 So let me now open up to the floor to hear your comments and questions to the panelists. We have about 20 minutes, I believe here, 25 minutes. Yeah, we'll first start in the back. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for the very interesting presentations. My name is Anu Junko and I'm the executive director of Demo Finland. Political parties are Finland for democracy. So I especially enjoyed the Professor Nick Cheesman's take. Quite probably the take on the working of the democracy support. And I would like to challenge that a bit because as we know, only less than 10% of the development funding goes to democracy support, out of which, from my point of view, way too much has gone to the election support. And when you look at the political party support, it's less than a percent. And this makes up quite nicely what Verena Fritz was saying about the silo between developing economics and economics altogether, as well as democracy support, because I think the political parties have been the forgotten stakeholder. All together in the development sector as a key entity for any country's development, as well as, yes, as well as obviously working or not working towards the democracy. And this came up nicely also at the World Development Report of the World Bank. And especially, I would like to point out from that report, the work of senior researcher Philip Kiefer from the World Bank, because he went to hundreds, I think it was over 400 loans by World Bank. And according to his academic research, the key success was for the successful public sector reform was the programmatic political parties. If the country had those, the public sector reforms were more likely to be highly likely to be successful. So, I do have a question. Professor Chisholm, it would be interesting to hear, where do you see the multi-party support in this scenario? I understand that your talk was very much about the elections, but yes, it would be lovely to hear your views on that. Thank you very much. Thank you. Good. Another question? I'm Joeri Kobanen from the University of Helsinki. I was quite intrigued by this idea that what is the problem now is the co-operation of democracy and governments. And that's the thing which is how we're creating the problem. I'm not really sure if they can be separated. The World Bank has made it's level best to keep these things separate, even if they haven't succeeded. I hope that you have a very strange definition of political, but the World Bank's work is not political, and certainly in their own government. In the government industry, at least this was an accountability. So, having said this, I would like to be a little bit... Let's advocate and say that perhaps we shouldn't be too worried and learn too much about the decline of democracy, or its stagnation, if only if it reflects the realization that this sort of it doesn't seem really be working, and it is something, things like democracy and governance are something which cannot be imposed from outside in no way. And certainly, it's certainly not by a wide-ranging condition. Historically, if you look at how institutions developed, they took a very long time to develop. They emerged for one reason, then they changed their function on the way. I don't think that's something that's extremely difficult or impossible for outsiders to elaborate. But this is an extent I think we shall run into problems when we try to promote democracy for democracy's sake, because it leaves out the question, who's democracy? Which democracy? Okay, thank you. Okay, we'll take these two here first. Well, it's being recorded, so we appreciate if you use the microphone. Yes, I'm going back to the two silos. I think it's a very important point here, because also going back to the first presentation, I would like to urge you, really, if we make a statement, if we urge people to promote democracy, for the sake of democracy, it's probably a very simple point. There needs to be a very clear theory of change, and you've talked about, as in some of the theories, we have many theories of change, but how do we get to democracy? There are many ways. Maybe we shouldn't invest in democracy. Maybe, as we all know, it's not a new point. Maybe we should invest in poverty reduction. Also, we should not confuse human rights and democracy. These are two very different points. In the end, we're here to talk about development, and maybe about development, maybe about democracy. In the relations to this, I also have a question to Nick. What's the current DFID theory of change? As we know, investment in engineers does not work greatly. Investment in technology is not a solution either. So what's the current DFID of this? Okay, thank you. Thank you. It seems as if that you have all concentrated on developing a way to encourage democracy, and I'm wondering why you make that separation, although it's convenient for financial reasons. Because I feel that the donors should actually be exemplary in the way they themselves practice democracy, and here I feel that they do not themselves practice democracy. You put up a statement that said donors have become complicit in fostering development in university commons without democracy, and the question was why. Now, in my opinion, the donors have institutionalized discrimination and poor democratic practices. And for this, I don't need to go far. I can pin it down to Finida, Danida, Norad and Sida, the so-called liberalized Nordic democracies. They do not practice democracy in their development assistance. Secondly, the other aspect is that we expect them to teach by example. Now, they have very little transparency in their decision-making, their discriminatory as well in their practices. So one point that arises here is why is aid given to undemocratic regimes? Why are undemocratic regimes in Africa, and for that matter even in Asia, allowed to dominate their undemocratic systems of government? And the answer to that that I can suggest is that is because international exploitation of these countries depends on having strong regimes which dictate on how they're going to sell their natural resources. And so these are basically could be construed as questions or they can be construed as just remarks. But if anyone wants me to prove what I'm saying, I'm willing to take the challenge. Okay, thank you. Okay, I think we'll first take those first four questions. I think one of those was directly addressed to Nick, and then I think the others are quite broad and raise a lot of kind of philosophical issues as well, I think about how we're looking at democracy versus development assistance. So any of the other panelists who want to address those as well. Let's first start with Nick since he had one directly