and other development institutions promote apolitical interventions and that citizen participation is often undermined by unequal power structures has been previously documented. Yet this analysis of USAID’s practice in Guatemala and Bolivia serves to underscore the important conclusions from a recent Carnegie Endowment for International Peace report on governance strengthening (Carothers & de Gramont, 2011), namely that there remains a significant gap between knowledge about productive governance interventions (including the central importance of the political drivers of governance challenges) and the implementation of programs to address governance deficiencies. Wil Hout (2012) reinforces this point by demonstrating that political economy analyses carried out by the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development and other donors, aimed at uncovering the political obstacles to good governance, were only partially, at best, integrated into those institutions’ development practices and interventions.
As discussed, USAID documents evidenced some understanding of the relevant political challenges to democratic governance in each country. Further, USAID-sponsored projects demonstrated some degree of learning over the course of several iterations. Despite these advances, the projects carried out on the ground continued to be fundamentally technical and apolitical and the evaluation of those projects continued to ignore important political considerations. Thus, policy makers and practitioners involved in interventions aimed at strengthening governance and citizen involvement must take more seriously the challenge of applying the lessons learned over the past decades to actual projects and programs in the field.
The first area in which these lessons could be applied is in monitoring and evaluation. Robust baseline investigations and impact evaluations need to be incorporated into proposed interventions to strengthen participatory governance, as well as timelines adjusted to better incorporate the longue durée of democratic change. More attention needs to be paid to qualitative assessments of CSO participation, as well as the representativeness of these organizations, particularly with regard to marginalized actors. This point is underscored by a broad investigation carried out by John Gaventa and Gregory Barrett (2010), which found that citizen participation had varied outcomes, not all of which were positive, and that outcomes could only be fully analyzed through detailed, qualitative case studies.
Secondly, USAID and other donors must take seriously the lesson that governance and democracy work is inherently political. This points to the need to strengthen participatory democracy by incorporating lessons learned from many excellent analyses of citizen participation, especially by marginalized individuals and groups. Andrea Cornwall (2004) suggests a combination of three approaches for improving participation that are repeated in a recent (2010) report by the U.K.’s Department for International Development: (1) innovative participatory institutions that open up new spaces for citizen involvement, (2) strategies and methodologies that reframe visions and discourses of participation and reflect the perspectives and experiences of citizens rather than elites, and (3) facilitation and mobilization to build participants’ individual and collective capacities for engagement. Together, contends Cornwall, these might make citizen participation more inclusive and meaningful for marginalized groups, such as poor women and indigenous persons in the cases studied in this article. However, this guidance does not represent a toolkit for citizen participation but rather a set of propositions that need to be tested and adapted in varying circumstances.
Thus, and finally, USAID and other donors need to consider their funding mechanisms in relation to strengthening participatory democracy. The Porto Alegre experiment is over 20 years old and still evolving. Democracy is ever a work in progress. Four- and five-year projects are unlikely to be sufficient in this regard. Rather, long-term support to civil society in order to strengthen citizen engagement is necessary. USAID Forward, an initiative that seeks to direct more funding toward local organizations, is a potential advance in this regard, if funding to such actors can be continued over longer time horizons. However, USAID’s own accountability mechanisms often demand a more immediate (and generally simplified) demonstration of results. Unless the agency can convince its high-level administrators, other high-level officials involved in development and diplomacy, and congressional oversight committees of the validity of a changed approach, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to institute any changes in the way USAID seeks to strengthen participatory democracy, to the ultimate detriment of those the agency seeks to support.
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Author Note
Brendan Halloran is a PhD candidate in Planning, Governance, and Globalization at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia. He can be contacted at brendan.brinkhalloran@gmail.com.