Last month’s decision by the Palestinian Authority to schedule municipal elections in early October hardly registered in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, much less here in Washington. In light of Hamas’ recent decision to take part in the process, however, those elections have suddenly taken on new meaning. While the election of some 414 village, town, and city councils across the West Bank and Gaza Strip will not change the face of the Palestinian leadership or alter the diplomatic impasse with Israel, local elections have the potential to unlock the current paralysis within Palestinian politics.

Although Palestinian law calls for local elections to take place every four years, they have only been held twice since the creation of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in 1993, only one of which could be deemed genuinely competitive. The first and only local elections to take place in both the West Bank and Gaza Strip were held in 2004-05, in which Hamas—in its first foray into electoral politics—made major gains. Local elections were again held in 2012, although this time Hamas boycotted the process, preventing the vote from taking place in Gaza and allowing Fatah to declare a sweeping, if somewhat hollow, victory. 

Hamas’ decision to take part in this year’s local elections was therefore something of a surprise. Indeed, Hamas initially expressed dismay at the announcement, accusing the leadership in Ramallah of acting without consulting the other parties. Moreover, should the elections proceed as planned on October 8, they would be the first competitive electoral contest in the occupied territories since Hamas defeated Mahmoud Abbas’s ruling Fatah faction in the 2006 legislative election. Those elections triggered an international boycott of the PA which eventually led to the split between Fatah and Hamas and the current political paralysis.

If nothing else, Hamas’ entry into the elections averts another needless internal crisis in Palestinian politics. A boycott by Hamas would likely have further entrenched the political and geographic division between the Fatah-dominated West Bank and Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, while dealing yet another blow to the beleaguered National Consensus Government, which despite being accepted by both factions in April 2014 has yet to physically return to Gaza. Movement on the reconciliation track could also help push the long-stalled reconstruction of Gaza, which has yet to recover from the devastating war of 2014.

Hamas has little to lose from participating in an election that is unlikely to significantly alter the political landscape one way or the other...[and Fatah] has little to gain from “winning” another electoral process that is largely uncontested.

What explains Hamas’ apparent change of heart? For one, Hamas may believe it has an advantage over Fatah, which continues to suffer from widespread perceptions of corruption and incompetence—a perception reinforced by the collapse of the peace process as well as the unprecedented unpopularity of President Abbas. Hamas may also view the upcoming vote as a way to gauge its current standing and future prospects in anticipation of long-awaited legislative and presidential elections. Either way, Hamas has little to lose from participating in an election that is unlikely to significantly alter the political landscape one way or the other. 

Hamas’ decision to participate in the elections is welcome news for Palestinian voters eager to see the return of competitive elections and a revival of political life after years of stagnation. It even helps Fatah, which has little to gain from “winning” another electoral process that is largely uncontested. More important, as the party that lost both parliamentary elections and a civil war in 2006-07 and that remains the chief proponent of a failed process, Fatah desperately needs a political victory of some kind as well as a basis on which to stake its claim to legitimacy and continued grip on power.

That said, it is important not to overstate the significance of local elections, which in the end will do nothing to address the deeper problems facing Palestinians in the occupied territories, whether from Israel’s continued occupation and its ever-expanding settlement enterprise or the ongoing political dysfunction within their own ranks. On the other hand, the prospect of the first competitive Palestinian elections in a decade represents a small but significant ripple in the otherwise stagnant waters of Palestinian politics.

       

Editors’ Note: Whatever one thinks of Erdoğan, there is little doubt: As tenuous as Turkey’s future remains, a disaster—one that would have had ripple effects across the region—was averted last week, writes Shadi Hamid. Here, he makes sense of the coup and why it failed, drawing out a few key lessons. This post originally appeared in Newsweek Middle East.

On a Friday night, just a day after a horrific attack in Nice, France, that had taken the lives of more than 80, rumors of a military coup in Turkey began to spread.

It was a reminder that even the most unlikely things can happen in a Middle East that tends to follow the maxim “if it can get worse, it probably will.” Nearly everyone, including senior U.S. officials, were caught by surprise. Political scientist Jay Ulfelder had put the probability of a Turkish coup attempt in 2016 at a mere 2.5 percent.

For all of the ruling AK Party’s faults and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s intensifying paranoia and authoritarian tendencies, perhaps the most consequential victory the party could claim was the neutralization of Turkey’s powerful military, which long considered itself the guardian of Turkish secularism. The army had been responsible for a steady succession of coups. The first, in 1960, where a democratically elected prime minister was hung to death was never too far from Erdoğan’s mind, despite the passing of more than five decades. But it had seemed that after 14 years of AKP rule, Turkey had finally moved beyond its own dark history of military intervention. But it hadn’t.

Coups introduce a dynamic where there can only be one winner. Coup plotters, once they make their decision to act, have an incentive to fight (and kill) to the very end, since failure usually entails a harsh prison sentence, or worse. In countries already wracked by existential, winner-takes-all politics and deep social polarization, coups, especially if they succeed, are likely to provoke ongoing bloodshed and civil conflict. Whatever one thinks of Erdoğan, there is little doubt: As tenuous as Turkey’s future remains, a disaster—one that would have had ripple effects across the region—was averted.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan addresses the crowd following a funeral service for victims of the thwarted coup in Istanbul at Fatih Mosque in Istanbul, Turkey, July 17, 2016. Photo credit: Reuters/Alkis Konstantinidis.

In making sense of the coup and why it failed, there are a few key lessons. One has to do with the importance of norms. Despite a long history of military intervention, norms against coups have entrenched themselves in recent years, including, most importantly, among secular parties; among these are groups that have a pronounced dislike of Erdoğan. This norm shift happened quickly. As recently as 2008, Turkey’s Constitutional Court was just one vote away from shuttering the AKP for “anti-secular activities.” The idea that disputes, however intense, must be resolved through legal, democratic means has spread and deepened, cutting across societal and ideological divides.

The country’s last successful coup was in 1997, when the military forced the resignation of an Islamist-led coalition government. The Islamists of the Welfare Party, an AKP predecessor, were unable or unwilling to take to the streets en masse, allowing the army to quickly impose itself. This time around, however, Erdoğan and other AKP leaders immediately called on their supporters to mobilize throughout the country and resist the army’s moves.

For me, Friday night was a frightening moment, presenting a key test for an international community that has had a checkered record of (not) opposing coups against deeply flawed but still democratically-elected Islamists. As I watched the coup attempt unfolding in real time, I was reminded of the sick feeling I had on July 3, 2013, the day the Egyptian military overthrew President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood. We have the benefit of knowing how the coup turned out there, producing a brutal outcome responsible for the worst mass killing in modern Egyptian history, according to Human Rights Watch.

Of course, that Turkey didn’t follow in Egypt’s footsteps does not mean that the country is in the clear. In 2015, I conducted extensive interviews with current and former AKP figures for my new book on the “problem” of Islam and politics. While the coup attempt cannot be reduced a simple Islamist-secular divide, the aftermath of the coup—with Erdoğan moving aggressively to crack down on both actual and potential opponents—is likely to exacerbate ideological divisions over the role of religion in Turkish society.

With the other Islamist groups I’ve studied, including the Egyptian and Jordanian Muslim Brotherhoods, there was always at the least the pretense of sounding conciliatory. Not so much in Turkey, where some of the AKP figures I interviewed openly expressed a raw, bitterness toward their secular opponents. For them, after all, it was quite personal. Most lived through the 1997 coup and the so-called “February 28 process” which aimed to deal a decisive blow against the broader Islamic movement in every facet of public life, particularly in the educational sphere, with the shutting down of imam hatip religious schools.

A senior advisor to former Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu told me that Turkey’s normalization required “carrying Ataturk to his grave,” referring to the still revered founder of modern Turkey and the architect of decades of forced secularization. For this advisor, the scars hadn’t gone away. He was still furious that his wife, because she wore a headscarf, wasn’t able to work at a state hospital until 2014, despite the fact that, by then, the AKP had been in power for 12 years.

In short, Turkey has a long way to go, considering that questions over Islam, identity, and the very meaning of what it means to be both Turkish and Muslim remain unresolved. But, at least for a moment, observers can take some solace in the fact that, as bad as it still might be, it could have been worse—perhaps much worse.

       

Editors’ Note: The attempted coup in Turkey was, for many observers, reminiscent of another recent July uprising in a key American ally: the 2013 military takeover in Egypt. These coups were a disaster for U.S. policy in both cases, and would have been regardless of how they turned out, argues Jeremy Shapiro. This post originally appeared on Vox.

Friday’s attempted military coup in Turkey demonstrates that yet another U.S. partner in the Middle East seems to be descending into domestic unrest. The spectacle was, for many observers, reminiscent of another recent July uprising in a key American ally: the 2013 military takeover in Egypt. There, as in Turkey, a powerful military in a country with a history of coups rebelled against a democratically elected Islamist government.

Egyptians and Turks alike will naturally reject such comparisons and emphasize the unique nature of their respective situations—not least that the coup in Egypt succeeded and the one in Turkey failed. They have a point. The differences in the local political context are more important than the superficial similarities.

But from an American perspective, there is a key similarity: These coups were a disaster for U.S. policy in both cases, and would have been regardless of how they turned out.

In each case, the U.S. government’s immediate response to fast-moving situations was to issue bland statements urging calm and condemning violence. Regardless, it gets blamed for not acting forcefully enough, and often accused of directly instigating the violence. In the end, a relationship with the government that emerges is strained, both by such accusations and by the ensuing crackdown and human rights abuses that usually follow both successful and unsuccessful coups.

How does the United States end up in this no-win situation so frequently? Why is domestic unrest in faraway countries like Egypt and Turkey such a problem for the United States?

The essential problem is that the United States cannot just do foreign policy business with its partners. Because of America’s own values and domestic politics, it needs to get involved in their domestic political struggles. It needs to promote democracy and civil society in its partners and to take positions on controversial domestic issues such as the proper functioning of democratic institutions and the protection of human rights or media freedom.

This means that when domestic politics explodes, the United States is often caught in the middle.

Partnership isn't enough

Both Egypt and Turkey are “key security partners” of the United States. This means the U.S. government needs these countries to deal with critical security issues.

Turkey is a NATO ally that sits at the crossroads of practically every geopolitical issue in the Middle East. It is particularly critical for the fight against ISIS. The United States and its anti-ISIS coalition partners supply their partners on the ground in Syria through Turkish territory and use the military base at Incirlik in Turkey to launch airstrikes against ISIS. The foreign fighters that replenish ISIS’s ranks have also often come into Syria via Turkey.

Egypt is also seen as an important partner for counterterrorism. It is struggling to cope with jihadist groups, some of them linked to ISIS, in the Sinai Peninsula. Egypt also provides the United States military with privileged access to the strategic Suez Canal, helps keep the peace with Israel, and helps ensure that weapons that might be used to attack Israel don’t get to Hamas through Egypt’s border with Gaza.

One could argue about whether these are truly important security interests for the United States. But the key point is that successive American governments since, in the case of Turkey in the 1950s and in the case of Egypt in the 1970s, have accepted that they are.

They have accordingly sought to build an effective partnership with both countries. The United States is committed, through NATO, to defend Turkey in case of aggression. And the United States provides Egypt with more than $1.3 billion a year in military assistance and $150 million a year in economic assistance, making it the second-largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid in the world (after Israel).

But the United States can’t just give these guarantees and this money without taking on some moral responsibility for what goes on in these countries. Debates over these countries in U.S. domestic politics reflects this sense of moral responsibility.

If the Egyptian military overthrows a democratically elected government, U.S. Congressmembers will quite naturally ask why the United States is giving nearly $1.5 billion a year to a government that shoots peaceful protesters in the street. If the Turkish government suppresses media freedom or arrests judges, U.S. human rights groups will similarly question why the United States accepts such actions by a NATO ally.

Hoping to escape from this dilemma, the U.S. government has long sought to promote the Western values of democracy and human rights in its security partners.

But particularly in the Middle East, this has rarely worked. The United States doesn’t really know how to democratize these societies, and in any case, it values its security relationship with the government too much to exert sustained pressure.

So even as the Egyptian military overthrew the democratically elected government, the United States continued to give it military aid. Even as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has moved in an increasingly authoritarian direction, the United States has stepped up its security cooperation with Turkey over ISIS.

The result is a hypocrisy that is evident and annoying to both the government and its opposition. Every effort to pressure governments on human rights elicits furious reactions and denials. And when, despite the rhetoric about human rights from U.S. officials, nothing really improves, the population grows cynical about U.S. motives.

So every effort to build up civil society organizations spawns a million conspiracy theories about U.S. involvement in domestic politics.

The crucible of a coup

Military coups or revolutions in U.S. partners always bring these tensions out into the open. They force the United States to confront in extremely fraught circumstances whether it most prizes its security relationship or its commitment to democratic values.

Usually, it can’t decide. The immediate reaction tends to be both muddled and seen through a lens of decades of built-up distrust of the United States. The conspiracy theorists find ample evidence for every preconceived notion.

The reaction to the Turkish coup has been a textbook example of this dynamic. The U.S. government condemned the coup, but it took several hours. The Turkish government interpreted this as hedging and evidence of ill will.

President Erdoğan has blamed the coup on Fethullah Gülen, a Muslim cleric in self-imposed exile in the United States, and wants the U.S. government to extradite him to Turkey.

When Secretary of State John Kerry said the United States would need solid evidence to extradite him, a Turkish government minister accused the United States of instigating the coup itself. As Kerry warned Turkey about the large number of arrests, the Turkish government temporarily restricted use of the Incirlik base and arrested its Turkish commander on suspicion of involvement in the coup. The conspiracy theorists went wild:

Ibrahim Karagul, Chief editor of pro-AKP daily: "The USA is behind this coup. I'm saying it clearly that the USA attempted to kill Erdogan."

— Turkey Untold (@TurkeyUntold) July 19, 2016

If the United States wanted to break out of the vicious cycle, it would either have to end its security partnership with Turkey or accept that that partnership means accepting Turkish authoritarianism. But if experience is any guide, the United States will not take either of those paths.

As in Egypt, the U.S. relationship with Turkey will probably survive these events, albeit in diminished form. After a period of distancing, both sides will accept that they need each other for their mutual security problems too much to allow a complete breakdown.

But at the same time, the distrust of the United States within the government and the hatred of the United States within the population will grow. The U.S.-Turkey relationship will fail to evolve into a true alliance of trust and thus be of limited use in defeating ISIS or ending the civil war with the Kurds in Turkey.

In the meantime, Turkey's roiled domestic politics will continue as Erdoğan attempts to cleanse Turkish politics of his opponents. The next coup or revolution may be the last that the strained U.S.-Turkish alliance can withstand.

