Centre
for Human Environment
Theoretical Trust &
Praxis for
Capacity Development in
Fledgling
Democracies
Backgrounder
prepared for the International Advisory Group on Capacity Building International
Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, IIDEA, 1998
Public Lecture - Respublica Litereria -
RL Vol XIII No 445 MMXIX
Costantinos
Berhutesfa Costantinos, PhD
Professor of Public Policy & Sustainable Institutional Reforms
Executive Summary
Political transitions are initiated at three levels: state led
transitions, society led transitions and combinations of state led and society
led transitions. Three main strategic and processual issues are usually
considered in the study and analysis of democratic transitions (Ibid). First,
the presence of “objective conditions for political transition” in the
socio-economic structures. Second, contingent political dynamics -- democracy is
installed as a result of the conscious reform initiatives of individual
leaders, elite factions and social movements. Finally, political rules and
institutions, where democratisation depends upon the emergence of supportive
set of political institutions. Institutions are recurrent and valued patterns
of political behaviour that give shape and regularity to politics. They may be
manifest as political rules (either legal or informal) or as political
organisations (within the state or civil society). As the building blocks of
democracy, certain combinations of political institutions must be extant or
emergent if a democratic transition is to occur. Political institutions also
include customary political norms and practices, as the prospects for democracy
partly depend on habitual attitudes of the population at large.
|
|
|
|
Implicitly or explicitly, the Western liberal democratic model is often
taken naively as the acme of democratic governance. The target that a host of
other African countries set themselves in the process of democratisation is the
attainment of institutions and practices that have been the basic ingredients
of the Western democratic tradition. Naïve realism within existing perspectives
and projects of democratisation emphasises the immediacies of institutional and
political activity to the neglect of the constitutive and regulative concepts
and norms that define, structure and validate democratic institutions and
practices. It attempts to establish a direct relation to social experience,
largely by passing the intangible, yet no less significant, terrain of critical
political thought. Its immediate turn to the practical tasks of inducing people
to participate in ostensibly democratic activities such as elections, the full
meaning of which is often beyond the grasp of the participants, tends to become
a substitute for the making of transparent and open rules of political
engagement. Hence, the capacity building targets for democracy and good
governance focus on participation, communication, openness and tolerance, capacity-building
targets for democracy and good governance, and administrative rules and
bureaucratic consistency.
Key words: capacity building,
participation, communication, openness, tolerance, democracy, governance,
administrative rules and bureaucratic consistency
We have said over and
over again that what this is all about is not changing a regime. It is about
building democratic capacity and culture at the grassroots so that countries
have the capacity, if there is a democratic opening, not to see that opening
closed by another autocratic regime so that they can engage in a stable
democratic transition. The whole idea that this work is about regime change, shows
a failure to understand what it is all about. Our interest is in strengthening
democratic capacity and culture so that people have the tools to govern
themselves democratically and it’s a long-term process (Gershman, 2016:1).
No comments:
Post a Comment