 So this is I do this for all my presentations This is the daily African news for today and the headline in daily African news for today is democracy aid is under threat Why? There are three things I'm going to talk about why democracy aid has stopped working to Why support for democracy promotion is falling and I think they're different but related issues three Why democracy aid may actually make things worse if we do it badly? And I think that's something that was implicit in the previous talk But I want to bring that out a bit more explicitly and finally a bit more on what we can do So the context I'll just tell you a little bit about Africa in case we have anyone in the room who's not entirely sure where we are with Democracy in Africa before I start telling you about democracy aid So Africa features probably a small number of democracies and we kind of got used about ten years ago to talking about quite a lot of systems in Africa as being democratic But in recent work Nick van der Waal has challenged us to actually say which of these countries would qualify as a really high-quality Democracy and the reason he's done that is to point out that we have a lot of countries that just about sneak into the kind of Democracy category at the very lower end a quasi semi whatever you want democracy that in many ways a really competitive authoritarian regimes their regimes that hold elections But without the other trappings of democracy and his argument would be that we actually only have five countries that are genuine democracies in terms of really good respect for civil liberties political rights Genuine the open elections in which there's a possibility of a transfer of power So we have great variation across the continent We have some countries that are approaching the highest standards of democracy in the world are getting close to that sort of freedom house One one score indicating the highest score of democracy But we have a lot of countries that are effectively closed authoritarian systems in which the ruling party wins 97% plus of the vote And we have everything in between so one of the things I always say to my students is we have more democratic Diversity in Africa than almost anywhere else on earth You can find almost any level of democracy you want to on the constant and that of course is a great challenge It means for example when we talk about things like democratic term limits the extent to which they have become Institutionalized and respected varies greatly. So as we argue in this recent book Actually democratic term limits in Africa. So two term limits on the president are respected more than they are Neglected, but you can still name a number of high-profile countries in which they've recently been overturned Uganda Rwanda Burundi and so on so we see great variety And we've had 19 countries that have had a transfer of power Which is pretty good in the sense that if I was giving you this talk 10 years ago It would have been six, but it's also less than half the number of countries in sub-Saharan Africa So we see some transfer of power some abilities of opposition parties to win But we actually see that in less than half the countries that we have. Okay, that's the background Within that context, I'm going to support more specifically about elections So what are the role of elections as we know we invest in elections for all sorts of reasons one of which is that we believe they promote Accountability we believe they promote public service provision and therefore we believe they promote long-term development We also believe they enhance the legitimacy of political systems and hence they build stability And so elections are usually the endpoint of power-sharing negotiations that emerge out of civil war Most post-civil war conflict statements have ended up in elections after a period of power-sharing It's the default mode of resolving conflict and moving countries on and yet as we know from lots of work on Africa Including some of my own work from the past Initial optimism about the potential for elections as a transformative device Whether in Kenya or Nigeria or Iraq or Afghanistan Rapidly became much more realistic and much more cautious We saw elections that in some cases generated violence and conflict which in other cases were won by ruling parties Consistently over time and in other cases which seem to promote forms of patrimonialism and ethnic politics Rather than undermine them and promote forms of a more civic notion of accountability And so we ended up in a way. I've argued in this book with a kind of mission creep When we did democracy aid at the beginning we focused on introducing elections and getting those elections to work Elections didn't work as we wanted so we started to work with the parties because we figured if elections don't work It must because the parties aren't right. What do we need to do? We need to have internally democratic parties So we put a lot of money into doing things around parties But we were constrained because it looked like we were infringing on country sovereignty So we started putting a lot of money into civil society We decided that we didn't really get the civil society we wanted so what we really needed to do was change society itself So we started doing things like education programs and getting involved in radio shows to teach people norms and values of democracy So that they would be the right kinds of voters. So we get the right kinds of parties, right? We went down the chain and the problem was as we went down the chain our capacity as an international community to affect things Got reduced and reduced and reduced because we were going for bigger and bigger targets that are more deeply rooted in society And these are some of the things that democracy aid actually can't necessarily change on its own But we also Engaged in programs that became increasingly Because as we moved from the holding of elections and the conduct of elections to a broader program about political parties and society It started to look more and more like this was a neocolonial project about promoting certain Western values and Particularly in the last five to ten years that has been used by African leaders sometimes reasonably sometimes unscrupulously to push back against democracy aid and Western intervention in these areas So why is democracy aid not working? I'll give you four main reasons and some of these aren't highlighted up So I think it's important one we've run out of easy cases, right? The reason we thought things were going better in the 1990s is because we had easier cases that we could see worked But those cases have already transitioned the Garners the Mauritius the South Africa in some cases in Eastern Europe We saw early victories, right? But the countries that had the setup to transfer more easily to democracy have done so by now So the cases that we're