       

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has responded to last week’s coup attempt with a hammer. Over the span of just a few days, more than 50,000 people have been fired from their jobs or detained on suspicions that they’re connected to the coup or to the Gülenist movement (which President Erdoğan blames for the coup attempt). Now emergency rule has been imposed, suggesting that more detentions may follow.

Turkish leaders are assuring everyone that the state of emergency is meant to control the situation and to preserve Turkish democracy. But many observers, including in the West, aren’t buying it: There are legitimate fears that these measures will actually further consolidate Erdoğan’s authoritarian rule. And the consequences of Turkey’s continued drift away from democracy isn’t only a human rights or governance problem—it could become a real geopolitical challenge for the West. 

The swinging pendulum

Turkey—literally the bridge between Europe and Asia—sometimes seems of two minds on governance issues. On the one hand, its leaders express a commitment to a Western form of governance based on the rule of law, liberal democracy, transparency, and accountability. On the other—and more in the vein of governance styles in Russia, Iran, and China—they sometimes reject what they see as outside interference, restrict civil liberties and government transparency, and promote a heavy state role in the economy. 

Although Turkey was welcomed into NATO and other transatlantic institutions after World War II—at a time when Soviet expansionism was a real fear—its commitment to democratic values has always been shaky. The military’s shadow loomed large over Turkish politics (last week’s coup attempt was far from the first) and the country’s human rights record was poor, particularly on minority rights. 

Many thought that all this would change when Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in 2002. They introduced political reforms that propelled Turkey toward EU membership. The Turkish economy excelled: Many people in Turkey once depended on remittances sent by Gastarbeiters (guest workers) in Germany and other West European countries, for instance, but the country quickly became host itself to immigrants from neighboring countries. Tourists, business people, students, athletes, and artists poured into the country in the millions. And Turkey enjoyed considerable soft power in the region and the world, often touted as a model in the wake of the Arab Spring of a country that properly paired mainstream Islamism and democratic governance. None of this would have been possible were it not for Turkey’s growing adherence to Western governance norms and its membership in the transatlantic community. 

But the picture has since become rather grim. The events of the past week have renewed concerns about the state of Turkish democracy, yes—but those concerns have in fact been growing for years. Turkey’s commitment to supporting freedom of expression, freedom of the media, anti-corruption efforts, and liberal markets has been in serious doubt for a while. Meanwhile, the economy has stalled, related in part to political developments and to a recent spate of terror attacks that have seriously damaged the overall security situation. It is no wonder that Turkish per capita income—which peaked at $10,800 in 2013—has now fallen to 2009 levels, at $9,950. (That’s an almost 10 percent drop in the span of just two years.) Turkey’s further slide away from Western governance norms would likely only make matters worse, making Erdoğan’s promise of putting Turkey among the largest 10 economies in the world a fantasy.

If you ask Erdoğan and his AKP colleagues why reforms sputtered out, they’re likely to answer with conspiracy theories: They’ll blame the West, the EU, the interest rate lobby, and others. But the AKP has failed to be self-critical, which could have helped it succeed. 

Turkey’s choice of orbit

So if Turkey seems to be moving away from Western norms, is it also moving away from the West? Possibly. In November 2013—after years of stop-and-go accession talks with the EU—Erdoğan sought Russian President Vladimir Putin’s support for accepting Turkey into Eurasian organizations like the Shanghai Five. That could be a big geostrategic gain for Russia, something not lost on the Russian press.

Western Europe and the United States would be the biggest losers if Turkey moved closer to Russia’s camp. Losing their partnership with Turkey would deliver a serious blow to the fight against ISIS in Syria and Iraq, for one thing. But it would also further dim prospects that Turkey might really embrace Western-style democracy any time soon. As Ted Piccone has written, Turkey has the potential to be a linchpin of the liberal international order—and a long-term downturn in the country could have wide detrimental effects in regional and global governance. 

The path ahead

Finally, is there a role for the United States in all this? In the short term, as Ömer Taşpınar has argued, the United States should offer real help to Ankara in investigating the role of Pennsylvania resident Fethullah Gülen and his movement in last week’s coup attempt. Extradition is a highly sensitive issue, and the United States must defend its legal standards. At the same time, that kind of cooperation could build trust in U.S.-Turkey relations, calm Ankara’s paranoia about a potential U.S. role in the coup attempt (and therefore possibly help minimize the damage to Turkish democracy that Ankara itself might cause in its heavy-handed response), and help the United States build credibility on the rule of law. A thorough investigation—including into the Gülenists—is important for determining who was behind the coup attempt. And it’s in U.S. interests to know: As Turkey is a NATO member, a threat against it should be considered a threat against all members. It is in no NATO member’s interest to allow a political earthquake like this to push Turkey from its fold or towards a rival mode of governance. 

This isn’t to downplay the burden now on Ankara; the Turkish government shouldn’t forget that its respect for civil liberties and the rule of law once helped earn it a lot of international respect and a place in the Western community. It’s disappointing that the AKP and Erdoğan supporters have failed to capitalize on their country’s potential. Among its peers in the Muslim world, Turkey had once made the most progress in terms of democratic values and economic growth. Many would still like to believe that that Turkey still exists, in spite of recent setbacks. But for Turkey to win back those gains, its leadership will have to proceed very cautiously and with reason. 

       

Editor's Note: The current U.S. presidential race demonstrates the deep political divisions that exist in our country. But what does it mean to be "liberal" or "conservative," "Republican" or "Democratic"? According to Shadi Hamid, certain values transcend political chasms. This post originally appeared on PBS NewsHour.

What does it mean to say that the Republican Party is on the “right”? The GOP, long defined (at least in theory) by its faith in an unbridled free market, the politics of personal responsibility, and a sort of Christian traditionalism, is no longer easily plotted on the traditional left-right spectrum of American politics. Under the stewardship of presidential nominee Donald Trump, the Republican Party appears to be morphing into a European-style ethnonationalist party. With Trump’s open disrespect for minority rights and the Bill of Rights, the GOP can no longer be considered classically “liberal” (not to be confused with capital-L American Liberalism). This is a new kind of party, an explicitly illiberal party.

These developments, of course, further constrain Republicans’ appeal to minority voters (I haven’t yet met an American Muslim willing to admit they’re voting for Trump, but they apparently exist). This makes it all the more important to distinguish between conservative values and those of this latest iteration of the Republican Party.

There are some aspects of Burkean conservative thought – including aspects of what might be called civic communitarianism – that could plausibly strike a chord in the current cultural landscape across “left” and “right,” categories which, in any case, are no longer as clearly distinguishable as they once were. (Take, for example, British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s Euroskepticism and that of his opponents on the right, or the populist anti-elitism and trade protectionism that are now the province of both Republicans and Democrats).

Everyone seems angry or distrustful of government institutions, which, even when they provide much needed redistributive fiscal stimulus and services, are still blamed for being incompetent, inefficient, or otherwise encouraging a kind of undignified dependency. After the Brexit debacle, it seemed odd that some of the most Europhobic parts of Britain were the very ones that benefited most from EU subsidies. But this assumes that people are fundamentally motivated by material considerations and that they vote – or should vote – according to their economic interests.

If there’s one thing that the rise of Trump and Brexit – and the apparent scrambling of left-right divides – demonstrates, it’s that other things may matter more, and that it’s not a matter of people being too stupid to realize what’s good for them. As Will Davies put it in one of the more astute post-Brexit essays, what many Brexiteers craved was “the dignity of being self-sufficient, not necessarily in a neoliberal sense, but certainly in a communal, familial and fraternal sense.”

The communitarian instinct – the recognition that meaning ultimately comes from local communities rather than happiness-maximizing individuals or bloated nanny-states – transcends the Republican-Democratic or the Labour-Conservative chasm. In other words, an avowedly redistributive state is fine, at least from the standpoint of the left, but that shouldn’t mean neglecting the importance of local control and autonomy, and finding ways, perhaps through federal incentives, to encourage things like “local investment trusts.”

Setting up local investment trusts, expanding the child tax credit, or introducing a progressive consumption tax aren’t exactly a call-to-arms, and various traditionalist and communitarian-minded philosophers have, as might be expected from philosophers, tended to stay at the level of abstraction (authors armed with more policy proposals are more likely to be young conservative reformers like Ross Douthat, Reihan Salam, and Yuval Levin). Douthat and Salam want to use wide-ranging tax reform to alter incentives in the hope of strengthening families and communities. This is a worthy goal, but realizing such policies requires leadership on the federal level from the very legislators who we should presumably become less dependent on.

This is the reformer’s dilemma, regardless of whether you’re on the left or right. If your objective is to weaken a centralized, overbearing state and encourage mediating or “middle” institutions, then you first need recourse to that same overbearing state, otherwise the proposed changes are unlikely to have any significant impact on the aggregate, national level.

The fact that few people seem interested in talking about any of this in our national debate (we instead seem endlessly intrigued by Melania Trump’s copy-and-paste speechwriting) suggests that we’re likely to be stuck for some time to come. Incidentally, however, the Hillary Clinton campaign slogan of “Stronger Together” has an interesting communitarian tinge to it. I doubt that was the intent, and it’s only in writing this column that I even took a minute to think about what the slogan might actually mean. I, as it happens, have been much more interested in talking about – and worrying about – an unusually fascinating and frightening man named Donald Trump.

       

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The failed coup in Turkey on July 15 to 16, organized by factions within the Turkish military in an attempt to overthrow the government of President Erdoğan, represents both a victory and a new trial for Turkish democracy. Although the Turkish citizenry brought the country back from the brink of anarchy and civil war, many analysts see last week’s events as a consequence of the political instability and discord that has been mounting for years as Erdoğan has consolidated powers, marginalized the opposition, and redefined Turkey’s democracy. How will the president react in the aftermath of the coup? Will the democratic backsliding intensify, or can the thwarted coup offer new opportunity for reconciling the deeply-polarized nation?

The upheaval and political instability in Turkey also holds significant implications for Turkey’s foreign policy and the fate of a neighboring region already in turmoil from the war in Syria and insecurity in Iraq. The West desperately needs a stable, democratic, and predictable partner in its NATO-ally Turkey to address the many challenges besetting the region and to fight the Islamic State (or ISIS). How will recent events affect regional stability and Turkey’s cooperation with the West on security issues, including the resettlement of Syrian refugees? What does the failed coup mean for the coalition against ISIS engagement in Syria?

On July 20, the Foreign Policy program (FP) at Brookings hosted a panel discussion to consider these questions and other domestic and international consequences of the coup attempt in Turkey. Brookings Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on the United States and Europe Fiona Hill introduced and moderated a wide-ranging conversation featuring FP Senior Fellows Shadi Hamid, Kemal Kirişci, Michael O'Hanlon, and Ömer Taşpınar.

After the discussion, the speakers took questions from the audience.

Video

• Turkey coup attempt was a shock
• Institutional collapse of Turkey unprecedented
• Disaster averted in failed Turkey coup
• Incirlik Air Base not irreplaceable
• Turkey after the coup attempt: Implications for Turkish democracy, foreign policy, and the future of the Syrian War

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• Turkey after the coup attempt: Implications for Turkish democracy, foreign policy, and the future of the Syrian War

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• Transcript (.pdf)

Event Materials

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U.S. and EU officials have called on Turkey to show restraint amid concerns that Friday's failed coup attempt will be the pretext for an authoritarian crackdown. Turkey’s ability to investigate the putsch will be compromised by the fact that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has repressed the media and weakened the judiciary, says Kemal Kirisci, of the Brookings Institution. The coup attempt will likely bolster Erdoğan’s efforts to consolidate power, and that will make any investigation into the true causes of the coup difficult, Kirisci says.

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has pinned responsibility on the cleric Fethullah Gülen, who lives in self-imposed exile in the United States. Is that credible?

It is possible [that the Gülen movement is responsible], but this needs to be thoroughly investigated. The [Turkish] government has long argued that Fethullah Gülen leads a parallel state from Pennsylvania, where he has been living since 1997. The journalist and academic Ali Bayramoğlu has said that the movement, going back to the 1980s and early 1990s, began to systematically place their students in the police and military academies. These students were closely monitored and accompanied.

Other commentators have argued that it's unbelievable how F-16 pilots, on whom the state has spent more than a million dollars each to educate, attacked the Turkish parliament, military headquarters, intelligence services, and communications centers. How can a well-trained, prestigious F-16 pilot do this unless they are deeply attached to a cause? The movement also [includes] high-ranking judges and officers, including many one-star generals, who have been arrested.

Erdoğan has renewed his calls on the United States to extradite Gülen. Is this more plausible after the attempted coup?

Turkey has for a long time been seeking Gülen’s extradition, but the United States has not been cooperative, saying there was not enough evidence to build a case. However, the [U.S.-Turkey] extradition treaty refers to an obligation to extradite anyone who attempts to assassinate the leaders of one or the other country. There clearly was an attempt to assassinate Erdoğan: the hotel where he had been staying was attacked, and there was an attempt to control the airport where he was supposed to land. A necessary condition of extradition is that a convincing connection between the coup and the sought-after person is established; that should be the focus of cooperation.

Many analysts expect that Erdoğan will use the attempt as a pretense to invest the presidency with full executive powers, as he’s long sought.

The difficult issue will be to assess Erdoğan’s accusations independent of his political ends. Many commentators say the allegations put forward by the government serve his political aspirations: Erdoğan has become, de facto, the executive president of Turkey, but he wants to introduce an element of legality to it, which will require either a constitutional amendment or a completely new constitution. Opinion polls just before the coup suggested that the public, even supporters of [the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP)], did not look favorably on it. This kind of threat to the system gives him considerable leverage [to codify an executive presidency], and I suspect he will follow that path rather than what some commentators are calling for, bringing the polarized country to a consensus through dialogue.

How to sort that out from the pursuit of the truth will be a difficult exercise, and I’m not sure today’s Turkey is equipped to do it, given the way the media has been repressed and the judiciary has been brought under the influence, if not control, of the government. These measures raise serious doubts about Turkey’s ability to investigate this within the realm of the rule of law.

The Incirlik air base, from which a U.S.-led coalition carries out air strikes against the self-proclaimed Islamic State, just reopened after a temporary closure. Will the coup attempt have broader implications for the anti-ISIS campaign?

Cooperation on ISIS is important, but much more so is the future of democracy in Turkey. A Turkey that is democratic is a Turkey of the rule of law, and a secular Turkey is one in which sympathy for such extremist groups is much less. Such a Turkey shares common values with the West, which makes cooperation much easier.

