Office of Democracy & Governance: Performance Monitoring and Evaluation
USAID has spent nearly $10 billion in over 100 countries to support democratization and good governance (DG). Beginning as small programs in human rights, justice, and elections over 20 years ago, annual funding in DG has grown to about $1 billion per year for the last few years, with a median DG program of about $5 million. Given the large investment in this sector of development, and its importance as a pillar of US foreign policy, the DG office in USAID has taken the lead in pressing for better evaluations, developing new methodologies for measuring effectiveness, and working with practitioners to improve democracy and governance programs.
In collaboration with academic experts and experienced practitioners, the DG office has undertaken a comprehensive, long-term plan to measure the impact and effectiveness of various approaches to democratic development and incorporate the findings into USAID programs through training and field support. Some of its products include:
Comparative evaluations in specific areas of democracy such as civil society development, elections, local government, and justice. These early studies in the 1980s and 1990s still provide insights into programming, but our knowledge of how to measure impact and effectiveness has moved the DG Office into new analytic and comparative approaches.
Indicators of change in democracy and governance has been a sustained and evolving program for the last decade, with the development of handbooks, support for research, and expert consultation. The DG office’s commitment to good indicators integrates USAID’s extensive field experience in measuring for results with advances in the democratic development academic literature.
Cross-national quantitative studies on DG effectiveness: In two highly-regarded studies in 2006 and 2007, a US academic group examined democratic patterns in 165 countries from 1990 to 2005, and found that USAID DG assistance has a significant, positive impact on democratic development. The studies concluded that in any given year an investment of $10 million of USAID DG funding produces a five-fold (500%) increase in the amount of democratic change over what the average country would otherwise be expected to achieve.
Now Available:
 Quantitative study, conducted by researchers from Vanderbilt University and the University of Pittsburgh (PDF, 720MB)
 More information, including the database and an earlier study, can be found at: http://www.pitt.edu/~politics/democracy/democracy.html.
View a short summary of the research findings (PDF, 720KB)
National Academy of Sciences (NAS) study: Under a contract awarded in 2006, the NAS convened an expert commission which produced recommendations for improving evaluations of DG programs, including needed USAID institutional reforms, policy changes, and methodological innovations.
Now Available:
The report can be accessed at http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12164.
View National Academies Report in Brief: Improving Democracy Assistance (PDF, 71KB)
NEXT STEPS: The Democracy and Governance Office is building on current research and recommendations to continue building its capacity to assess effectiveness and improve democracy programming. The cross-national studies helped identify hypotheses to test and provided critical information on indicators of democratic change. The NAS report outlined new techniques for vastly improving the monitoring and evaluation of new DG programs, better methodologies for retrospective case studies, and other means of collecting and analyzing data that will allow USAID to more reliably gauge impact and improve strategic planning and programming decisions.
Impact evaluation pilots: Based on the recommendations of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) 2008 Report, this pilot initiative will help USAID better determine “what democracy assistance works and doesn’t work under what circumstances.” It aims to systematically incorporate the principles of good impact evaluations into USAID programming. These include project designs that provide for 1) clearly defined and measurable outcomes linked to democratic change; 2) quality baseline data that allow tracking processes of democratic change over time; 3) collection of baseline and outcome data in target and comparison groups; and 4) random assignment of target and comparison units where feasible.
The DG Office will provide evaluation assistance to missions at important stages of the project cycle: project planning and design; solicitation and selection of implementing partners; development of performance monitoring and evaluation plans; consultation on implementation issues related to the impact evaluation; and data analysis.
Other methodological improvements: Following the NAS report and earlier studies, the DG office will continue to improve indicators of democratic change and methods of improving causal analysis, drawing on academic experts and, for the first time, the wider donor community. It will also implement recommendations to more systematically incorporate field experiences, both successes and failures, and use state-of-the-art methodologies for better comparative analyses of past work.
Contributing to Agency change in support of better evaluations: The DG Office is closely collaborating with the new Agency Evaluation Unit and will work for agency-wide changes in planning and implementation processes that promote more effective DG evaluations.
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