addressed to him. Yes, on the party's point, yes, absolutely. I mean, I was talking more about elections because I knew that our first speaker was going to focus more on democracy fallback. So I didn't want to focus too much on the same thing, which is why I tried to take in our approach. So that wasn't intended to suggest that we should be focusing exclusively on elections or that we shouldn't be focusing on those other areas. I agree with you about parties, and we go back to Tom Cuthers' very important book on parties being the weakest link in new democracies in most parts of the world. And I think that's fundamentally true, and I think your point about the significance of more programmatic parties for a range of development outcomes is absolutely central. I think one of the things that is true key is the question of how do we do that work. And of course, many governments shy away from supporting parties because it seems to be an infringement on sovereignty. To give you an example, I was in Zimbabwe trying to design strategies that would strengthen the last Zimbabwe election. There's a serious question here. Do you try and design a program that strengthens party agents, but then you have to design a program that Zanupia will allow you to operate in a context in which you have opposition parties in very high levels of tension and competitive election? And how do you design a program that's acceptable to all of the parties? And I think one of the ways in which organizations like yours, the Westminster Foundation, NAMD and others have an advantage is to be able to do party to party work, which doesn't have the label of being state to party work and therefore the sovereignty issue is slightly softer and could be managed. But of course that means that we need to drive more money into that type of activity but also develop better mechanisms to prove that that's effective so that that's a sustainable way of doing it. But I think that question about sovereignty is one reason why we pushed for these more technocratic solutions because they're easier to deliver, they're less problematic, but it doesn't mean that they're necessarily more effective. And I think one of the things I was saying is we need to not shy away from the hard work that needs to be done to make stuff work. I was asked about DFID's theory of change. That's a very big question and I'm not an expert on DFID. So for what I would say, having done a lot of work with DFID on political economy recently, as DFID's argument would perhaps be, we don't have one theory of change. That it is inappropriate to have one theory of change. That almost all the work in political economy analysis that's been done in the last 10 years has been focusing on more adaptive models, more reflective models, models with a more context specific, models that go with the grain rather than against the grain but in very specific ways, models that are not based simply on working through institutions and saying let's build a stronger legislature simply by working with the legislature and having a theory of change around that. But let's build change by forming coalitions that allow us to overcome obstacles and veto players and generate sufficient consensus. And those coalitions for change can only be identified on the ground in a case by case, even sector by sector level. And I think that's not a very satisfying answer in the sense that there's no one size fits all model. But if we know anything from the last 20 years it's that there is no one size fits all solution. So I think in some ways what DFID is trying to do by pushing into more adaptive programming and more responsive programming is really good. I think the challenge and I think DFID would recognize this themselves is that it's easy to say that but it's very hard to implement that because actually on the ground people are still used to working in the old way and it's hard to actually introduce something that's more challenging or revolutionary. Just a very quick question on the democracy and why should we see it as being significant. My point would be if you look at the last 30 years the consistently highest growing countries in Africa are the more open political countries. They're not the authoritarian states. Authoritarian states in Africa have achieved high levels of growth for short periods of time and then crashed. That was true in the 70s and 80s and it's also looking to the countries like Ethiopia in terms of having to reconfigure the political system. So to me the lesson of history in Africa is that you can grow very quickly faster than a democracy with an authoritarian system but you cannot sustain that for 20 years. The way to sustain that is to build a more inclusive political system. Now that doesn't have to be a democracy. It might be a different form of system. It might be a more inclusive version of a one-party state. It might be something else but it has to be more inclusive. So the systems that we see right now in cases like Angola, Rwanda, Ethiopia to me do not look politically sustainable in the long term and if they're politically not sustainable the economic gains they're achieving will not be sustainable. So the Ethiopia case is really fascinating because the question is here this became a politically unsustainable system they're trying to simultaneously do now political and economic reform and I agree with you the economic strengthening will probably make that political reform easier to do but the success of that long-term economic reform will now depend on managing this political situation and I believe that Rwanda will face the same challenge in the next 10 years as well and so what that all means if we add all that up is it actually paying attention to how we generate more effective open political systems is critical to long-term economic gains so whether you care about democracy for its own sake or whether you care about it for long-term economic development I think you end up at the same place we have to get this right. So let me be really quite brief I mean there's a lot of work on this overall relationship between governance and growth and then within governance what really matters and perhaps just the one point that I would flag I agree very much with Nick that there isn't a unified theory of change I think but perhaps there may have been in the past the expectation that democracy was instrumental to growth or other developments and I think what I would perhaps propose is that improving governance in how rules are made and how things function in the economy has a benefit to democracy so if you can get functioning institutions it makes it easier to then at some point build a functioning democracy if you don't have that then it's probably