It looks like a large number of officers—colonels as well as one-star generals—were involved, and so the Turkish military is going to experience a period of weakness. That’s where U.S. cooperation, on intelligence and counterterrorism, is critical. Such cooperation demands trust. That trust will partially, but importantly, be a function of [cooperation over] the Gülenist dossier.

The United States and Turkey are going to have to find a way to cooperate over the PYD (Kurdish Democratic Union Party). [Editor’s note: the United States backs the Syrian Kurdish party’s militant wing, the YPG, to combat the Islamic State; Turkey says the group has aided its compatriots in Turkey, the PKK, whose insurgency against the state resumed in July 2015]. The United States enjoys leverage over the PYD, and now it’s ever more important that it keeps the PYD in line so it does not become involved in the conflict in Turkey and strengthen the hand of the PKK while Turkey is vulnerable.

Turkey hosts roughly three million refugees and the country is party to an agreement with the EU to stem migration to Europe. What will EU-Turkey relations look like in the aftermath of the coup attempt?

If the perpetrators had gained control of government, it would have led to civil war, so the very fact that the coup attempt collapsed is saving Europe from waves of Turkish asylum seekers. The EU will need to expand its basis of cooperation with Turkey, because this coup attempt will adversely impact Turkey’s ability to deal with these refugees. There will likely be a purge from some of the bureaucracies and organizations that deal with them.

More broadly, both U.S.-Turkey and EU-Turkey ties have been strained lately. Will the Turkey’s alliance with the West come out on stronger footing after their condemnation of the coup attempt?

Helping with the investigation to establish the truth will be critical. The way in which, at the end of the day, [the EU and United States came out] with support for the elected government, just as Turkish opposition parties did, should entitle them to some influence, calling on Turkey to live up to the norms, standards, and values of democratic society.

The EU and United States together must reanchor Turkey solidly within the Western alliance. Erdoğan, as much as [the United States and EU member-states] may resent him or disagree with policies, must be made to feel that he's welcome back in the ranks, the way he was between 2003 and 2010, on the condition he reforms his policies.

Erdoğan and the people around him, especially [former Prime Minister Ahmet] Davutoglu, had delusions of grandeur. They dreamed they were going to lead the ummah, the Islamic world. This is all gone now: the emperor is naked. Erdoğan seems to recognize Turkey has boxed itself into a corner and wants to come out in the direction of the West. There is nowhere else to go. Turkey needs tourism, international trade, and foreign investment, and to protect its national security. On all these grounds it needs cooperation, and it’s not going to come from Iran, China, or Russia, even if that might be their preference. It can only come from the West.

Turkey may also recognize that the West is in trouble too, and if the West cannot come out of that trouble, Turkey will be in even deeper trouble. Brexit is going to have a negative impact on Turkey's export market and tourism. An EU in trouble is not going to be able to give visa liberalization to Turkish nationals, which symbolically will anchor Turkey in the West, and is also important economically. If the EU and United States move to the right and say no to free trade agreements [and migration], Turkey will not benefit. Both sides next each other even more than in the past.

Copyright © Council on Foreign Relations 2016, republished with permission

       

Editor's Note: With the latest coup attempt in Turkey, Turkish democracy survived a major test, and the country turned from the edge of a precipice. writes Kemal Kirisci. But Turkey’s democracy has also taken a severe blow. This article was originally published in The National Interest.

The history of Turkish politics is littered with coups and coup attempts that have occurred in roughly ten-year intervals. It is almost a genetic defect.

• The nascent Turkish democracy experienced its first coup in 1960 when it was barely into its tenth year—led by a group of left-wing “young officers,” who had also forced the General Staff into its ranks. Administrative authority was returned to civilians in October 1961, after having cost the lives of the then-Prime Minister, Adnan Menderes, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Fatin Rüştü Zorlu, and the Minister of Finance, Hasan Polatkan.
• The second military intervention took place in 1971 against the government of Süleyman Demirel—this time around, though, through a “coup by memorandum.” The military issued to the prime minister an ultimatum—to step aside and be replaced by a technocratic cabinet.
• Less than ten years later, in the midst of endemic violence between left- and right-wing radical groups, the military's top brass carried out another intervention. This was bloodier than the previous two interventions, costing hundreds of lives and leading to massive human-rights violations. After rubberstamping a suffocating constitution on the country, the military handed the government over to a semblance of a democratically-elected government in 1983.
• Surprisingly, Turkey broke this pattern of ten-yearly military interventions, and civilian authority continued until 1997, when there was what was termed a “post-modern coup.” The army rolled out a convoy of tanks into the streets of Ankara, and in a repeat of the coup of 1971, demanded the resignation of the coalition government led by Necmettin Erbakan.
• The next coup occurred a decade later (almost to the day) in April 2007, when the Chief of Staff staged an “e-coup” by posting a set of demands on its website. The coup was a reaction against a long list of democratic reforms that were introduced as a part of the leadership’s pro-EU agenda and were seen as a departure from the staunchly secularist, restrictive mode of governance. Bolstered by the public support for these reforms, however, the incumbent Justice and Development Party (AKP) led by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, now the current president of Turkey, successfully withstood the “e-coup,” and for the first time, pushed the military back “into the barracks”.

The latest coup attempt—which took place on Friday, July 15—has widely been attributed to a large Gülenist faction within the military and the judiciary that circumvented the established chain of command and held the high command hostage. Gülenists are the followers of the Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen, who leads a worldwide movement that claims to advocate a moderate form of Sunni Islam with an emphasis on tolerance and interfaith dialogue. Formerly allies with Erdoğan, the Gülenists were blamed for spearheading the corruption scandal in December 2013 that engulfed several government officials, ministers and people in Erdoğan’s intimate circle. Since then, Gülen and Erdoğan have been locked in a power struggle.

Back from the brink

Turkish democracy survived a major test, and Turkey turned from the edge of a precipice. The credit for the coup’s defeat goes to the Turkish people, who heeded Erdoğan’s call to resist this intervention “by any means possible and necessary" and filled the squares. TV reports were filled with eye-to-eye, tense, agitated confrontations between civilians and armed soldiers on the two bridges that connect the Asian and European sides of Istanbul. Public restraint and sobriety helped to prevent escalation of violence. There were nevertheless senseless causalities resulting from fire opened by the mutineers and especially attacks mounted on the parliament building as well as the Headquarters of the General Staff. It could have been a lot worse.

Erdoğan needs to rise above a majoritarian understanding of democracy and do justice to the aspirations of a public that heeded his call by pouring into the streets and squares to defeat the coup attempt.

Clearly, Turkey’s democracy has taken a severe blow—cushioned only by the unequivocal stance of the opposition leaders and the media against the coup. Once again, the nation managed to break this pattern of ten-year coups. This offers the country a matchless opportunity for reconciliation. Granted, Erdoğan has had an exceptionally rough weekend and his frustration with those responsible for or implicated in the coup is understandable. He is correct in calling “for their punishment under the full force of the law of the land.” It will, however, now be critical that he ensure that the rule of law is upheld and rises to the challenge of winning the hearts and minds across a deeply polarized nation. He has the tools for it in his repertoire and had successfully wielded them in the past—especially between 2003 and 2011, when he served as prime minister. In hindsight, this period is often referred to as AKP’s “golden age,” when the economy boomed, democracy excelled, and Turkey was touted as a model for those Muslim-majority countries aspiring to transform themselves into liberal democracies.

As he steers the country from the brink of civil war, Erdoğan needs to rise above a majoritarian understanding of democracy and do justice to the aspirations of a public that heeded his call by pouring into the streets and squares to defeat the coup attempt. This is the least that the Turkish public deserves. This would also be a move in the right direction for Turkey’s neighborhood, which desperately needs a respite from the turmoil resulting from the war in Syria, the instability in Iraq, Russia’s territorial ambitions and now Brexit. This is the moment when a stable, democratic, transparent, accountable and prosperous Turkey needs to come to the fore on the world-stage. The United States needs it too. As much as the White House declared its faith in the strength of Turkey’s democracy and its support for the elected leadership, there is a clear chance for forging closer cooperation between the two countries. The first step in cooperation should be in bringing to justice the perpetrators of this coup, followed by measures to enhance Turkey’s capacity to address and manage the many challenges facing Turkey and its neighborhood.

       

Editor’s Note: In the aftermath of the United Kingdom's vote to leave the European Union, we are left with more questions than answers. Dhruva Jaishankar writes that with all the questions about what happens next, there's a bigger question worth asking: What are the implications of Brexit for democracy? Arguably, Brexit represents the first major casualty of the ascent of digital democracy over representative democracy. This piece was originally posted by The Huffington Post.

In the aftermath of the United Kingdom's vote to leave the European Union, we are left with more questions than answers. What kind of relationship will the UK now forge with the EU, and how will that affect economic relations and migration? Will Scotland and Northern Ireland opt to leave? What is the future of British politics, given turbulence within both the Conservative and Labour Parties? Will a successful Brexit set a precedent for other EU members -- perhaps even some eurozone members-- to leave the union? What are the long-term economic consequences of the resulting uncertainty? Will Brexit even happen at all, given the absence of a clear post-referendum plan, the apparent unwillingness of 'Leave' campaign leaders to invoke Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, and the fact that the referendum was advisory and non-binding? Answers to these questions will make themselves evident in the coming weeks, months, and years.

[D]igital democracy... has contributed to polarization, gridlock, dissatisfaction and misinformation.

But there's a bigger question worth asking: What are the implications of Brexit for democracy? Arguably, Brexit represents the first major casualty of the ascent of digital democracy over representative democracy. This claim deserves an explanation.

When historians look back at the world of the past 25 years, they will likely associate it not with terrorism or growing inequality but with the twin phenomena of the "rise of the rest" (particularly China and India) and of globalization. Globalization involves the easier, faster and cheaper flow of goods, people, capital and information. One big enabler of globalization is the internet, the global network of networks that allows billions of people to cheaply and easily access enormous amounts of digital information. The rise of service and high-technology industries, trade liberalization, container shipping, and the development of financial markets have also been important enablers, as is the increased ease and lower cost of travel, particularly by air.

Many technology optimists have assumed that globalization would lead to the democratization of information and decision-making, and also greater cosmopolitanism. Citizens would be better informed, less likely to be silenced, and able to communicate their views more effectively to their leaders. They would also have greater empathy and understanding of other peoples the more they lived next to them, visited their countries, read their news, communicated, and did business with them. Or so the thinking went.

[L]eaders only exploit the vulnerabilities of a post-fact world. The conditions have been laid by the digital sphere.

But there has been little to justify such panglossianism. There is some evidence for a correlation between greater information, political democratization and economic progress, in that all three have advanced steadily, if at different paces, over the past two decades. But that correlation is weak. Instead, digital democracy -- the ability to receive information in almost real time through mass media and to make one's voice heard through social media -- has contributed to polarization, gridlock, dissatisfaction and misinformation. This is as equally applicable to the countries in which modern democracy took root -- in the United States and Europe -- as it is to India, the biggest and most complex democracy in the developing world.

The ascent of digital democracy around the world has some shared features. One characteristic is that access to greater information has, rather counterintuitively, contributed to a "post-fact" information environment. Nick Cohen -- speaking of British pro-"Leave" journalists-turned-politicians Boris Johnson and Michael Gove --called out their use of bold claims, their contempt for practical questions, their sneering disregard for expertise, and their transgressions of the bounds of political spin. These tactics are not all that dissimilar to Donald Trump's assertions about Barack Obama's birth certificate or immigration policies, or Subramanian Swamy's insinuations about the nationality of senior Indian policymakers.

But leaders only exploit the vulnerabilities of a post-fact world. The conditions have been laid by the digital sphere. A recent example springs to mind. There is a widespread belief on Indian social media that US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is somehow anti-India, pro-Pakistan, and/or anti-Modi. I am no supporter of Ms. Clinton, but as someone who worked on foreign affairs in Washington and knows many of her advisors, I found these claims baffling. In fact, Clinton's political opponents (whether Barack Obama in 2008 or Donald Trump in 2016) have accused her of being too close to India, while Pakistanis often view her as critical of their country and Prime Minister Modi appears to enjoy cordial relations with her. After some inquiries, and a few tips, I managed to trace these sentiments to a single publication, a poorly sourced and misleading column that gained widespread circulation upon its release. The article's contents were deemed sufficiently credible to have now become instilled as absolute fact in the minds of many Indians active online. In a digital democracy, a lie or (better yet) a half-lie if told enough times becomes truth.

In a digital democracy, a lie or (better yet) a half-lie if told enough times becomes truth.

Another outcome of digital democracy may be a variation of what the psychologist Barry Schwartz has called the paradox of choice. Quite possibly, the greater abundance of political choice leads to less satisfaction, and the result is citizens increasingly voicing their displeasure with their available political and policy choices. The political platforms of mainstream parties rarely adhere entirely to individual voters' views. That may explain why many voters are gravitating towards parties, factions or leaders who offer the simplest messages, and project themselves as alternatives to the mainstream.

A third result of digital democracy, and one that has been better documented, is the political echo chamber. Social media, rather than creating connections with people who possess differing views and ideologies, tends to reinforce prejudices. As the psychologist Nicholas DiFonzo has noted, "Americans across the political spectrum tend to trust the news media (and 'facts' provided by the media) less than their own social group." This makes it easier for views and rumours to circulate and intensify within like-minded groups. Similar digital gerrymandering was evident in the EU Referendum in Britain and the polarization is palpable in the Indian online political space.

Finally, instant information has increased the theatricality of politics. With public statements and positions by governments, political parties and individual leaders now broadcast to constituents in real time, compromise, a necessary basis of good governance, has become more difficult. When portrayed as a betrayal of core beliefs, compromise often amounts to political suicide. Political grandstanding also contributes to legislative gridlock, with elected representatives often resorting to walkouts, sit-ins, or insults -- all manufactured for maximum viral effect -- instead of trying to reach solutions behind closed doors. Even as ease of travel allows legislators to spend more time in their constituencies, making them more sensitized to their constituents' concerns, less gets done at the national or supranational level. It is a trend that, once again, applies equally to the United States, Europe, and India.

Social media, rather than creating connections with people who possess differing views and ideologies, tends to reinforce prejudices.

The unintended consequences of digital democracy -- misinformation and discontent, polarization and gridlock -- mean that the boundary between politician and troll is blurring. The tone of democratic politics increasingly reflects that of anonymous online discourse: nasty, brutish, and short. And successful politicians are increasingly those who are able to take advantage of the resulting sentiments. Exploiting divisions, appealing to base instincts, making outlandish claims, resorting to falsehoods, and pooh-poohing details and expertise. All that could just as easily describe the playbooks of populists around the world, on the right and left: Marine Le Pen, Frauke Petry, Donald Trump or Subramanian Swamy as much as Jeremy Corbyn, Beppe Grillo, Bernie Sanders or Arvind Kejriwal.