now trying to work with the Uganda's the Democratic Republic of Congo's the Cameroon's and the Chad's Are the toughest cases that we actually have so we're using the same tools, but in more difficult contexts to Change can be triggered by the international community. We're good at forcing elections We're good at demanding a certain response from the government But we all know that genuine long-term democratic consolidation comes from within a country It comes from domestic contestation domestic structures evolving and becoming sustainable over time And so what we can do is we can start the process so we can facilitate that change But we cannot deliver that change or actually ensure the end result And so one of the things you often seen is the international community Start a process of change that has a very different long-term consequence to what they initially envisaged And as I said before you can see this is clearly in Iraq or Afghanistan as you can in any of the African countries You might talk about today The third and this comes from my recent book how to rig an election is that the authoritarians are learning The authoritarians we see today are smarter saviour leaders than they were 10 years ago They're rigging elections in ways that are much harder to detect. They're much more subtle They're softer in the book. We talk about non-strategic rigging That's things like rigging the election on the day by stuffing the ballot box and beating people up at the polling station And what we now see which is much more strategic forms of rigging Use of violence that's so hard to detect that it actually typically goes under the radar Manipulation through the use for example of digital technology rather than by actually stuffing ballot boxes So that's very difficult for the international community and international election observers to detect what's going on So what's the narrative story empirically? We have more elections than ever before right? This is global which is great more elections You would think would mean more democracy we also have more elections being monitored by observers and ever before and you'll notice That this figure is very similar to the figure before almost all elections now are monitored by one group or another at the regional or International level and yet despite the fact that we have all of these elections and despite the fact that they're all being monitored The quality of democracy is declined for ten years in a row Why well partly because the average quality of elections has not really improved over the last decade So this is using data collected by the election integrity project Which gives you a score from zero to ten so ten is the best possible election one the worst possible election What you can see is that sub-Saharan African elections get a pretty poor score below five out of ten But actually there's nothing particularly distinctive about the African cases here They're pretty much where Asian elections are Middle Eastern elections are and post-communist Europe elections are and this is a point I always make when I end up talking on an Africa panel, right? There was nothing distinctive about the quality of these elections and the whole point of our book How to rig an election was that actually this has become the norm in terms of the disappointing quality of elections and new democracies It is not in any way an African story So the story over the last ten years as I said is sadly declining democracy every year for the last ten years More countries in the world. This is global not African have moved towards authoritarianism Then they have moved towards democracy and again It's important to make the point that what we're talking about today are African narratives, but they chime with many other parts of the world So why is support for democracy promotion falling? Well for one reason and obviously because it's proving to be less successful It's harder to find those big wins that we can point to to justify the expenditure on democracy aid But there's other factors of course and I'll go through these very quickly because they'll be very apparent to all of you Europe has been consumed with Brexit and the migrant crisis and has developed a different set of priorities And it had in the 1990s when there were especially nearly 90s Numerous statements by leaders about the priority of promoting democracy abroad America has become more introverted and the worst role model and that's a very bad combination in the world's most important power where democracy promotion is concerned and as some of you will have known key American ministries and Institutions that were previously tasked with promoting democracy have had that watered down or taken out of their mission statements under the current administration Third aid itself is changing its composition And one of the things that we don't talk about a lot is that the definition of what counts as democracy aid is very vague So we went from something like hundreds of millions of pounds being spent on this in the early 1990s To something like two billion pounds last year But the definition of democracy aid can include almost anything from state-building projects to Stabilization projects to projects that effectively are spending on what you might think of as building up military and police capacity In other words, it's very easy to define things under a democracy aid budget and get them in and one of the things We've seen also in the UK is a concern that for example the budget given to the Department of International Development is Increasingly being used for tasks that we would not historically have thought of as actually falling under a development remit So there's a concern that not only is there a falling international support for the concept of democracy aid But the democracy aid is being hollowed out from the inside by being used to spend on other things for other priorities The fourth and at least again touched on this But it's really important to say is that to some extent we have lost the kind of hegemonic power of democracy as an ideal Fukuyama's quote is funny to look at now But it was important because it reflected a moment in which there was a genuine belief that democracy had won and will keep winning That argument is very difficult to make in the context of Rwanda Ethiopia in China For those of you who don't know Rwanda and Ethiopia are two of the fastest growing economies in Africa and have been for some time and Explicitly run a model in which democracy is sacrificed on the altar of development least talked a little bit about this in her talk as well So we see new alternatives and these alternatives are gaining traction in Africa And I think one of the things we need to talk about more is the risk that these alternatives Actually play not just for international democracy and their support for democracy in Africa But the