very hard and that comes back to my earlier point that probably the 1990s was a very difficult moment in time to actually begin a democratization in Africa to make that successful but the challenge is that there are a number of countries where we worry so much about fragile states where governance is just overall very very poor, very chaotic, very captured and how to move out of those situations I think it's going to be a key puzzle for the next 20 years for the overall development community I think I almost want to apologize I may be I should have spent three more minutes in my presentation so to make it a little bit more clear I think I'm going to be very clear on what I mean by democracy and there are very many forms of democracy and it's going to develop over history, over time and it is a domestic issue but a democracy has two components there is contestation over power who has power, there is a competition in order to obtain power which includes freedom of association freedom to form bodies freedom to compete in elections so that's the number one the second part which is the part that gets left out especially around Europe these days is rule of law contestation is really very weak and nothing without rule of law and these two components rule of law and contestation has to be present how the composition comes about the party system how this works out that is something that cannot be designed I totally agree but this is what I mean by democracy why do I think it's important that we separate the concepts of governance from the concept of democracy first of all what I talk about rule of law that's governance of course everything you talked about that's part of rule of law but it goes back to what Nick was saying in his presentation the fact that this concept became so wide with World Bank with its legal statues not being touched anything that looks like politics that concept became so all embrace it that you could put anything into it and that is the problem because you put anything into the concept and then you blame it on democracy in the end and so I really want to back to the first commentator democracy aid is only 10% and even that a lot of it goes to securitisation and political party support is like a faction of that so that's just really important but I think it's just why that's why it's to me the world outside cannot dictate what a democracy is supposed to look is supposed to be like it has to have those two components and then countries would have to sort that out you know how the last thing I wanted to say there are so many things I wanted to say and I think I just really want to second what Rina said in her introductory comments maybe in the 1990s was the worst time of all to actually try to solve because it was at the same time that the international world was quietly dismantling states that was the big project and so and that is something we need to think about and this we may have actually sort of lost the chance when there was a very very uniform and kind of almost a strong belief for a time in democracy if we had a very bad situation to carry it out so I just think I really want to second that I think a lot of democracy support we need to separate it it should happen it should be organized differently I think donors by lateral governments should get themselves out of this because it out of the way they end up supporting the sitting government it's really hard not to that's part of diplomacy so NGO funds, party funds media funds that is a way for governments to separate themselves and it is to me a way of getting into more kind of independence semi-state institutions that can overlook this to actually sort of be able to create these watchdogs an underrated institution that I have a strong affinity for is the ombudsman that's one of the things that we can think about in the future a quick point first, support for authoritarian regimes you are right if you go back to the 90s let's take two example, France and the USA two countries in Africa Zahir for the USA and Togo for France they were not doing well at all at the time all the countries in Africa were trying to democratize but they received more help than maybe the good guys maybe not the different case but other countries that are democratizing so I think you are right second, now I think in the democratization studies you have more and more talks coming up about authoritarian resilience for example I don't know if you know Yevitzky and Westbrook or the Arab states why these Arab states continue to be supported by countries like the USA and something to do with national interests so I think you are right second, why does democracy matter I think and maybe you will go further Nick said that you can achieve some kind of economic success with the authoritarian regime but you have to find another way I think in Africa these days there is no other ways than the democratic system because if you look at the Afro-Biohematical for example surveys what you see is that the African societies are eager to democratize them they want freedom so it's very difficult for example in countries like Rwanda or Ethiopia where all the seats in the National Assembly are for the ruling party I think it's very difficult to sustain something like this at one point or another pluralism should be implemented then can democracy be imposed from outside I think yes there are two questions here if you look back to the second wave of democratization the second wave of democratization following the second world war Japan and countries like that you can but if you want democratize to be sustained and consolidated you need to look inside in consideration and sustainability in the long run is the matter of internal affairs so I think if you make this distinction maybe you can clarify a little bit the question and finally about the World Bank I don't know maybe you can correct me but it's true that the World Bank is not supposed to do politics but if you go I think it's the World Bank that issued this report in 1989 called Sub-Saharan Africa from crisis to sustainable growth where the government came governments is not only the way to manage like economic affairs but also institutions that are able to support this and when you talk about this it means pluralist institutions and then it's very difficult to separate the two so the World Bank is not supposed but in practice what some of the things they do like the idea of governments goes back to politics also I think unfortunately we do have to end it there but of course please do come and ask your questions to the panelists bilaterally I'd like to thank you for attending today and definitely to thank all our panelists for I think a really thought provoking session today Thanks