The unintended consequences of digital democracy -- misinformation and discontent, polarization and gridlock -- mean that the boundary between politician and troll is blurring.

In all these cases, populists are willing to cross the lines that mainstream parties have flirted with, becoming forces that the centre cannot hold. US Republicans fanned the anti-immigration sentiments that first the Tea Party and then Trump are only taking to their natural conclusions, just as mainstream Democrats' economic protectionism has been seized upon by Sanders. Cameron's euroscepticism, explained away initially as constructive criticism, spiralled out of control with Brexit, just as those who pronounced the death of New Labour helped paved the way for Corbyn. Will the same one day apply in India, to the economic populism of the Congress, of which Kejriwal has become a new torchbearer, or to the chauvinism of the right, which Swamy now threatens to run away with?

Brexit is not anti-globalization so much as a product of globalization. It is also a product of democracy rather than an affront to it. But it is a democracy of a different sort, one that many of its ideological forebears anticipated. When James Madison warned of "the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority," or John Stuart Mill cautioned against "a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression," or BR Ambedkar argued (in a slightly different context) that "political tyranny is nothing compared to social tyranny," they could just as easily have been speaking in 2016 as in 1787, 1859, or 1936. Democrats around the world may not yet be married to the mob, but plenty have been betrothed.

None of this should be interpreted as some kind of nostalgia for an older, simpler world. That world was not necessarily simpler, but it was more violent and chaotic, prejudiced and unfair, and poor and backward. It may be hard to discern amid the smoke and noise, but there are some benefits to digital democracy. Information is no longer in the hands of the few. It is easier than ever to bring injustices to light. And the same process can throw up mainstream leaders from backgrounds that are far from privileged, such as a Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, or Narendra Modi. Two of the three, Obama and Modi, rose to power on the backs of unprecedented social media movements.

But representative democracy as we have come to know it is under threat, and Brexit represents the first major casualty. Rather than fight the tide, a collective rethink is needed about how to make democracies resilient and productive in the digital age. It won't be easy.

       

Data shows that white, poor, elderly, uneducated men from rural England pulled the United Kingdom outside the European Union. Great Britain will be on its own as it will have to navigate an increasingly complex and globalized world. Europeans must wish all the very best to their British friends. At the same time, they must explore what opportunities are there to be seized. Britain’s departure presents Europeans with many exciting political prospects.

Scotland

Unlike England, Scotland voted massively in favor of remaining within the European Union. Scots now risk being dragged out of it at the hands of the English. Because of this, Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has been clear: The possibility of a new referendum for Scottish independence is on the table. Should Scotland break free of England, it would immediately be welcome back into the European Union as a sovereign and independent country. Scots would have the best of both worlds: free of English dictates and welcome in the common European family. Their economic liberalism and progressive social policies meanwhile being a boon to the rest of Europe. 

Ireland

Although far less likely than those of a Scottish scenario, major changes could be afoot in Ireland as well. Ireland is presented with a fantastic opportunity to solidify its position as an outpost of Anglo-Saxon economic dynamism within the European Union. A global language, a flexible labour market and low corporate taxation (as well as great beer) are the ingredients the Irish bring to Europe. In the coming years, they could leapfrog what will be left of Britain as America’s springboard into Europe. Meanwhile, Dublin has a fantastic opportunity to punch above its weight in international affairs (as it could and should) by acting as an honest broker between Brussels and London.

International affairs

Calls for the establishment of a common European military, of shared European representation in international institutions, and of a truly European diplomatic service have for the last 40 years regularly and to varying degrees been frustrated by the United Kingdom. Now that Britain is out, Berlin, Paris, and all other like-minded member states should seize this historical opportunity in order to tremendously boost their cooperation in all these policy areas. By doing so, Europe could achieve economies of scale, save money and resources on possible duplications, boost its global standing, and become the strong and reliable partner that the United States desperately wants it to be.

The economy

The welfare state, public services, and healthcare that most continental and northern Europeans enjoy have long been far superior to anything most Brits can even dream of. Additionally, Germany and most northern European member states boost far more competitive economies and standards of living than the United Kingdom. The historical challenge for Europeans is now to improve the performance of the southern and eastern member states of the European Union. Free from British fears of Brussels’ red tape and with the crucial contribution of small yet economically dynamic countries such as the Netherlands or Sweden, Europeans should further integrate toward a dynamic yet inclusive social-market economic model.

Democracy

Westminster gave parliamentary democracy to the rest of the world. After having made a joke out of it through a referendum marred by enormous lies regurgitated onto an ill-informed population, Britain might have given a new impetus to democratic ideals across Europe. Two elements conspire positively in this respect. On the one hand, the country that historically more than any other opposed reforms aimed at further democratizing the European Union is out of the way: Britain will no more be able to veto reforms in this direction. On the other hand, both European elites and common citizens alike might now be spurred into further democratizing the EU as a means to rescuing it.

A rather homogenous socio-demographic group of white, poor, uneducated, elderly, and rural Englishmen have pulled the rest of Britain outside the European Union. The United Kingdom might now enter a new phase in its history characterized by a further deterioration of its international standing. Europeans, meanwhile, have to catch up on the time they spent dealing with 40 years of British foot-dragging. Great opportunities are out there to be seized.

       

There will always be winners and losers as the global economy shifts and evolves. For a long period in the mid- to late 20th century, those losers were cities. Across the developed world, suburbanization shrank inner-city populations just as the industrial base that had once fueled growth succumbed to globalization.

At the end of the 20th century, as global cities such as New York and London pulled themselves out of the malaise of the 1970s, economic growth still eluded many smaller, formerly industrial cities across the United States and Europe. Catalyzing recovery in those older industrial areas was the focus of a decade-long effort of the London School of Economics and the Brookings Institution. As is clear in Cities for a Small Continent, a new book from Anne Power at LSE, the potential in these cities is greater now than ever. In our contribution to the volume, we examine the why and the how of economic transformation in several U.S. cities. 

There has been a lot of focus on the shift in location preferences that is bringing people back to cities. Significant shares of millennials as well as empty nesters are voting for urban communities where they can live, work, and play. At least as important is the restructuring of the U.S. economy—from a closed innovation system where corporations operated isolated research facilities, to an open, networked economy where corporations innovate in collaboration with universities, researchers, entrepreneurs, and investors. Innovation is critical, because as Antoine van Agtmael and Fred Bakker assert in The Smartest Places on Earth, “the era of cheap [in manufacturing] is over; the era of smart has begun.”

These shifts in social preferences and market forces revalue cities and “cityness”—proximity, density, vibrancy, authenticity, and diversity. In particular, population and employment growth is occurring in downtowns and midtowns that have key institutions and assets: universities, medical campuses, cultural venues, historic buildings, walkable streets, and transit connectivity.

This regeneration is being delivered through a new localism in U.S. governance. Every day brings new bottom-up, city-led approaches to the training of workers, the education of children, the mitigation of climate change, the financing of infrastructure, and the development of affordable housing for our workers and quality places for our young and elderly populations.

Across this wide range of activity are some common characteristics.

Cities are harnessing the power of networks of government, business, civic, philanthropic, university, and community institutions and leaders rather than relying on public-sector solutions alone. The focus of the new American localism on unlocking the latent capacity and creativity of public, private, and civic networks differs markedly from the focus of traditional federalism on relationships between levels of government, particularly the federal government and the states.

Cities and metropolitan areas are also deploying capital from an array of public, private, and civic sources at the local, national, and even global levels. With federal investment dwindling, financing of critical projects will increasingly come from public-private collaboration and require experimentation around new forms of innovative finance.

Our chapter highlights four cities in the United States—Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Detroit—where this new localism has delivered tangible results. Though each city is at a different point of recovery, all have experienced growth in their cores that has been enabled and co-led by anchor institutions, major philanthropies, private-sector leaders, and civic groups. The biggest investments and decisions in these places have been the results of collaborative processes—proof that cities and the institutions that invest in them can be a source of long-term, strategic thinking that ultimately leads to healthier and more prosperous urban economies.

Similar efforts are spreading across the United Kingdom and Europe, though the systems there tend more toward public-sector leadership. In Sheffield, England, a concerted effort by business and academic institutions to “upskill” the manufacturing base, enabled by the flexibility of a “city deal” from the central government, has made the city a global center of advanced manufacturing. Bilbao, Spain evolved from a manufacturing base to a vibrant urban cultural hub by leveraging the value of publicly owned land and other assets for regeneration purposes. Stories such as these are featured throughout Cities for a Small Continent, as well as in a new series of seven case studies from LSE.

We are still in the early stages of this rebalancing of growth. Cities and metropolitan areas experienced decades of population and employment decentralization, poverty concentration, racial separation, and de-industrialization. Such patterns do not get changed overnight. But they are changing. As cities innovate, those solutions must be captured and codified and then replicated across the world.

Watch the May 24, 2016 LSE launch event for Cities for a Small Continent here: 

      

Recent political movements within the United States have raised concerns about the health of American democracy. With hyper-partisanship dividing the country and Donald Trump—the most unlikely, unsuitable, and unpopular presidential nominee of a major party in American history—securing the Republican nomination, the question emerges of whether democracy in America has gone awry.  And if so, is it too much or too little democracy that’s to blame?

To help address those questions, in this paper, Thomas E. Mann summarizes and discusses the findings of Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels’ ambitious treatise on American democracy: “Democracy for Realists.” Achen and Bartels contend that the traditional conception of voters as rational, attentive decision-makers does not hold against empirical evidence. Instead, voters are best understood as members of partisan groups, which influence their perception of candidates, issues, and even simple facts. According to Achen and Bartels, perceived social identities drive voting decisions, rather than rationality.

Mann notes that most scholars would agree that voters do not follow the expectations of idealistic models, but draws attention to competing theories that are far less damning to voters’ rationality. In particular, the research of Paul Sniderman and Arthur Lupia suggests that voters are far more capable than Achen and Bartels would assert. In their view, voters have enough rationality and information to ensure a well-functioning democracy.

As Mann summarizes the arguments:  Achen and Bartels believe that citizens and elections are held to impossible, idealistic standards in the folk theory of democracy, which perpetuates myths and works against government responsiveness. Sniderman and Lupia, on the other hand, are offended by those who dismiss citizens as ignorant and incompetent; they seek to defend voters’ dignity and demonstrate the rationality and efficacy of their behavior in American democracy.

What does this scholarship tell us about the coming presidential election, and the future of American democracy?  Ultimately, Mann concludes that Achen and Bartel’s perspective is not anti-democratic, even if it is built on a belief that too much importance is placed on the often random and myopic outcomes of elections.  Instead, Mann believes that “Democracy for Realists” reveals the real democratic deficit facing America is one stemming not from too much democracy, but  from “asymmetry in political resources and representation of different segments of American society.” Truly understanding this problem and its root cause is a step toward strengthening American democracy. 

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A central function of the United States Congress is oversight of the executive branch. Congressional oversight, as exercised from the beginning of the nation, is an essential tool in making the separation of powers real by empowering Congress to check the executive. In recent years, however, as polarization has reached paralyzing levels, Congress has largely gotten out of the business of routine and prospective “police-patrol” oversight.  In the absence of the will and the capacity to do prospective oversight, Congress is at risk of losing its power to the executive branch and thus failing one of its most important constitutional roles.

This paper assesses whether or not anything can be done to get Congress back into the oversight business. Specifically, author Elaine Kamarck examines the following question: Assuming that future Congresses develop the political will to conduct oversight, do they have the capacity to do oversight of a large, modern, and complex executive branch?

As Kamarck illustrates, mismatched resources may make it difficult for Congress to resume its oversight function. The modern federal government is a complex and enormous enterprise. But as the executive branch has grown considerably over the past decades, Congress has adopted budget cuts that make the legislative branch less and less capable of undertaking the kinds of systemic oversight that can solve or prevent problems. Congress employs a mere 17,272 professional staff to oversee an executive branch consisting of 4.2 million civil servants and uniformed military. 

“The existing infrastructure that is supposed to help Congress be on top of the executive branch has fallen prey to a mindless dumbing down of Congress,” Kamarck states. She details the five entities that are meant to support Congress in its oversight role: committee staff, the Congressional Research Service, the Government Accountability Office, the Congressional Budget Office, and the Inspectors General, all of which are understaffed and under-budgeted. Kamarck recommends the first thing Congress should do to fix its oversight problem is to properly staff the agencies it already has and to stop nickel and diming and degrading its own capacity.

Furthermore, Kamarck calls for a “Congressional Oversight Office,” a body charged with evaluating governmental performance before a crisis arises. This office should be staffed by implementation professionals who can gather the signals from all the other oversight organizations annually and in sync with the budget cycle.

“Congress needs to get back into the business of productive executive branch oversight,” concludes Kamarck. A Congressional Oversight Office is certainly a step in that direction.

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On 15 May the Dominican Republic held its most complex elections since 1994. On this occasion, not only were the president and vice president elected, but also all the members of the lower house, the Chamber of Deputies, and the Senate, as well as local authorities.

There were no surprises. Danilo Medina, of the governing Partido de la Liberación Dominicana (PLD), was re-elected by a large margin, and all indications are that he was also able to conserve his party’s majority in both houses of Congress. We say “all indications are” because the election was beset by irregularities (well-documented by the OAS observer mission); and these irregularities have triggered a serious post-electoral crisis that has yet to be fully resolved.

Medina’s re-election confirms the infallibility of the rule (in place in Latin America since 1978) that every president who reforms the Constitution to keep himself in power has achieved his objective. The only exception was Hipólito Mejía, former president of the Dominican Republic, who amended the Constitution in 2002 to seek a second term, but then failed to get re-elected. This defeat opened the door for the return of Leonel Fernández (also of the PLD), who had already governed from 1996 to 2000, and who won the 2004 election and then (benefitting from Mejía’s reform) got himself re-elected in 2008. Once in office, Fernández reformed the Constitution in 2010 (moving from allowing consecutive re-election to allowing unlimited re-election but with alternating rather than consecutive terms). President Medina amended the Constitution once again, in 2015, on an expeditious basis (within 15 days) to re-enact consecutive re-election and to run again in the elections just held on 15 May. No other country in Latin America has amended the constitutional provision on re-election so many times in such a short period, four times in 21 years. 

Continuity of the PLD for the fourth consecutive term 

With this clear-cut triumph by Medina (he garnered 61.74 per cent of the votes, leading the second-place challenger Luis Abinader, of the recently-formed Partido Revolucionario Moderno (PRM), by more than 25 points), the PLD has now won the presidency for the fourth time in a row, with a total (at the end of this new term) of 16 years in power without interruption. Never before under democratic rules of the game had the same party won four times in a row in the Dominican Republic. 