willingness of Africans on the ground to support democracy and the idea of democracy itself And African leaders are also increasingly as I said contesting the legitimacy of these international interventions You can think about a who a Kenyatta in Kenya Reprimanding Barack Obama for talking about gay rights on his meeting in Kenya when a basically Kenyatta told him a this is none of your business and B We have bigger priorities to worry about right all the way through to Kenyatta similarly reprimanding Theresa May Coming to Kenya to say that she was going to promote the UK to be as important as China and Kenyatta reminded her that he'd met numerous Chinese leaders over the years She was the first conservative party or British leader to actually visit the continent in quite some time So the willingness of leaders to actually speak back to the international community has increased And if you think about some of the things we've seen over the last five to ten years This is in a number of different areas. It's in the economic area when we talk about partnership agreements with the European Union It's in the area of international justice when we think about the African Union Coordinated sort of campaign against the international criminal court when it sought to prosecute leaders in Kenya And it comes into the democracy arena because leaders who want to deflect demands for greater democratization Now have a greater set of tools that they can use to push back and gain currency in their own countries while doing so one of the things I want to push on that hasn't been mentioned and I think is really important is to change in Composition of where we are now spending our democracy aid and I'm going to focus this on election aid Which is what I call the rise of technocratic solutions I think because we've started to realize that Many of the interventions we're making and not generating the desired outcomes because we realize in many cases We're dealing with countries that are stuck in a process of transition and we may have thought at one point that they would Inevitably reach high levels of democracy, but 20 years in we realize that actually that progress isn't necessarily being made We started to try and change the way we spend money So in the early 1990s, we spent so much money through civil society organizations and a lot through electoral commissions We supported civil society organizations for good reasons We assumed that they were going to be more efficient less corrupt and Essentially more responsive to our policy concerns than state governments and state bureaucracies Right and this follows on from of course in the 1980s when the Berg report for the World Bank had Identified the nature of the African state as a critical problem in African development and the argument there was you need to take the state out of the Economy you need to remove subsidies remove bias reduce the state reduce the number amount of employment allow exchange rates to float and Generally get the government out of the economy to allow the economy to grow and so there was a similar attitude when it came to service delivery So this actually led to people like Julie her and critiquing donor policy in Africa on the basis that it was leading to an NGOization of government policy it was empowering NGOs to set the agenda because so much money was going for NGO bank accounts Rather than government bank accounts and to some extent the same thing happened in democracy aid You see vast amounts of money supporting civil society groups that were going to do domestic monitoring or supporting civil society or Doing things like promoting voter education but because we haven't had so many successes recently and because of this pushback and I should say and these talked about this as well But it's worth reinforcing it one of the best predictors of an anti NGO piece of legislation by a government So a piece of legislation introduced by a government to basically curtail NGO activities is a spike in donor support in the last two Years right so this is where the unintended consequences of donor engagement comes in that actually it's often a big Promotion of civil society by the international community done in a very high profile way that leads to the backlash that you were talking about And we actually have some great regression analysis that now shows this quite clearly that actually getting a big increase in money for civil society Almost directly one or two years later triggers a backlash when the government seeks to impose legislation the classic formulation of that Legislation is a percentage of income that must be generated domestically So you have to generate 80 or 90 percent of your income locally which effectively prevents Organizations and taking international grants because of course they can't collect 90 percent more than that on the domestic basis So we've started to move away from funding civil society for good reason We want to protect civil society and not generate unintended consequences, but also we haven't seen the progress we wanted So we started to fund more technology More than half the countries in Africa now use a form of digital technology in their elections That's either voter registration using fingerprints photo verification at the polling station again using fingerprints or voting using technology machines and This has been driven by three things as I said the lack of progress the search for a sort of uncontroversial Controversial solution, but also the fetishization of technology the idea that technology will provide a solution that if we find a way Of registering people using their fingerprints will get rid of the dead voters if we find a way of electronic voting it will get rid of voter fraud and I've got to finish because I'm out of time But the central problem of this of course is that we forget that all of this technology has to be implemented by an institution Typically the electoral commission, which is usually heavily controlled by the ruling party And so what we've seen in about 60 to 70 percent of the cases in which the technology has been introduced is that it's failed And it's failed at key points during the process that have undermined the credibility of the elections But have also ensured that there is space in the electoral process to manipulate the elections Because for example the vote transmission system that was designed to prevent Manipulation during accounting phase goes down for two hours during which a vast number of votes come in for the ruling party And so one of the things I think going back to something you said at the end of your talk was We need to beware the idea that moving away from these long-term difficult sustainable investments in civil society Towards technological investment in equipment and machines is going to solve what is actually inherently a political problem Thank you very much