Additional Challenges in Democracy Support and the Need for Donors to Confront some Neglected Issues
| Author | Kebapetse Lotshwao |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12642 |
| Date | 01 February 2019 |
| Published date | 01 February 2019 |
Additional Challenges in Democracy Support
and the Need for Donors to Confront some
Neglected Issues
Kebapetse Lotshwao
University of Botswana, Gaborone, Botswana
Although Susan Dodsworth and Nic Cheeseman’s article
entitled ‘Ten Challenges in Democracy Support and How to
Overcome them’focuses on issues previously raised by
many scholars working on democracy support, such as Tho-
mas Carothers, Marina Ottaway, Peter Burnell, Stephen
Brown, Carlos Santiso, James M. Scott, Gordon Crawford,
Larry A. Diamond, Steven W. Hook and Carie A. Steele
among others, it is still a welcome contribution to the litera-
ture on democracy support, or democracy assistance. In the
first part of the article, the authors identify ten challenges to
democracy support, namely: difficult cases, authoritarian
backlash, adapting to context, confronting politics, managing
uncertainty, unintended side effects, a tight funding environ-
ment, defining and demonstrating success, competing priori-
ties and a limited evidence base. In the second part, the
authors propose three solutions to these challenges, being:
the need to improve evidence base by among others being
open on the way data is produced, analyzed and shared; the
need to bridge the gap between researchers, practitioners
and policymakers working on democracy support; and lastly,
the need to generate more realistic assessments of what is
possible in a given time frame.
The article, nevertheless, has some limitations. First, some
equally important challenges in democracy support are not
discussed in the paper. One of the missing challenges
relates to how the efforts of democracy supporters are in
some instances undermined by the presence of a relatively
powerful neighbor on which some authoritarian regimes
can rely on for support when democracy supporters impose
sanctions. Russia, for example, has supported the govern-
ments of countries such as Belarus and Armenia, while for
many years, South African patronage undermined all efforts
aimed at removing Robert Mugabe and his party from
power in Zimbabwe (Levitsky and Way, 2005). Mugabe was
only removed by the military in November 2017. A related,
but different challenge, which the authors ignore, has to do
with China’s growing influence in many parts of the devel-
oping world. With an authoritarian political system back
home, and a purportedly non-interventionist foreign policy,
China is an obvious stumbling block to democracy promo-
tion in some countries. In sub-Saharan Africa for example,
Chinese patronage has in the past cushioned some authori-
tarian regimes, including the Sudanese and Zimbabwean
governments, allowing them to survive pressure from
democracy supporters (Eisenman and Kurlantzick, 2006; Tull,
2006). Beyond sub-Saharan Africa, China has also been
doing business with some Latin American countries, in the
process undermining democracy promotion in the region.
As R. Evans Ellis (2012, p. 6) aptly puts it ‘Chinese purchases,
loans and investments in Latin America have undercut the
United States’leverage in demanding adherence to certain
practices of democracy, human rights and free trade’.An
additional challenge that Dodsworth and Cheeseman ignore
relates to why democracy supporters misunderstand con-
text. While they agree with previous work that ‘context mat-
ters’, they avoid discussing why it (context) is
misunderstood by some democracy supporters. The prob-
lem, in my view, is the over-reliance on foreign experts by
some donors. Such foreign experts, as Carothers (2004, p.
10) argues in the case of party aid, are ‘often viewed by the
persons they are training as having little understanding of
the local context and an irrepressible tendency to suggest
approaches and solutions that are designed in their home
country buy not necessarily suited to a different terrain’.
Although donors can still engage foreign experts, there is
need to also involve local experts if democracy promotion
initiatives are to make any meaningful impact. Furthermore,
while the authors accurately describe problems related to
the funding environment, they are silent about another
challenge that Ottaway and Chung (1999) have raised
before; lack of sustainability of some of the programs initi-
ated by democracy supporters. Indeed, some recipient
A Response to: ‘Ten Challenges in Democracy
Support –and How to Overcome them’,
Susan Dodsworth and Nic Cheeseman*
*Dodsworth, S. and Cheesema n, N. (2018), Ten Challenge s in
Democracy Support –and How to Overcome them. Global Policy, 9
(3), pp. 301–312.
Global Policy (2019) 10:1 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12642 ©2019 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Global Policy Volume 10 . Issue 1 . February 2019 153
Response Article
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