If we exclude the special cases of the PRI in Mexico (prior to 2000) and the Partido Colorado (in Paraguay), from 1978 to date only four parties or coalitions have won four consecutive presidential contests in the region: Chavismo in Venezuela, which has been in power for 17 years (now in the midst of a profound crisis that could lead to Maduro’s early exit); Brazil’s Workers’ Party (PT), which so far (we’ll see what comes of the trial of Rousseff by the Senate that is about to get under way) has been in power for 13 years; ARENA in El Salvador (which governed without interruption from 1989 to 2009 with presidents Cristiani, Sol, Flores, and Saca); and the Concertación in Chile (from 1990 to 2010, with presidents Aylwin, Frey, Lagos, and Bachelet in her first term). 

Reasons for the victory

What are the reasons that explain Medina’s landslide victory after three consecutive terms of the PLD in office?

In my opinion, a combination of personal, political, and socioeconomic reasons explain this outcome. As to the personal reason, one should highlight the great popularity of President Medina. With approval ratings greater than 70 per cent, he enjoys high levels of popular support, much more than any other Latin American president.

In terms of the political reasons, one should note the advantage that any Latin American president has when seeking consecutive re-election: the enormous concentration of power by the PLD in all areas of the State, accentuated political clientelism, and above all, an opposition that has not figured out a strategy for removing the PLD from power. Mention should also be made of the marked lack of fairness in the electoral contest and the abusive use of state resources in favor of the governing party.

The third important reason that explains Medina’s easy re-election is to be found in the economy. With 7 per cent growth and inflation at 2.5 per cent, the Dominican Republic is one of the two best-performing economies in the region (the other is Panama). This growth stands in stark contrast to a Latin America which (according to World Bank projections) will see negative growth of -0.6 per cent this year. It is also more than 2 percentage points greater than the average growth rate for the countries of Central America.

Challenges

Yet Medina’s second term, despite the strong support he received at the polls, is not problem-free. On the contrary, he faces major challenges, including having the results of the 15 May elections accepted by the opposition so that his legitimacy and, above all, that of the PLD legislators and mayors, will not be called into question.

Improving the quality of democracy is another major challenge. The Dominican Republic is part of the group of countries (according to The Economist) that has a flawed democracy, characterized by marked institutional weakness and high levels of citizen insecurity and corruption. 

Moreover, profound and urgent changes are needed in the political–electoral system aimed at improving the quality and integrity of the electoral process to avoid having to suffer similar problems in future elections. 

In the electoral sphere, the OAS report recommends that it is important to separate voting for members of the lower house from voting for senators. It is also important to provide for fairer electoral competition. This requires adequate regulation of the use of state resources (to keep the party in power from enjoying unfair advantages), strengthening the levels of transparency, oversight, control of political financing (establishing, among other measures, ceilings for campaign spending and limits on private financing), as well as assuring more equal access to the media. 

As regards the political system, the priority includes introducing thorough changes in the party system aimed at modernizing the parties, institutionalizing them and improving their levels of internal democracy. Another priority is ensuring effective gender parity in politics. 

These political–electoral changes need to be supplemented by adequate modernization and strengthening of the electoral organs (JCE - Central Elections Board and the TSE - Superior Electoral Tribunal), ensuring that they are made up of very qualified professionals of renowned prestige, who are totally independent of the political parties. In the area of the economy, despite the current positive macroeconomic outlook, the situation is far from ideal. 40 per cent of the population lives in poverty due to the economy’s serious difficulty generating quality employment (due to its growth model). To this we must add the need to solve the main limitation that the economy has faced for some time, i.e., scarce energy and high energy prices. 

In my opinion, this fourth consecutive victory consolidates the PLD as the predominant party in the Dominican political system (with the risk of becoming a hegemonic party). The PRD, which until recently was the main opposition party under the now-deceased Peña Gómez, weakened by its constant internal strife and divisions, ended up allying with the PLD in this election and won just over 5 per cent of the votes. The other major historical party, the PRSC, of deceased former president Joaquín Balaguer (which allied with the PRM in this election) also obtained few votes; its numbers similar to the PRD’s. The big question is what will happen in the coming years with the recently formed PRM and the leadership of Abinader, in particular, if both he and the party will be able to become consolidated as the main opposition force. 

One will also have to see whether Medina and the PLD have the capacity to steer clear of the attrition and crisis that generally affects “long governments” under a single party or coalition in the region, especially during the curse of the second consecutive term. Of the four “long governments” mentioned above, two, the PT in Brazil and chavismo in Venezuela, are currently experiencing serious crises that could lead to an early end of the terms of presidents Dilma Rousseff and Nicolás Maduro. 

In summary, during his second term Medina should implement an ambitious agenda of reforms. In politics, the priority includes modernizing and strengthening democratic institutions, adopting a law on political parties, and transforming the judiciary and the police to fight insecurity and corruption head on. In economic and social policy, the focus should be on maintaining high growth rates but correcting the serious prevailing inequalities and distortions with the objective of creating quality jobs and thereby reducing the high levels of poverty.

This piece was originally published by International IDEA. 

      

The only interlocutor for the United States in Turkey will be President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan from now on, Professor Kemal Kirişci has said, adding that Washington has come to recognize the reality that whoever becomes the prime minister “knows he is not going to do anything that is unauthorized.”

The U.S. has lost its hopes regarding Turkish democracy, according to Kirişci, who is at the Washington-based Brookings Institute.

Prior to President Erdoğan’s visit, there were a record number of articles saying he would not receive a warm welcome in Washington, let alone a meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama. Yet Erdoğan ended up in the White House for a long meeting.

I was able to observe both of his visits in May 2013, and the one that took place last March. The difference is day and night. In 2013 the U.S. administration was bending over backwards to welcome Erdoğan, and he was hosted very lavishly.

The last visit was also preceded by the article of Jeff Goldberg, where there was a reference to how disappointed Obama was with his relationship with Erdoğan. I think that the appointment was given because Turkey and the president of Turkey is very central and critical to the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). This is the only reason why this appointment was given; this is my reading.

The meeting took place despite Obama’s disillusionment with Erdoğan. Does that mean that Turkey is indispensable, regardless of rules Turkey? Or is Erdoğan not expendable?

Both. The term that is being used in Washington for the U.S. relationship with Turkey is “transactional,” meaning wherever we have common interests and common concerns, we are going to try to cooperate. The idea of a model partnership based on shared liberal values is no longer an issue; the cooperation is out of necessity.

Was there ever a Davutoğlu effect in bilateral relations, since he was one of the figures shaping foreign policy?

Starting in September 2015, Davutoğlu projected the image of a pragmatic person wanting to address a problem. The way in which he handled the European migration crisis was assessed as something positive compared to the rhetoric the president uses where he is constantly criticizing and using contemptuous – almost denigrating – language toward Europe but also the U.S. I suspect that Davutoğlu was offered an audience with Obama [shortly after his meeting with Erdoğan] because of this.

How do you think Washington will see his departure?

At the micro level, they thought that there was room for a pragmatic, solution-oriented relationship with Davutoğlu. But in the course of the last year or two, they had also come to realize that Davutoğlu’s foreign policy based around his book “Strategic Depth” was producing conflict between Turkey and the U.S. – the conflict areas being Syria, ISIL, Egypt, Israel and Iraq. 

Do you think there will be any changes in relations with Davutoğlu’s departure?

I think there is a recognition in Turkey, Europe, the U.S. and the rest of the world that from today onward, Turkey’s foreign policy will be run by the president. The notion that Turkey is a parliamentary system and the president is supposed to be equidistant from political parties does not reflect reality. The U.S., with this experience behind them, has come to recognize this reality. Whoever becomes the PM, they know he is not going to do anything that is unauthorized. The consequence is that Turkey-U.S. relations will not be where they were when Erdoğan first came to power; that’s how I can answer the question because it is comparative. At that time, in addition to Syria, trade, the economy and Turkey’s relations with the EU were also on the agenda.

These issues will no longer be on the agenda; there will be only one issue: the Syrian issue. [But another will be how will] NATO manage the challenges that Russia is bringing to European security? I think there is some room for interaction there.

Has the U.S. given up on Turkey as a reliable ally sharing the same values? 

It is sad but that is the reality. Turkey’s agenda today in the neighborhood is not an agenda that overlaps with the Western transatlantic community’s agenda. There is a lot of aggravation that emerges from that reality. For the U.S., the issue of ISIL is regarded as the major challenge emanating from the Middle East to U.S. and European security. I think they have reached a conclusion that cooperating with Turkey is an uphill battle. They also recognized Turkey and the U.S. have conflicting interests with respect to the PYD [Democratic Union Party]. Turkey considers it a threat to national security whereas the U.S. sees the PYD as an actor with which they are able to cooperate against ISIL in a decisive, reliable and credible manner. In the case of Turkey, there is cooperation but there are question marks over the reliability and credibility and commitment of Turkey.

Why are you using the word sad?

It is sad from a personal point of view because when you look at the world right now, it looks like there are two governance system competing with each other. One governance system is the system to which I thought Turkey was always committed. We became a member of NATO, Council of Europe and the OECD. We aspire to become part of the EU because I suppose we believed the values of members of this community provides more prosperity, stability and security to its citizens. Then there is an alternative form of governance represented by Russia, Iran and China [based on] the idea that the state should have a greater say on the economy, the state interest should prevail over the interests and the rights of individuals and that freedom of expression and media can be curtailed to serve state interests. Turkey is increasingly moving in the direction of this second form of governance.

Why, then, did Brookings invite Erdoğan, producing embarrassing moments when the president’s security detailed interfered with demonstrators?

Brookings has a long-established program called the Global Leaders Forum and invites presidents and prime ministers to give speeches. It is an independent think tank and does not confer legitimacy or illegitimacy on a speaker. The Washington audience got an opportunity to see how Turkey is being governed.

It looks like the U.S. remains indifferent to democratic backpedalling in Turkey.

There was a time at meetings on Turkey in which questions were raised along the lines of, “Why isn’t the U.S. doing more against this backsliding?” Interestingly, in the course of about six months or so, this question is being raised less and less. The U.S. has lost hopes about Turkish democracy. The primary reason for this is that they have this impression that Turkish society, especially after what happened after the June [2015] elections, gives priority to this kind of governance. Also, the Obama administration, especially compared to the Bush and Clinton administrations, is less comfortable with the idea of promoting democracy and supporting democratization.

The interview was originally published in Hürriyet Daily News.

      

Editors’ Note: The phenomenon Donald Trump has created has become something larger than him, and something far more dangerous, writes Bob Kagan. This phenomenon has arisen in other democratic and quasi-democratic countries over the past century, and it has generally been called “fascism.” This piece originally appeared in The Washington Post.

The Republican Party’s attempt to treat Donald Trump as a normal political candidate would be laughable were it not so perilous to the republic. If only he would mouth the party’s “conservative” principles, all would be well.

But of course the entire Trump phenomenon has nothing to do with policy or ideology. It has nothing to do with the Republican Party, either, except in its historic role as incubator of this singular threat to our democracy. Trump has transcended the party that produced him. His growing army of supporters no longer cares about the party. Because it did not immediately and fully embrace Trump, because a dwindling number of its political and intellectual leaders still resist him, the party is regarded with suspicion and even hostility by his followers. Their allegiance is to him and him alone.

And the source of allegiance? We’re supposed to believe that Trump’s support stems from economic stagnation or dislocation. Maybe some of it does. But what Trump offers his followers are not economic remedies—his proposals change daily. What he offers is an attitude, an aura of crude strength and machismo, a boasting disrespect for the niceties of the democratic culture that he claims, and his followers believe, has produced national weakness and incompetence. His incoherent and contradictory utterances have one thing in common: They provoke and play on feelings of resentment and disdain, intermingled with bits of fear, hatred and anger. His public discourse consists of attacking or ridiculing a wide range of “others”—Muslims, Hispanics, women, Chinese, Mexicans, Europeans, Arabs, immigrants, refugees—whom he depicts either as threats or as objects of derision. His program, such as it is, consists chiefly of promises to get tough with foreigners and people of nonwhite complexion. He will deport them, bar them, get them to knuckle under, make them pay up or make them shut up.

That this tough-guy, get-mad-and-get-even approach has gained him an increasingly large and enthusiastic following has probably surprised Trump as much as it has everyone else. Trump himself is simply and quite literally an egomaniac. But the phenomenon he has created and now leads has become something larger than him, and something far more dangerous.

[T]he phenomenon he has created and now leads has become something larger than him, and something far more dangerous.

Republican politicians marvel at how he has “tapped into” a hitherto unknown swath of the voting public. But what he has tapped into is what the founders most feared when they established the democratic republic: the popular passions unleashed, the “mobocracy.” Conservatives have been warning for decades about government suffocating liberty. But here is the other threat to liberty that Alexis de Tocqueville and the ancient philosophers warned about: that the people in a democracy, excited, angry and unconstrained, might run roughshod over even the institutions created to preserve their freedoms. As Alexander Hamilton watched the French Revolution unfold, he feared in America what he saw play out in France—that the unleashing of popular passions would lead not to greater democracy but to the arrival of a tyrant, riding to power on the shoulders of the people.

This phenomenon has arisen in other democratic and quasi-democratic countries over the past century, and it has generally been called “fascism.” Fascist movements, too, had no coherent ideology, no clear set of prescriptions for what ailed society. “National socialism” was a bundle of contradictions, united chiefly by what, and who, it opposed; fascism in Italy was anti-liberal, anti-democratic, anti-Marxist, anti-capitalist and anti-clerical. Successful fascism was not about policies but about the strongman, the leader (Il Duce, Der Fuhrer), in whom could be entrusted the fate of the nation. Whatever the problem, he could fix it. Whatever the threat, internal or external, he could vanquish it, and it was unnecessary for him to explain how. Today, there is Putinism, which also has nothing to do with belief or policy but is about the tough man who singlehandedly defends his people against all threats, foreign and domestic.

Successful fascism was not about policies but about the strongman, the leader (Il Duce, Der Fuhrer), in whom could be entrusted the fate of the nation.

To understand how such movements take over a democracy, one only has to watch the Republican Party today. These movements play on all the fears, vanities, ambitions and insecurities that make up the human psyche. In democracies, at least for politicians, the only thing that matters is what the voters say they want—vox populi vox dei. A mass political movement is thus a powerful and, to those who would oppose it, frightening weapon. When controlled and directed by a single leader, it can be aimed at whomever the leader chooses. If someone criticizes or opposes the leader, it doesn’t matter how popular or admired that person has been. He might be a famous war hero, but if the leader derides and ridicules his heroism, the followers laugh and jeer. He might be the highest-ranking elected guardian of the party’s most cherished principles. But if he hesitates to support the leader, he faces political death.

