Micro-Assistance to Democracy: Two Revolutions in Promoting Consolidation of Democracy in Developing Countries

Abstract

Despite acknowledging the need for nurturing democracy from within, democracy assistance programmes have often been carried out in a top-down fashion. By starting from the limits of democracy assistance, this article outlines the notion of micro-assistance to democracy, which can be defined as support to local civil society organizations operating at the most grassroots level, and establishes a comparison between micro-assistance to democracy and the case of micro-credit in anti-poverty policies. Both micro-credit and micro-assistance to democracy share the same understanding of development (the former economic, the latter political) as a bottom-up process. In cases of democratic consolidation where it is deemed to be a feasible and effective approach, micro-assistance to democracy encourages the deepening of democratic practices and vertical accountability and responsiveness. Acknowledging the potential of micro-assistance to democracy would bring about two revolutions in the way democracy assistance has been traditionally conceived of. The first revolution is a Copernican revolution, since democratic consolidation comes to be understood as a mainly bottom-up process, radically opposite to the more traditional top-down rationale of the last decade of democracy promotion policies. The second revolution regards how to measure democratic advancement. Arguing that democracy assistance can more effectively be assessed at the micro-level of local projects, this analysis maintains that micro-assistance to democracy provides international donors with more reliable information on the impact of democracy assistance programmes. Since micro-assistance to democracy produces a regression to local democratic development as the first source of knowledge, this second revolution might be seen as a Cartesian epistemological reconstruction.