Supporting Legislative Development within the Political Context: Legislatures As Political Actors and Participants

Abstract

Legislatures are important political actors – one of the three major branches of government. In providing technical and developmental support, donors have been very sensitive to the need to deal respectfully with the legislature so as to avoid charges of undue influence or neo-colonialism. While this originally resulted in donors designing their programs as exclusively “technical” in nature, where the work focuses on reforming and enhancing administrative and functional skills, as noted by Tostensen and Amudson, “Parliamentary strengthening is inherently political in nature and very sensitive.” Moreover, the demand on donors by their citizenry is that legislative support needs to be justified by its effect on achieving broader good governance and development goals. In this paper I want to focus on the problems for a development practitioner in working with a legislature as a political actor and participant in light of the increasing demand by donors for demonstrable programming impact. However, rather than examining the internal politics of legislative change and development, the focus of most of the development literature, I want to reflect on the dynamic interplay between the implementer and the legislature examining how the implementer interacts with the legislature and the extent to which the implementer can respond to the demands of the sponsoring donor to deliver tangible results sought by that donor. As will be described below, there are two primary types of project outcomes associated with legislative strengthening. First, is the development of the legislature as a strong, independent institution capable of carrying out its roles in law making, oversight and representation? The second is working with the legislature to promote improvements in particular areas or issues of concern, such as public health, anti-corruption, and economic development. While legislative strengthening programs have, in the past, concentrated primarily in promoting the former, with the USAID initiative of developing more integrated programming in which governance is incorporated within other types of development programming, it appears increasingly likely that these non-governance specialist program officers will be expecting the legislative strengthening program to contribute more directly to substantive development outcomes. In this paper, I will start by reviewing the emerging emphasis on demonstrable impact, not only on institutional strengthening of the legislature but also on the promotion of desired policy reforms. I will also describe how working with a legislature differs substantially from working with the executive. I will then examine the nature of the relationship between the implementer and the legislature and how certain political considerations will affect the implementer’s ability to promote institutional development. Finally, I will review techniques available to an implementer to help promote donor targeted development issues.