In such an environment, every political figure confronts a stark choice: Get right with the leader and his mass following or get run over. The human race in such circumstances breaks down into predictable categories—and democratic politicians are the most predictable. There are those whose ambition leads them to jump on the bandwagon. They praise the leader’s incoherent speeches as the beginning of wisdom, hoping he will reward them with a plum post in the new order. There are those who merely hope to survive. Their consciences won’t let them curry favor so shamelessly, so they mumble their pledges of support, like the victims in Stalin’s show trials, perhaps not realizing that the leader and his followers will get them in the end anyway.

A great number will simply kid themselves, refusing to admit that something very different from the usual politics is afoot.

A great number will simply kid themselves, refusing to admit that something very different from the usual politics is afoot. Let the storm pass, they insist, and then we can pick up the pieces, rebuild and get back to normal. Meanwhile, don’t alienate the leader’s mass following. After all, they are voters and will need to brought back into the fold. As for Trump himself, let’s shape him, advise him, steer him in the right direction and, not incidentally, save our political skins.

What these people do not or will not see is that, once in power, Trump will owe them and their party nothing. He will have ridden to power despite the party, catapulted into the White House by a mass following devoted only to him. By then that following will have grown dramatically. Today, less than 5 percent of eligible voters have voted for Trump. But if he wins the election, his legions will comprise a majority of the nation. Imagine the power he would wield then. In addition to all that comes from being the leader of a mass following, he would also have the immense powers of the American presidency at his command: the Justice Department, the FBI, the intelligence services, the military. Who would dare to oppose him then? Certainly not a Republican Party that laid down before him even when he was comparatively weak. And is a man like Trump, with infinitely greater power in his hands, likely to become more humble, more judicious, more generous, less vengeful than he is today, than he has been his whole life? Does vast power un-corrupt?

This is how fascism comes to America, not with jackboots and salutes (although there have been salutes, and a whiff of violence) but with a television huckster, a phony billionaire, a textbook egomaniac “tapping into” popular resentments and insecurities, and with an entire national political party—out of ambition or blind party loyalty, or simply out of fear—falling into line behind him.

      

The Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute hosted a forum with Ted Piccone and Ambassadors Hardeep Singh Puri and Antonio de Aguiar Patriota as they discussed his new book, Five Rising Democracies and the Fate of the International Liberal Order.

While the spread of democracy over the last three decades has inspired hope for an international liberal order, recent shifting power balances and democratic backsliding are shaking this foundation. In his new book, Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Ted Piccone discusses how five pivotal countries—India, Brazil, South Africa, Turkey, and Indonesia—could play a critical role as examples and supporters of liberal ideas and practices. 

Mr. Piccone, Hardeep Singh Puri, former Ambassador of India to the U.N. and Secretary General of the Independent Commission on Multilateralism, and Antonio de Aguiar Patriota, Ambassador of Brazil to the U.N. and former Minister of External Relations, discuss the ways in which these countries stand out for their embrace of globalization and liberal norms on their own terms—and how, in a multipolar world, they may impact our shared future.

      

Editors’ Note: Donald Trump has exposed the tension between democracy and liberal values—similar to the Arab Spring, writes Shadi Hamid. This piece originally appeared on The Atlantic.

When I was living in the Middle East, politics always felt existential, in a way that I suppose I could never fully understand. After all, I could always leave (as my relatives in Egypt were fond of reminding me). But it was easy enough to sense it. Here, in the era of Arab revolt, elections really had consequences. Politics wasn’t about policy; it was about a battle over the very meaning and purpose of the nation-state. These were the things that mattered more than anything else, in part because they were impossible to measure or quantify.

The primary divide in most Arab countries was between Islamists and non-Islamists. The latter, especially those of a more secular bent, feared that Islamist rule, however “democratic” it might be, would alter the nature of their countries beyond recognition. It wouldn’t just affect their governments or their laws, but how they lived, what they wore, and how they raised their sons and daughters.

Perhaps more than at any other time, millions of Americans are getting a sense, however mild in comparison, of what it might feel like to lose your country—or at least think about losing your country—because of what people decide to do in the privacy of the voting booth. It still remains (somewhat) unlikely that Donald Trump, the now presumptive Republican nominee, can win a general election. Regardless of the final outcome, however, the billionaire’s rise offers up a powerful—and frightening—reminder that liberal democracy, even where it’s most entrenched, is a fragile thing.

* * *

When I hear my friends debating how, exactly, so many of their fellow citizens could support someone like Trump, it reminds me a bit of Egypt. In my forthcoming book, I relay a telling conversation I had four years ago, which has stayed with me since. A few days after the country’s first post-revolutionary elections concluded in January 2012, I visited my great aunt in her extravagant flat in the posh Cairo suburb of Heliopolis. She was in a state of shock, but worse than that was the confusion. It was one thing for the Muslim Brotherhood, long Egypt’s largest opposition group, to win close to 40 percent of the vote, but how could 28 percent of Egyptians vote for ultraconservative Salafi parties, which believed in the strict implementation of Islamic law?

Like most Egyptians, she personally knew Brotherhood members even if she didn’t quite like them, but she hadn’t had much experience with Salafis and seemed totally unaware that they had extended their reach deep into Egyptian society. She realized, perhaps for the first time, that the country she had thought was hers for the better part of 70 years would never quite be the same. It hadn’t really even been hers to begin with.

What if voters don’t want to be liberal and vote accordingly?

What my aunt feared was that Egypt would become an “illiberal democracy,” a term popularized by Fareed Zakaria in his 2003 book The Future of Freedom, but one that’s still difficult for Americans to fundamentally relate to. In the American experience, democracy and liberalism seemed to go hand in hand, to such an extent that democracy really just became shorthand for “liberal democracy.”

As Richard Youngs writes in his excellent study of non-Western democracy, liberalism and democracy have historically been “rival notions and not bedfellows.” Liberalism is about non-negotiable personal rights and freedoms. Democracy, while requiring some basic protection of rights to allow for meaningful competition, is more about popular sovereignty, popular will, and accountability and responsiveness to the voting public. Which, of course, raises the question: What if voters don’t want to be liberal and vote accordingly?

* * *

When the stakes are high, there is more to lose, and if there is more to lose, those on the losing end of a ballot box have powerful incentives to play “spoiler.” Fortunately, in the post-Civil War United States, the stakes have never reached what political scientist Barry Weingast calls the “threshold” at which citizens decide to defend themselves through extra-constitutional means, including by appealing for the military to take sides. This, in part, is why (good) constitutions are so important: They lower the stakes, reassuring citizens that even if their preferred party loses the election, it’s still just that—an election.

Donald Trump, or more specifically what he represents, calls some of these assumptions into question. Trump himself isn’t quite an Islamist, but he is a proponent of a kind of “illiberal democracy,” even if he himself may not be familiar with the term. Drawing on a wellspring of white nativism and machismo, candidate Trump has regularly made demeaning statements about entire groups of people, including African-Americans, Mexicans, and women. His commitment to the protections enshrined in U.S. constitution are questionable, at best, and if we assume the worst, downright frightening (the difficulty with Trump is that he’s not precise with words, so it’s sometimes hard to make sense of what he’s saying). He has expressed support for registering Muslims in a database, elaborating that they could “sign up at different places.” When a reporter asked how this was different from requiring Jews to register in Nazi Germany, Trump said “you tell me,” prompting The Atlantic’s David Graham to note that “it’s hard to remember a time when a supposedly mainstream candidate had no interest in differentiating ideas he’s endorsed from those of the Nazis.” Trump, for good measure, has also refused to disavow President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s internment of Japanese-Americans.

The U.S. Constitution includes robust civil-liberties protections, enshrined in the Bill of Rights. But these protections are not unlimited. Contrary to popular belief, majorities—if they’re large enough—can, in fact, do nearly anything they want, even in established democracies. It’s only really a question of how high the majoritarian bar is. In the United States, two-thirds of Congress and 75 percent of the states can amend or repeal articles of the Constitution. They could theoretically pass a constitutional amendment banning abortion. In countries like Egypt, Tunisia, and Turkey, where alcohol is currently legal and relatively easy to find, the issue of alcohol consumption is a touchstone for endless “what if” hypothesizing. Yet, Prohibition happened not in any of those countries but in America, with large majorities in the Senate and House of Representatives as well as 46 of 48 states backing the 18th Amendment (of course, banning alcohol in the U.S. wasn’t justified on primarily scriptural grounds, while in Muslim-majority countries, prohibition is seen as fulfilling an explicitly Quranic directive).

In other words, built-in constraints and constitutional “guarantees” aren’t enough on their own to preclude illiberal outcomes. What Americans really depend on, then, is a shared political culture and the ideas and ideals that undergird it. As James Fallows notes, “Liberal democracies like ours depend on rules but also on norms—on the assumption that you’ll go so far, but no further, to advance your political ends.” But all it apparently takes is one man with charisma and an unusually perceptive understanding of the human psyche to change that. There are norms against politicians suggesting that minorities should have special identification cards. There are norms against saying you want to kill the families of terrorists. There are norms against encouraging your supporters to use violence against their political opponents. It’s not entirely clear why you don’t do or say these things (because Trump clearly has), but you just don’t. The very fact that Trump has made such frightening comments on national television—without any corresponding “disqualification” or decline in popular support—has already undermined these longstanding norms.

The United States has had demagogues before, but they rarely make for viable presidential candidates. This is democracy’s blessing as well as its curse: that people you really don’t like—people who you think might threaten the Republic—can actually win. In the specific context of the Republican nomination, Trump opponents basically called for prioritizing good outcomes over democratic ones. They continued to search for possible paths to denying Trump the nomination, despite the fact that, barring acts of God, he was certain to win the popular vote and a plurality of delegates in the primaries.

Even if Trump reached the magic number of 1,237 delegates, which would normally settle the matter, there were those who still seemed intent on scouring the rulebooks, parliamentary procedure, and delegate details in the hope of averting disaster. Democratic norms, the thinking goes, are great in normal contexts, but sometimes the stakes are simply too high to let democratic outcomes stand. As the columnist Walter Shapiro wrote, “[W]ith the threat of the first takeover of a modern political party by an authoritarian who traffics in racism and exudes contempt for the First Amendment ... [t]here would be nothing anti-democratic about GOP leaders using every mechanism in their power to stop Trump.” Nate Silver pointed out that “technically [Republicans would] be able to deny Trump the nomination even if he had a delegate majority by changing the rules at the last minute.” They could still theoretically do something like this, even after Trump’s decisive victory in Indiana. The Republican Party is not a country, and the party can disregard the preferences of primary voters if it so chooses, but elite pacts and back-room negotiations would seem decidedly antiquated during an unusually populist moment in American politics.

[T]here will no doubt be a temptation to defy or otherwise undermine a democratically elected Trump.

This particular debate in some ways mirrors arguments over the tensions between democracy and liberalism, a debate that will only intensify if Trump gains ground on Hillary Clinton in the coming months. It is probably time to err on the side of imagination, since party elites and pundits failed to imagine the unthinkable once already. What if Trump actually wins the presidency? How would we as Americans deal with an outcome that at least some of us see as a potential danger to our Constitution as well as our livelihoods?

If Donald Trump wins, he would have, whether we liked it or not, a democratic mandate. Once in power, he might moderate his rhetoric and policies (yet another data point in the debate over the “inclusion-moderation hypothesis”), rendering at least some of this discussion moot. Yet it’s also possible that, facing a growing terrorist threat and a sputtering economy, more and more Americans might, like their newly elected president, dispense with the norms of reasonable conduct and support extreme measures. Still, a President Trump would be a legitimate president, having been freely and fairly elected by enough Americans. He would be, as much as it pains me to say it, our president. Still, there will no doubt be a temptation to defy or otherwise undermine a democratically elected Trump. For those of us who study the Middle East, the idea of not respecting democratic outcomes is business as usual, but I never thought it would be up for debate in the United States.

* * *

“Deep state” is a phrase that’s used to describe the constellation of autonomous and self-perpetuating institutions, namely the judiciary, military, and security services, which operate outside the glare of the public and are immune to the electorate’s whims. This deep state, acting as the guardian of national identity, puts limits on what elected politicians can hope to accomplish. The deep state was responsible for four coups in Turkey, the most recent of which deposed the country’s first-ever democratically elected Islamist prime minister in 1997.

It would be difficult for Americans to think about their own government—or “regime”—in such terms. The U.S. military is subject to civilian control, while Supreme Court justices, though unelected and appointed to life terms, are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. It is possible, however, to imagine a president so reckless as to activate state institutions against him or her, in a way that makes the notion of an American deep state more meaningful and relevant.

Former CIA Director Michael Hayden ignited some speculative debate when he said that the military “would refuse to act” if ordered by a President Trump to take actions that were clearly illegal, such as killing the families of terrorists. Moreover, he said, military commanders are “required not to follow an unlawful order.” Even short of flagrant illegality, the military can still do what it’s done, at times, with nearly every sitting president. Peter Feaver, a leading expert on civil-military relations, notes that “the historical record is replete with cases of the military shirking—withholding information and options, slow-rolling, end-runs to Congress and the media, inflating cost estimates, etc.—to thwart civilian policies they deem to be unwise.” Considering, however, that Trump would likely be more “unwise” than most past presidents, such tensions could intensify well beyond what America’s political system is accustomed to.

"[C]oup”...is not a word that Americans should ever get used to hearing in everyday political discourse.

One can also easily imagine left-of-center (and right-of-center) civil servants in the Departments of State and Defense working against the president from within to mitigate his effectiveness and even his authority. This would be good, insofar as Americans wouldn’t want their president doing things that were crazy, illegal, or both. But it would still raise difficult questions about democratic legitimacy and how far an elected president can pursue his preferred policies, especially when it comes to issues that aren’t clear-cut. If the military refused to obey orders, however justified their refusal, then it could very well erode norms against military intervention in domestic politics. In response to Hayden’s comments, host Bill Maher joked that the former CIA director was floating “a coup.” This is not a word that Americans should ever get used to hearing in everyday political discourse. The norm against “coups” is a powerful one, which explains why American analysts (if not the U.S. government) are generally uncomfortable with military coups in foreign countries. No one teaches us that military coups are bad. Rather, it’s something we absorb in the process of being American. It goes without saying, so it’s rarely said.

