Of the various stages in an electoral
assistance project’s life, the planning, identification and formulation stages
are perhaps most critical to effective electoral assistance. Despite the wide
acceptance of this axiom, automatic coordination in identification and
formulation among the various development agencies involved is often not a
given. The electoral cycle approach provides
development agencies with a basic understanding of
what the entry points in a given electoral process are. They should come
together at the beginning of every new cycle and dispatch coordinated electoral
needs assessment missions: ideally, this should even happen at the end of the
previous cycle. Development agencies often need to be reminded by both assistance
providers and national partners that targeted assistance must be determined and
made available at an early stage: this is when the clarification of the different
timelines for the various electoral activities within the electoral cycle
becomes crucial.
UNEAD has increasingly been conducting electoral needs assessment
missions jointly with UNDP to inform the project identification and formulation
stage, ensuring that the political and electoral assessment is 
fully taken into
account in project design. In several cases, UNEAD, UNDP and the EC have
organized joint assessment and formulation missions, with more coherent and
coordinated approaches emerging as a result. The enlargement and standardisation
of this practice will be crucial for ensuring adequate coordination from the
outset.
Needs assessment visits should include discussions with all relevant stakeholders, and provision of feedback on why their identified requirements have or have not been included in assistance programmes. The work of the needs assessment team becomes fundamental for good planning of electoral assistance projects, and not merely for the identification of technical assistance needs but also for providing adequate consideration to management and environmental constraints that are country specific (e.g. conflict prevention). Lessons learnt, conclusions from post-election reviews and recommendations from observers’ final reports should all be properly considered in developing needs assessments for the following electoral cycle. In addition to early planning, proactive rather than reactive programming, including the formulation by development agencies of contingency plans to meet late or emergency requests for assistance, is more cost-effective and has more impact. Lastly, the importance of sharing the needs assessment conclusions and adopting a common terminology among development agencies and electoral assistance providers can greatly enhance cooperation in the formulation of the respective assistance programmes.
Planning and identification activities would benefit enormously from the development of standard situation tool kits for electoral needs assessments missions that take into account all aspects mentioned above, and should be utilised in conjunction with stakeholders such as EMBs, civil society organisations (CSOs) and observers. Such tool kits would include a menu of options for assistance during each stage of the electoral cycle, linked to risk assessments and identification of the costs and benefits of implementing or not implementing items on the menu.
As for the content development activities of electoral assistance
projects, national stakeholders should be encouraged to take the lead in
determining priorities and linking them to national development goals using
international advice where appropriate and within the context of 
standard
development cooperation mechanisms. The design needs to consider the
practicality of multi-faceted programmes in light of the local availability of
management capacity, and whether better outcomes could be achieved by having
multiple programmes of narrower focus within a coordinated, holistic framework
for democratisation assistance.
It is important that electoral assistance, with its diverse components, provide support which is well balanced between that provided to institutions managing the electoral process and other institutions such as the media and grass-roots CSOs. Successful assistance programmes generally encourage the formation of NGO umbrella groups for voter/civic education activities and technical assistance to domestic observation to balance the support provide to the national EMB. Support to electoral dispute resolution mechanisms and training for the media on the electoral cycle is often omitted from such programmes, but is vital in building trust in the electoral process and in promoting understanding of the continuous publicity needs of EMBs and other electoral actors. The specification of the objectives of electoral assistance projects should then be aligned with the wider democracy and good governance programmes that the development agencies have commonly agreed with the partner country in consideration of the national programmes of poverty reduction/eradication, and should be inserted in the political dialogue with the recipient government.
The implementation of programmes is obviously central to their effectiveness, but it is important to set clear objectives from the outset. In this respect, the recruitment of electoral experts requires better coordination between the various actors involved and greater attention to identifying the most appropriate professional profiles, if quality and effectiveness are to be ensured. Overall, the mechanism that has shown the best results is the multi-level assistance coordination system that covers political, managerial and technical levels. In addition, participation of the partner country institutions in the technical coordination mechanisms is essential, but needs to be planned before the implementation starts. The typical cash-flow crisis in the middle of the implementation period can be avoided by linking the disbursements to specific benchmarks and deadlines in the electoral cycle. Stakeholders’ interest must also be stimulated and sustained by requiring multi-stakeholder participation in information sharing, for example through EMB/political party/CSO liaison mechanisms.
The most neglected component of electoral assistance programmes remains monitoring and evaluation. This is partly due to the objective difficulty of evaluating progress in the partner country’s democratisation process in the short-term. Even so, the electoral cycle approach offers a platform to development agencies to remain engaged in a continuous manner throughout this delicate process, where important breakthroughs can be achieved in improving the quality of the ensuing phase of assistance. Operational auditing, external and internal peer reviews, results-based monitoring and evaluation tools and independent or multi-stakeholder post-election reviews all help to make electoral assistance programmes more effective and promote and assist in their evaluation. Assistance programmes should adopt the results-based management approach, with indicators agreed by development agencies, implementers and recipients. International IDEA, UNDP and the EC are at the forefront of this activity and are committed to developing a new evaluation methodology for electoral assistance in line with the 12 principles of the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness of March 2005.
