Evaluating the Impact of Private Aid Interventions Aimed at Strengthening Civil Society

Author(s): Kees Biekart
Publication date: Wednesday 23 February 2005

Since the early 1990s, private and official aid agencies increasingly elaborated policies aimed at strengthening civil society, often as part of ‘good governance’ agendas. Although civil society building is not really a new phenomenon -private aid agencies have a long tradition of supporting organisations in civil society opposing authoritarian rule, particularly in Latin America- evaluating the results of these policies is a rather new area of concern (Crawford 1995; Robinson 1996b).

This paper examines the problems encountered by evaluating the impact of civil society building interventions. It is largely based on research in Central America since the early 1990s, focusing on the role of European private aid agencies during Central America’s democratic transitions.

Private aid agencies are generally believed to posses several comparative advantages over official aid agencies in strengthening civil society as they are relatively autonomous from Northern governments and political parties, have the capacity to directly provide substantial financial resources to Southern actors in civil society in a participatory way and to incorporate them into transnational networks for advocacy purposes. Official aid agencies therefore often use private aid agencies as channels for civil society building programmes. After briefly examining the meaning of civil society for democratic transitions, the paper outlines the main elements of these programmes before getting into the issue of impact evaluation. This assumes however that it is possible to verify what private aid agencies have achieved with their interventions, which is a difficult undertaking because assessing impact encounters many obstacles and pitfalls. ‘Performance’ of private aid agencies is not something that can be easily ‘measured’, and the question is addressed whether it is possible to attribute particular achievements of Southern actors to the interventions of private aid agencies. Several methodological lessons can be learned from a number of recent impact studies. These lessons were incorporated into a framework for analysing the impact of private aid interventions contributing to civil society building, which is discussed at the end of this paper.

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