Recently, a few friends (who work on Middle East issues) and I had an interesting although ultimately frightening conversation, as Trump extended his delegate lead over Ted Cruz. Sometimes it’s useful to game out worst-case scenarios, however unlikely they might seem. We tried imagining a dystopian future and came up with internment camps, (threats of) military coups, and pro-Trump militias. Soon enough, the last didn’t seem nearly so farfetched, with volunteers offering to provide security at Trump rallies (for Trump supporters).

* * *

It is hard to imagine such things because, despite a long, low-intensity war on terrorism, America hasn’t faced a large-scale terrorist attack on the homeland since September 11, 2001. Democratic systems produce self-perpetuating norms, because they are accountable to a voting public. It’s this very responsiveness, though, that can be a source of vulnerability, if enough citizens, in the grip of fear, decide to prioritize “security” over liberty. As the legal scholar Christopher Kutz writes in the suggestively titled article “How Norms Die,” democracy can be “at the same time both fertile and toxic: fertile as a source of humanitarian values and institutions, but toxic to the very institutions it cultivates.”

This is something we can measure. As Daniel Bush observed, after analyzing Pew survey data from 2002 to 2014: “During each campaign season, respondents reported having a higher negative impression of Muslim Americans than in non-election years.” This is a bit more mild than the link between elections and religious riots in India. As the historian of religions Michael Cook notes, “There is no doubt that Hindu nationalist politicians believe that communal riots can get out the Hindu vote for them. ... Under the right conditions the communal riot is a winning [electoral] strategy.”

Norm shifting of an even more dangerous kind than India’s can happen rather quickly in countries where democracy is not yet consolidated. For example, millions of Egyptians who demanded freedom and democracy in 2011 turned seemingly against it in less than two and half years, supporting not just a return to authoritarian rule but the August 14, 2013 massacre of more than 800 protesters—what Human Rights Watch calls the “worst mass killing in [Egypt’s] modern history.”

The kinds of shifts that occur in established democracies are less nefarious, but they can happen just the same. Torture is a good example. Kutz calls the spread of global norms against torture “one of the most impressive successes of the post-war period.” Yet, in the United States, these norms began to erode after the attacks of September 11th. Soon enough, torture—or what some were now euphemistically calling “enhanced interrogation”—came to enjoy broad support among the American public. The lesson again is clear. However strong they may first appear, norms, particularly those relating to national security, are more fragile than we might like to think. Once their sanctity is undermined by authority figures (whether presidents or presidential candidates), others can judge that what was once considered shameful is now not just socially tolerated but also necessary, good, and just. This is why “political correctness”—even if it seems irritating and is sometimes abused to restrict reasonable debate—still represents a public good: It makes us think twice about saying things that might contribute to the erosion of liberal and democratic norms.

[N]orms, particularly those relating to national security, are more fragile than we might like to think.

We have now reached a point where current or former presidential candidates from both parties have flirted with the idea of internment camps (former Democratic candidate Wesley Clark has called for “segregating” radicalized Muslims who are “disloyal to the United States”). In a series of incidents that have received less attention, a Tennessee State Representative called for using state institutions, in this case the National Guard, to “round up” Syrian refugees. Meanwhile, the mayor of Roanoke, Virginia, called for suspending assistance to refugees, but went further in an official statement on government letterhead. “I’m reminded,” he wrote, “that President Franklin D. Roosevelt felt compelled to sequester Japanese foreign nationals after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and it appears that the threat of harm to America from ISIS now is just as real and serious as that from our enemies then.”

No less than Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia believed that it could happen here. On this, he is on strong ground, since it has, of course, already happened. In 1944, the Supreme Court upheld Roosevelt’s internment of Japanese-Americans in Korematsu v. United States. While Scalia said that the decision was “wrong,” he also issued a warning in his blunt style: “You are kidding yourself if you think the same thing will not happen again.”

The norm against internment has been undermined, even though Americans do not face anything close to the threat presented by the Nazis and Japan during World War II. Which raises the question of what a plurality, or even a majority, of Americans might be willing to support if they had to confront a threat that was truly existential. We Americans are not, today, at war, at least not in the normal sense. I hope to God that we never will be again. But we might be. And this is where Scalia’s words that day were perhaps most chilling, in part because he was right. Evoking the Latin expression inter arma enim silent leges, he reminded the audience that “in times of war, the laws fall silent.” All we will have then are the things we still believe in—our norms. But, by then, they might not be enough.

      

Today, Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi is witnessing the most vocal and angry objection to his rule since he took power via a military coup in 2013. Across Cairo and beyond, Egyptians are gathering and chanting some of the same slogans from the January 2011 revolution—such as “the people want the fall of the regime” and “down with military rule.” These protests are not a spontaneous uprising. They were planned and announced on April 15, when thousands of Egyptians took to the streets, protesting the latest in a series of bold and controversial decisions that are slowly and steadily chipping away at Sissi’s once solid support structure abroad and at home.

During Saudi King Salman’s recent visit to Cairo, the Egyptian government announced that it had agreed to transfer sovereignty of two Red Sea islands—Tiran and Sanafir—to Saudi Arabia. This decision, which coincided with a $22 billion oil and aid deal, has a clear short term pay-off: a substantial Band-Aid on Egypt’s gaping economic wounds. But Sissi and his government are once again dramatically underestimating just how self-destructive their behavior can be. As my colleague Tamara Wittes eloquently noted, Egypt “continues to throw obstacles in the road of U.S.-Egyptian cooperation.” But even worse than the self-sabotage in Egypt’s foreign relations is the damage Sissi is doing to his reputation at home. 

The decision to transfer the islands to Saudi Arabia may turn out to be the final nail in Sissi’s coffin.

To the streets, again

Following the announcement of this decision, Egyptians took to Twitter, with the hashtag “leave” and “I didn’t elect Sissi” trending in Egypt. Lawyers filed lawsuits in Egyptian courts opposing the agreement. And plans were made for a much larger protest today, Sinai Liberation Day. 

But today’s protests are different than in the past. First, while the anti-Sissi protesters had time to plan and coordinate their actions, so did the regime. Today, pro-Sissi supporters organized their own protests, proudly waving the Saudi flag in Cairo’s symbolic Tahrir Square. The Egyptian Air Force painted the Egyptian flag in the sky. And the security forces came out in droves early today across greater Cairo, closing off access to most of the usual protests sites (such as the Journalists’ Syndicate and the Doctors’ Syndicate) and making a massive show of force to deter people from coming out. 

The government clearly learned a few lessons since Mubarak’s fall. A law passed in 2013 requires pre-approval from the Interior Ministry for any protest activity. That gave Sissi’s henchmen a green light to round up actual and suspected protesters as they have been doing since Thursday, arresting hundreds of suspected agitators and human rights activists on charges related to organizing today’s protests. (Notably, the pro-Sissi demonstrators have not been touched.) As each new anti-regime protest pops up today, security forces are there, arresting protesters and journalists and dispersing them with tear gas and rubber bullets. Regardless of the final outcome of today’s events, Sissi should pay attention to the growing dissatisfaction among the Egyptian people. 

The symbolism of holding today’s protests on Sinai Liberation Day is potent. Threats to Egypt’s nationalism and national sovereignty have long been key drivers of Egyptian rage, allowing the protest organizers to tap in to the anger and frustration shared by Egyptians across the political spectrum. The outrage citizens have expressed in the streets, online, and in the media should be a red flag to Sissi, who is hemorrhaging support. 

Notably, he’s now struck a nerve not just with Islamists or others in the anti-Sissi crowd, but with one of the few remaining bastions of Sissi supporters—the everyday Egyptians who are not normally politically engaged. This is a group of people who, following five years of political turmoil, see Sissi as Egypt’s best chance at stability in an increasingly unstable neighborhood. And they’re generally willing to forgive Sissi for his transgressions. They don’t believe the theory that the Egyptian security services are responsible for Italian PhD student Giulio Regeni’s death. They agree that foreign funding of NGOs is a form of Western meddling in Egyptian affairs. They justify the brutal crackdown on free expression in the name of security. But secretly concocting a deal to give away Egyptian land—that is one pill even they can’t swallow. 

Final straws?

Making matters worse are reports that Egypt consulted with Israel and the United States prior to the transfer. While the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty remains active, Egypt and Israel’s peace is cold, at best. The notion that Sissi would consult with Israel over something that he kept secret from his own people is the ultimate insult and betrayal to many Egyptians. The facts behind the transfer matter very little. What matters is the perception of the Egyptian public that President Sissi has duped them. 

The decision to transfer the islands to Saudi Arabia may turn out to be the final nail in Sissi’s coffin. Over the past several months, he has lost other pillars of support—including secular revolutionaries, who saw former President Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood as subverting the revolution and supported the military’s return to power. The far-reaching and brutal crackdown on Egyptian journalists and NGOs turned many of them off from Sissi. And wealthy Egyptians, who believed Sissi’s promises to grow the economy and protect their assets, have increasingly questioned their leader as Egypt’s economy continues to plummet. 

Sissi is not only running out of supporters, he is also running out of excuses.

Sissi is not only running out of supporters, he is also running out of excuses. Rather than admit his mistakes, Sissi has defended his actions, shifting the blame and feeding conspiracy theories. While protests were growing across Egypt on April 15, Sissi spoke to a group of Egyptian youth, referencing a “hellish scheme” to destabilize Egypt from within. 

Unfortunately for Sissi, there is no such “scheme.” In 2011 it was not a Western plot, as some Egyptian conspiracy theories have suggested, that ousted Mubarak—it was the Egyptian people, fed up with actions Mubarak carried out as president. In 2013, the coup that ousted Morsi succeeded because the people were fed up with decisions he made in office to consolidate power and reject democratic reforms. Had either Mubarak or Morsi spent as much time responding to the wants and needs of their citizenry as they had quashing dissent, one of them might still be in office. Much like his predecessors, what Sissi fails to understand is that the thing most likely to destabilize his government is neither an external conspiracy not an internal scheme—it’s him. 

      

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

Editor's Note: The World Bank’s Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) recently published a self-evaluation of its activities. Besides representing current thinking among evaluation experts at the World Bank, it also more broadly reflects some of the strengths and gaps in the approaches that evaluators use to assess and learn from the performance of the international institutions with which they work. The old question “Quis custodet ipsos custodes?” – loosely translated as “Who evaluates the evaluators?” – remains as relevant as ever. Johannes Linn served as an external peer reviewer of the self-evaluation and provides a bird’s-eye view on the lessons learned.

An Overview of the World Bank’s IEG Self-Evaluation Report

In 2011 the World Bank’s Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) carried out and published a self-evaluation of its activities. The self-evaluation team was led by an internal manager, but involved a respected external evaluation expert as the principal author and also an external peer reviewer.

The IEG self-evaluation follows best professional practices as codified by the Evaluation Cooperation Group (ECG). This group brings together the evaluation offices of seven major multilateral financial institutions in joint efforts designed to enhance evaluation performance and cooperation among their evaluators. One can therefore infer that the approach and focus of the IEG self-evaluation is representative of a broader set of practices that are currently used by the evaluation community of international financial organizations.

At the outset the IEG report states that “IEG is the largest evaluation department among Evaluation Capacity Group (ECG) members and is held in high regard by the international evaluation community. Independent assessments of IEG’s role as an independent evaluation function for the Bank and IFC rated it above the evaluation functions in most other ECG members, international nongovernmental organizations, and transnational corporations and found that IEG follows good practice evaluation principles.”

The self-evaluation report generally confirms this positive assessment. For four out of six areas of its mandate IEG gives itself the second highest rating (“good”) out of six possible rating categories. This includes (a) the professional quality of its evaluations, (b) its reports on how the World Bank’s management follows up on IEG recommendations, (c) cooperation with other evaluation offices, and (d) assistance to borrowing countries in improving their own evaluation capacity. In the area of appraising the World Bank’s self-evaluation and risk management practices, the report offers the third highest rating (“satisfactory”), while it gives the third lowest rating (“modest”) for IEG’s impact on the Bank’s policies, strategies and operations. In addition the self-evaluation concludes that overall the performance of IEG has been “good” and that it operates independently, effectively and efficiently.

The report makes a number of recommendations for improvement, which are likely to be helpful, but have limited impact on its activities. They cover measures to further enhance the independence of IEG and the consistency of evaluation practices as applied across the World Bank Group’s branches – the World Bank, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), and the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA) –; to improve the design of evaluations and the engagement with Bank management upstream for greater impact; and monitoring the impact of recent organizational changes in IEG in terms of results achieved. The report also recommends that more be done to evaluate the Bank’s analytical work and that evaluations draw on comparative evidence.

Assessment

In terms of the parameters of self-evaluation set by the prevailing practice among the evaluators on international financial agencies, the IEG self-evaluation is accurate and helpful. From my own experience as an operational manager in the Bank whose activities were evaluated by IEG in years past, and as a user of IEG evaluations (and of evaluations of other international aid organizations) for my research on aid effectiveness, I concur that IEG is independent and effective in meeting its mandate as defined. Moreover, the self-evaluation produces useful quantitative evidence (including survey results, budget analysis, etc.) to corroborate qualitative judgments.

However, the self-evaluation suffers from a number of limitations in approach and gaps in focus, which are broadly representative of the practices prevalent among many of the evaluation offices of international aid agencies.

Approach of the IEG self-evaluation

The core of the self-evaluation report is about the evaluation process followed by IEG, with very little said about the substance of IEG’s evaluations. The following questions could have usefully been raised, but were not: do evaluations cover the right issues with the right intensity, such as growth and poverty; environmental, governance, and gender impacts; regional dimensions versus exclusive country or project focus; effectiveness in addressing the problems of fragile and conflict states; effectiveness in dealing with global public goods; sustainability and scaling up; etc. Therefore the report does not deal with the question of whether IEG effectively responds in its evaluations to the many important strategic debates and issues with which the development community is grappling.

Related to this limitation is the fact that the report assessed the quality of IEG’s mostly in terms of (a) whether its approach and processes meet certain standards established by the Evaluation Cooperation Group; and (b) how it is judged by stakeholders in response to a survey commissioned for this evaluation. Both these approaches are useful, but they do not have any basis in professional assessments of the quality of individual products. This is equivalent to IEG evaluating the World Bank’s projects on the quality of its processes (e.g., appraisal and supervision processes) and on the basis of stakeholder surveys, without evaluating individual products and their impacts.

Gaps in the Self-Evaluation and in Evaluation Practice

Careful reading of the report reveals six important gaps in the IEG self-evaluation, in the prevailing evaluation practice in the World Bank, and more generally in the way international financial organizations evaluate their own performance. The first three gaps relate to aspects of the evaluation approach used and the second three gaps relate to lack of focus in the self-evaluation on key internal organizational issues:

1. Impact Evaluations: The report notes that IEG carries out two to three impact evaluations per year, but it sidesteps the debate in the current evaluation literature and practice as to what extent the “gold standard” of randomized impact evaluation should occupy a much more central role. Given the importance of this debate and divergence of views, it would have been appropriate for the self-evaluation to assess IEG’s current practice of very limited use of randomized evaluations.

