Observation projects are often subject to
the priorities of the donors who fund them. Unilateral and multilateral
governmental donors employ their own democracy and governance experts who
determine where to invest financial resources for each electoral cycle. They
may designate international observation as a priority, or decide to focus on
supporting citizen observation or providing technical assistance to the EMB.
Coordination is required among observer groups, between observers and donors,
and among the donor community to harmonize observers’ priorities with those of
donors and ensure that funds are not unduly concentrated on one group, election,
or type of activity, leaving others neglected. Political exigencies in donor
countries and their relations with those where they fund activities necessarily
influence the ebb and flow of available aid for observation. The 2011 Arab
Spring, for instance, transformed a negligible pool of European aid money for
Arab democratization into a major target.
The primary funders of democracy and
governance programs, including election observation, are Northern and Western
European and North American governments, as well as the multilateral UNDP and
EU. Newer and non-Western democracies, such as India, Brazil, and Japan, have
not funded democracy promotion on a significant scale. One reason is a
tradition of non-alignment and concerns about respecting national sovereignty.[i]
While intergovernmental observer groups such as EU, OSCE/ODIHR, and OAS are
funded directly by member states, nongovernmental organizations must seek out
election-specific grants from external donors.
For citizen observers, national funding has been possible in
some contexts, but the growing trend is for national observers to be funded by
foreign donors’ democracy support programs. While this has allowed for the
growth of citizen observation, it comes with risks. The “professionalization”
or at least “monetization” of national observation erodes the nature of
observation as a voluntary citizen engagement that is at the core of its
legitimacy and evolution. It also compels national organizations to compete for
funds rather than focusing on cooperating to ensure the most effective
observation possible.
Beginning with the trend toward long-term
observation, the greatest challenge to donor relationships has been how to
incentivize and effectively structure donor support through an entire electoral
process. “Donor support for elections has traditionally been event-driven,”
wrote Vidar Helgesen, former Secretary-General of International IDEA, in the
proceedings of the organization’s 2006 Ottawa Conference on Effective Electoral
Assistance. “Ample resources have often been available for a first transitional
election, but much less for subsequent elections.”[ii]
From the donor’s perspective, treating elections not as isolated events but as
ongoing processes is complicated by the difficulty of defining a clear scope of
activities with measurable outcomes once an election is over. For grant
proposal and reporting purposes, shorter-term projects with definite parameters
are preferred. Observer groups themselves struggle to assign end-dates to
important post-election activities that may continue indefinitely or blur into
the next electoral cycle.
At the Ottawa Conference and the first
Declaration of Principles Implementation Meeting later the same month, observer
groups collectively began exploring ways to meet donor needs while maintaining
the methodological integrity of the electoral cycle approach.[iii] A
key suggestion was the integration of donors into the follow-up to EOM
recommendations by encouraging donors to link funding for observation with
funding for electoral assistance to the same country.[iv] In
other words, the observation community urged donors to use observers’ election
assessments and recommendations to guide the funding of related initiatives on
good governance and human rights, not necessarily administered by the same
organizations.
Donors have experimented with this approach
to some extent, but even while they recognize the need for sustainable
progress, logistical constraints have kept funding discrete events the norm. In
some cases, donor governments solicit proposals for observation, especially in
highly strategic contexts where the severing or resumption of aid hangs on a
successful election. In other instances, observer groups seeking to observe in
countries they deem priorities may find themselves scrambling competitively for
available funds each time an election nears. When groups seek to observe all
phases of the electoral process, observers often must be deployed much earlier
than designated donor funds activities are available.
Another question that arises in the context
of donor-observer relations is the extent to which donors pressure observers
for specific outcomes. Even when no explicit request is made, observers are
aware of their funders’ policy positions and some may feel obliged to moderate
criticism of a host country accordingly. For citizen observers, foreign funding
can also have a negative impact on the national ownership of the
democratization process, as observation priorities, methodologies and findings
may be shaped to accommodate foreign donors rather than to serve national
democratization processes.
Yet the principle of independence integral
to professional observation applies to independence from donor agendas just as
it does independence from host country political factions. Organizations with
high professional standards recognize that their credibility rests on their
impartiality and independence from political pressures. Conversely, one might
assume that an observer group that highlights its connection with its donor or
sponsor could leverage that relationship to elicit better practices from a
semi-democratic host country government eager to receive more aid. In practice,
Kelley (2012:109) shows, fear of losing power generally trumps this leverage.[v]
[ii]
Vidar Helgesen, foreword to Effective
Electoral Assistance: Moving from Event-based Support to Process Support:
Conference Report and Conclusions (Stockholm: International IDEA, 2006), 5.
[iv]
International IDEA, Effective Electoral
Assistance, 8.
[v]
Kelley, Monitoring Democracy, 109.
