Strengthening the roles of political parties in Public Accountability - A case study of a new approach in political party assistance
Renée Speijcken
#2011-017
Donors in development cooperation increasingly emphasize the importance
of public accountability in developing countries for the good
functioning of democratic institutions, governance and the effectiveness
of their aid. Political parties are prime actors in a democratic society
that have essential roles to fulfil in public accountability. However,
only few donors work with them. As a result, there is relatively little
knowledge and experience available. This paper aims to contribute to
this body of knowledge by assessing how and to what extent a new
approach of so called 'Centre's for Multiparty Democracy', national
platforms for and by political parties, assist parties in their key
roles between citizen and state to enhance public accountability. This
is done in a case study on Kenya. The paper also explores the main
constraints to public accountability and to what extent cooperation
between parties and civil society has been enhanced. A new conceptual
framework that differentiates political party's roles in public
accountability in four domains and three phases of the accountability
process is used to assess CMD-Kenya's contribution. The paper concludes
that CMDs' approach explores interesting new ways to strengthen the
roles of parties in public accountability. Its main contribution lies in
enhancing mutual trust and strengthening politicians' awareness of the
value that parties have to add to a democratic society in providing them
with a platform that helped them to establish their identities as
parties. At the same time societal trust in parties was strengthened by
organizing joint projects between parties and civil society actors.
Considering its recent set up in 2004, CMD-K has been relatively
successful in initiating modest changes in some of the formal practices
and policies of parties and to some extent in the behaviour of
individual politicians. On the other hand deeper changes in the
underlying 'rules of the game', in parties' stability and their added
value to society, have hardly been realized as strong traditional
informal power relations, donor dependency, institutional governance
problems and managing multiple accountabilities on multiple levels pose
serious threats to CMD-Kenya's functioning and therefore to its clout
and relevance in the future.
Keywords: Public Accountability, Political Parties , Development
Cooperation, Political Party Assistance, Democratization, Impact
evaluation, Political Economy Analysis