International IDEA has been rethinking the international approach to electoral assistance and taking a leading role in advocating long-term support strategies rather than support to ad hoc projects aimed at specific electoral events. Donor support for elections has been traditionally event driven: ample resources have been made for a first transitional election, but support tends to dissipate afterwards. Reorienting electoral assistance towards building the professional capacity of national electoral administrations and making them less dependent on external assistance is a better long term investment than funding the conduct of elections alone.
This project aims to both develop global principles on what constitutes effective electoral assistance and to achieve a consensus among development partners. International IDEA is developing guidelines for organizations providing or receiving electoral assistance which shift the emphasis towards a longer term developmental approach. The guidelines emerge from discussions of donors, assistance providers and recipients and attempt to set standards of best practice.
Effective Electoral Assistance Conference
The “Effective Electoral Assistance Conference” in Ottawa May 2006 gathered most representatives of the world’s development partners, implementing agencies, Electoral Management Bodies (EMBs) and worldwide electoral assistance experts to discuss effective electoral assistance.
The aims of the meeting were to share experiences, gather different perspectives and to reach a common understanding of how to make electoral assistance more effective and electoral processes more sustainable.
Electoral Assistance Training Course
Following the recommendations from the conference, International IDEA has developed a three-day Electoral Assistance Training module for reorienting bilateral and multilateral development agencies to long-term process-driven support. To this purpose, it encourages looking beyond the immediate electoral event to be supported and, via an “Electoral Cycle Approach”, tailor the electoral assistance interventions towards the developing of the institutional capacity of the EMBs and the long-term needs of the civil society. The training course combines the analysis of the lessons learned from past experience of electoral assistance with the investigation of future challenges.
The Electoral Assistance Training Course:
- Outlines the lessons learned and presents a new operational approach in the field of electoral assistance.
- Defines activities that can be implemented in support of Electoral Cycles also introducing the cross-cutting issues and the factors to be considered when embracing technology for electoral processes.
- Specifies the elements of enhanced collaboration on the production of content, training, and participation in specialist networks with the major actors in the electoral assistance field.
- Indicates the available operational tools and resources to be taken into consideration for programming, formulating and implementing electoral assistance.
International IDEA collaborated with the European Commission (EC) and the UN Development Programme (UNDP) in adapting a four-day joint training course. The objective of the training is to introduce EC and UNDP field staff with the current policy framework that governs both EU and UN involvement in elections, lessons learned, and the electoral cycle and new approaches in electoral assistance with a view to building capacity for programming, identification, formulation, implementation and evaluation of electoral assistance projects. International IDEA co-facilitated the first EC-UNDP joint training workshop in Brussels in September and a second one in Tanzania in November 2006.
