Endemic corruption, poverty, poor governance and executive abuse of power are the leading threats to the world’s fragile democracies, a Washington conference heard today. But too much aid and assistance addresses the symptoms rather than the underlying causes of underdevelopment, especially the endemic corruption that retards economic and democratic development.
While humanitarian assistance’s focus on quantifiable deliverables has a palliative effect, developmental assistance must be transformational, addressing the systemic conditions that impede sustainable development, said Gregori Lebedev, chairperson of the Center for International Private Enterprise. US agencies are “superb purveyors of technical support” on a wide range of deliverables, but less successful in addressing intangibles such as women’s inequality, the absence of free markets, corruption and failures of democratic governance, “possibly the most intractable” of the poison pills that impede development.
It is necessary to “change the name and the face” of development assistance, with a new transformational agency to work in parallel with USAID’s laudable delivery of humanitarian assistance and the innovative work of the Millennium Challenge Corporation.
Authoritarian populists in Latin America and elsewhere had perfected a “Fujimori-model” of plebiscitary democracy, said Hernando de Soto of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy. They can organize relatively free and fair polls that satisfy visiting election monitors, but while they “look like a democracy, they gut the system,’ stripping out genuine forms of accountability and intermediary institutions.
Providing legally enforceable property rights not only gives a majority of a state’s citizens, not least its poorest, a source of income and security, it also serves as a form of political education, enhancing citizenship by giving meaning to otherwise distant and abstract concepts like rule of law.
At least one in five of the democracies that emerged since the Third Wave have experienced some kind of breakdown, said Stanford University’s Larry Diamond told CIPE’s international conference on the theme of “Democracy that Delivers“. Poor governance threatens to accelerate the spread of the “irresponsible populism and degradation of democracy” seen in Latin America.
Recent research suggests that the critical variable for ensuring young democracies’ survival is constraint of executive power. The MCC has been possibly the most single important innovation in promoting democratic governance in his lifetime, said Diamond, but its mandate needs to be broader.
Curbing corruption through freedom of information provisions, anti-corruption commissions (with genuine teeth, including independent ability to prosecute) and ombudsperson’s offices are essential for addressing the endemic corruption that is so corrosive to other democracy and development assistance.
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