In 2006-7, following the publication of Transacting Transition, the project launched two linked follow-on initiatives, under the rubric Evaluating Intervention.
Under the title Evaluating Intervention: Local perspectives on democracy-building in the Post-Yugoslav countries and territories, the project is hosting an essay competition that we hope will generate a companion volume to Transacting Transition. It is intended to highlight the value of locally-grounded perspectives on international democracy-building efforts in the former Yugoslavia, by publishing essays by students, scholars, professionals, activists and practitioners in the region which analyze the social, cultural, political or economic dimensions of international involvement in transition. More details are at the competition webpage.
Under the title Evaluating Intervention: Knowledge production and democracy promotion in the Western Balkans, project director Keith Brown is assessing U.S. democracy promotion programs in Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo and Macedonia, analyzing in particular the politics and culture of program evaluation and its double duty as audit process and learning process. Taking as start point the creation of the Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI) within the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in 1994, and drawing primarily on publicly available project reporting mandated by the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) of 1993, as well as congressional testimony and U.S. media coverage, the research will trace changes and continuities in the explicit theory, methodology and reporting of democracy promotion initiatives, focusing in particular on the extent to which the political, social and economic context of the region informed (or did not inform) programming. By focusing in particular on evaluations - produced in significant numbers, but seldom analyzed closely - the project will contribute both to scholarship on the impact of international intervention on the region, and to efforts by government and non-governmental agencies to capture "lessons learned" from a decade of engagement in democracy-building in the region. It aims to yield policy-relevant publications which illuminate the ground-level realities behind polemical arguments which rush to judge democracy promotion as either success or failure.
The project received support from the National Council on Eurasian and East European Research. The project proposal can be accessed here.
