Best Practices Guide in Electoral Security

The Guide provides USAID’s development professionals, as well as electoral assistance and conflict prevention policy-makers and practitioners, with a global overview of best practices in programming they may use to devise interventions to prevent, manage, or mediate electoral conflict and violence. Within the context of electoral security, the Guide defines a “best practice” as a policy, practice, or program intervention that has demonstrated measurable results in achieving electoral conflict prevention, management, or mediation. The Guide presents best practices as organized by: 1) electoral phase; 2) thematic area; and 3) policy, practice, or program activity by state and non-state stakeholder. To inform the Guide, Fischer and Quirk performed electoral security assessments in Guatemala, Afghanistan, the Philippines, and Burundi, employing the methodology described in USAID’s Electoral Security Framework – Technical Guidance Handbook for Democracy and Governance Officers (Framework), which Creative developed for USAID. The assessments were augmented with additional analysis as well as interviews of electoral security and conflict management practitioners from across the globe. The Guide is the companion volume to the Framework, which describes an assessment methodology to develop a profile of potential threats to electoral processes so that donors and partner governments can develop programmatic responses to prevent, manage, or mediate such threats. Since developing the Framework, Creative has used it to perform electoral security assessments in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Burundi, Colombia, Guatemala, Haiti, the Philippines, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

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