Improving Democracy Assistance ― Building Knowledge Through Evaluations and Research

This report was produced by the National Research Council in response to a request by the USAID Office of Democracy of Governance for help in developing methods for measuring the effectiveness of its programs. The report makes four recommendations and discusses how to implement them. The recommendations involve undertaking a pilot program of impact evaluation designed to demonstrate whether such evaluations can help USAID determine the effects of projects on targeted policy-relevant outcomes; developing more transparent, objective, and widely accepted indicators of changes in democratic behavior and institutions at the sectoral level, using more diverse and theoretically structured clusters of case studies of democratization and democracy assistance and planning in diverse settings; and rebuilding USAID's institutional mechanisms for absorbing and disseminating the results of its work and evaluations on processes of democratization and democracy assistance. Annotation ©2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)