2. Evaluation of Scaling Up: The report does not address the question of to what extent current IEG practice not only assesses the performance of individual projects in terms of their outcomes and sustainability, but also in terms of whether the Bank has systematically built on its experience in specific projects to help scale up their impact through support for expansion or replication in follow-up operations or through effective hand-off to the government or other partners. In fact, currently IEG does not explicitly and systematically consider scaling up in its project and program evaluations. For example, in a recent IEG evaluation of World Bank funded municipal development projects (MDPs) , IEG found that the Bank has supported multiple MDPs in many countries over the years, but the evaluation did not address the obvious question whether the Bank systematically planned for the project sequence or built on its experience from prior projects in subsequent operations. While most other evaluation offices like IEG do not consider scaling up, some (in particular those of the International Fund for Agricultural Development and the United Nations Development Program) have started doing so in recent years.

3. Drawing on the Experience of and Benchmarking Against Other Institutions: The self-evaluation report does a good job in benchmarking IEG performance in a number of respects against that of other multilateral institutions. In the main text of the report it states that “IEG plans to develop guidelines for approach papers to ensure greater quality, in particular in drawing on comparative information from other sources and benchmarking against other institutions.” This is a welcome intention, but it is inadequately motivated in the rest of the report and not reflected in the Executive Summary. The reality is that IEG, like most multilateral evaluation offices, so far has not systematically drawn on the evaluations and relevant experience of other aid agencies in its evaluations of World Bank performance. This has severely limited the learning impact of the evaluations.

4. Bank Internal Policies, Management Processes and Incentives: IEG evaluations traditionally do not focus on how the Bank’s internal policies, management and incentives affect the quality of Bank engagement in countries. Therefore evaluations cannot offer any insights into whether and how Bank-internal operating modalities contribute to results. Two recent exceptions are notable exceptions. First, the IEG evaluation of the Bank’s approach to harmonization with other donors and alignment with country priorities assesses the incentives for staff to support harmonization and alignment. The evaluation concludes that there are insufficient incentives, a finding disputed by management. Second, is the evaluation of the Bank’s internal matrix management arrangements, which is currently under way. The self-evaluation notes that Bank management tried to quash the matrix evaluation on the grounds that it did not fall under the mandate of IEG. This is an unfortunate argument, since an assessment of the institutional reasons for the Bank’s performance is an essential component of any meaningful evaluation of Bank-supported programs. While making a good case for the specific instance of the matrix evaluation, the self-evaluation report shies away from a more general statement in support of engaging IEG on issues of Bank-internal policies, management processes and incentives. It is notable that IFAD’s Independent Office of Evaluation appears to be more aggressive in this regard: It currently is carrying out a full evaluation of IFAD’s internal efficiency and previous evaluations (e.g., an evaluation of innovation and scaling up) did not shy away from assessing internal institutional dimensions.

5. World Bank Governance: The IEG self-evaluation is even more restrictive in how it interprets its mandate regarding the evaluation of the World Bank’s governance structures and processes (including its approach to members’ voice and vote, the functioning of its board of directors, the selection of its senior management, etc.). It considers these topics beyond IEG’s mandate. This is unfortunate, since the way the Bank’s governance evolves will substantially affect its long-term legitimacy, effectiveness and viability as an international financial institution. Since IEG reports to the Bank’s board of directors, and many of the governance issues involve questions of the board’s composition, role and functioning, there is a valid question of how effectively IEG could carry out such an evaluation. However, it is notable that the IMF’s Independent Evaluation Office, which similarly reports to the IMF board of directors, published a full evaluation of the IMF’s governance in 2008, which effectively addressed many of the right questions.

6. Synergies between World Bank, IFC and MIGA: The self-evaluation report points out that the recent internal reorganization of IEG aimed to assure more effective and consistent evaluations across the three member branches of the World Bank Group. This is welcome, but the report does not assess how past evaluations addressed the question of whether the World Bank, IFC and MIGA effectively capitalized on the potential synergies among the three organizations. The recent evaluation of the World Bank Group’s response to the global economic crisis of 2008/9 provided parallel assessments of each agency’s performance, but did not address whether they work together effectively in maximizing their synergies. The reality is that the three organizations have deeply engrained institutional cultures and generally go their own ways rather than closely coordinating their activities on the ground. Future evaluations should explicitly consider whether the three effectively cooperate or not. While the World Bank is unique in the way it has organizationally separated its private sector and guarantee operations, other aid organizations also have problems of a lack of cooperation, coordination and synergy among different units within the agency. Therefore, the same comment also applies to their evaluation approaches.

Conclusions

Self-evaluations are valuable tools for performance assessment and IEG is to be congratulated for carrying out and publishing such an evaluation of its own activities. As for all self-evaluations, it should be seen as an input to an independent external evaluation, a decision that, for now, has apparently been postponed by the Bank’s board of directors.

IEG’s self-evaluation has many strengths and provides an overall positive assessment of IEG’s work. However, it does reflect some important limitations of analysis and of certain gaps in approach and coverage, which an independent external review should consider explicitly, and which IEG’s management should address. Since many of these issues also likely apply to most of the other evaluation approaches by other evaluation offices, the lessons have relevance beyond IEG and the World Bank.

Key lessons include:

• An evaluation of evaluations should focus not only on process, but also on the substantive issues that the institution is grappling with.
• An evaluation of the effectiveness of evaluations should include a professional assessment of the quality of evaluation products.
• An evaluation of evaluations should assess:
  o How effectively impact evaluations are used;
  o How scaling up of successful interventions is treated;
  o How the experience of other comparable institutions is utilized;
  o Whether and how the internal policies, management practices and incentives of the institution are effectively assessed;
  o Whether and how the governance of the institution is evaluated; and
  o Whether and how internal coordination, cooperation and synergy among units within the organizations are assessed.

Evaluations play an essential role in the accountability and learning of international aid organizations. Hence it is critical that evaluations address the right issues and use appropriate techniques. If the lessons above were reflected in the evaluation practices of the aid institutions, this would represent a significant step forward in the quality, relevance and likely impact of evaluations.

       

A key objective of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) is to assist its member countries in meeting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). UNDP pursues this objective in various ways, including through analysis and advice to governments on the progress towards the MDGs (such as support for the preparation and monitoring Poverty Reduction Strategies, or PRSs, in poor countries), assistance for capacity building, and financial and technical support for the preparation and implementation of development programs.

The challenge of achieving the MDGs remains daunting in many countries, including Tajikistan. To do so will require that all development partners, i.e., the government, civil society, private business and donors, make every effort to scale up successful development interventions. Scaling up refers to “expanding, adapting and sustaining successful policies, programs and projects on different places and over time to reach a greater number of people.” Interventions that are successful as pilots but are not scaled up will create localized benefits for a small number of beneficiaries, but they will fail to contribute significantly to close the MDG gap.

This paper aims to assess whether and how well UNDP is supporting scaling up in its development programs in Tajikistan. While the principal purpose of this assessment was to assist the UNDP country program director and his team in Tajikistan in their scaling up efforts, it also contributes to the overall growing body of evidence on the scaling up of development interventions worldwide.

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Development ministers and experts will meet at the Fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan, Korea, in November 2011 to assess their efforts to improve the impact of aid. A recent survey by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) shows that little progress has been made since they met in Accra in 2008 for their Third High Level Forum. The many good intentions to improve coordination among donors, to enhance the alignment of aid programs with the priorities of aid recipients, and to develop effective partnerships in practice have turned out to be difficult to implement.

If anything, the challenge has become greater: the number of aid agencies keeps rising, as does the number of aid-supported projects, while average project size continues to drop. According to the OECD, more than half of the 90,000 official aid projects implemented annually are now well below $100,000 in size. With so many small interventions, most of them one-time, without links to each other, driven by the short-lived preferences of individual agencies and individuals in agencies, it is no surprise that the lofty goals of aid ministers go unrealized and that the cumulative impact of the many well-intentioned small aid projects is minimal at best.

It doesn’t have to be that way. There are examples of successful development programs that have lifted millions of people out of poverty, have greatly improved health conditions and have generated new business and employment opportunities. Examples such as the Mexican government’s national program of cash transfers to poor households (“Progresa- Oportunidades”) which conditions assistance on whether children attend school and mothers take their infants for health check-ups; the multi-donor program to eradicate the deadly river-blindness disease in West-Africa; the community based microcredit and employment programs of Grameen Bank and BRAC in Bangladesh; the Chinese government’s program for the development of the loess plateau with support of the World Bank; or the program of rural poverty reduction in the highlands of Peru supported by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) – these are just a few examples of cases where the impact of development programs has been at a scale such that it made a real and lasting difference in the lives of millions of people. And success at scale is also possible in fragile and conflict-affected states as a recent review by the Brookings Institution for the Australian aid agency AusAID has shown.

This raises three questions that development ministers should consider as they prepare for and meet in Busan: What made these success stories possible? Why are they the exception rather than the rule? What needs to be done the make scaling up the norm? Let us take these questions in turn.

What made these success stories possible? Each case has its own ingredients of success, but three dimensions are common to them all:

• The programs pursued a scaling up pathway towards a long-term goal: Few successful programs followed a blueprint for long-term scaling up from the start, but they all built on the recognition that if the early steps were successfully piloted, subsequent steps needed to systematically replicate and scale up what works, adapting the approach in the light of lessons learned at each of the earlier project. A key element in this connection is that the long-term objective of scale impact is part of the program concept from the beginning; that monitoring and evaluation are designed to test not only whether an idea works, but also to measure progress against the long-term goal; and that an effort is made to identify the drivers, to create the spaces and to chart a suitable scaling up pathway for programs to move from small pilot to impact at scale.
  
  
• The programs benefitted from strong and sustained drivers for scaling up: Specifically, they had strong leadership with a clear vision of the need for large scale impact, with ideas that were suited to the challenge, ready to learn from experience, willing to stay engaged for the long haul, championing the cause, building partnerships with other like-minded actors and politically savvy in overcoming obstacles. This leadership could come from public officials, such as the President of Mexico and his Deputy Minister of Finance in the case of “Progresa”, from private individuals, such as the founders of Grameen Bank and BRAC, from a community of national experts and community leaders, as in the case of the Peru Highlands Development Program, from outside aid donors, as in the case of the West-African River- Blindness program, or be part of a wellestablished system of experimentation with replication of success as established in China’s approach to economic growth.
  
  
• The programs created the space for sustained growth: As programs expanded successfully they managed to open up financial and fiscal space by keeping costs down and finding suitable financing mechanisms; they pursued policy reforms that created favorable legal and regulatory conditions; they created the institutional space by identifying appropriate organizational approaches and building institutions for managing the programs at scale; they adapted approaches to the specific cultural realities; and they created political coalitions and operational partnerships that made it possible to grow and sustain the initiative. In the case of “Progresa- Oportunidades” the Mexican government designed a program with a long-term goal of universal coverage of all poor, but started with carefully designed pilots, which were subjected to detailed evaluation against control groups and adapted as needed during the 5-10 year scale-up phase. It created the required fiscal and financial space by abandoning other less successful social programs and by seeking the support of international financial institutions. The government also insulated “Progresa-Oportunidades” from political controversy by carefully monitoring and documenting its positive impacts and by legally assuring that it did not get caught up in party politics. Finally, it designed an institutional approach suitable for phased nation-wide scale-up with minimal bureaucratic obstacles.

Why are these success stories the exception rather than the rule? The first explanation for the lack of systematic and effective focus on scaling up lies in the nature of governmental and bureaucratic incentives and the resulting planning and implementation mechanisms in the developing countries themselves. Typically, governmental plans set out broad targets, policies and implementation modalities, but they generally do not link specific interventions, projects and programs or individual agency budgets and investment plans with the longer-term goals set forth in national or sectoral plans. Moreover, whenever governments or heads of agencies change, the new leadership has a strong tendency to discard the programs supported by the former incumbents and instead to pursue new ideas and new programs. Finally, the practice of methodically evaluating the impact of programs is poorly understood in most countries, and in any case is not well appreciated, since politicians and agencies like to claim success, but prefer not to acknowledge failures in their programs. Contrast this with the incentives for scaling up in the private sector: In a competitive market a successful new initiative, i.e., one that makes a profit, will be replicated and scaled up either by the firm that pioneered it, or by competitors who see the opportunity to garner some of the potential profit for themselves.

The second explanation can be found in the way aid agencies work. While some donors help governments with advice and technical assistance to develop a longer-term national, sub-national and sectoral plans and improved budgeting and investment planning mechanisms, the aid agencies’ own operational modalities and incentives tend to operate just like those of governments: Their operational policies, programming, management and staffing do not encourage support for systematic scaling up. On the contrary, they tend to focus on innovative initiatives and even discourage replication of successful projects and programs. They do not reward effective monitoring and evaluation against longer-term objectives. They rotate managers and staff frequently and with little attention to ensure appropriate hand-over. And the incentives for staff are to start new projects rather than focusing on implementing and building on ongoing ones. And while partnerships, coordination and handing off programs to the clients are encouraged at the level of ministers and agency heads, in practice staff have little incentive to pursue these avenues, since they take time, effort and even budgetary resources, increase risks of delay and of loss of institutional identity and control, and since fiduciary requirements for procurement and disbursements are not harmonized among donors.

What needs to be done to make scaling up the norm? Let us start with aid agencies. Donors have an obligation to do no harm, and it can be argued that their proliferation of small, one-time, uncoordinated and unevaluated interventions do more harm than good. They certainly represent an opportunity forgone, namely the opportunity to support a systematic focus on scaling up successful development interventions. Indeed, this represents an obligation that should be reflected in the mission statements of all official aid organizations, as well as in those of the larger non-governmental organizations and foundations that provide development assistance A recent assessment of donor performance in terms of their attention to scaling up concluded that donors need to address five critical gaps in their operation approach:

1. Institutional information gap: Aid agencies should review and develop their institutional approaches to scaling up.
2. Evaluation gap: Evaluations of donor projects should include an assessment of the scaling up practices of donors.
3. Incentives gap: Donors need to develop internal and external incentives (e.g., operational policies and staff incentives; replication funds, competitions) to help drive the scaling up process.
4. Partnership gap: Donors should expand the use of programmatic approaches and instruments with joint funding of programs designed to bring donors together so they can help scale up successful interventions;
5. Ownership gap: Ultimately, scaling up is a country’s job; donors need to help by setting an example, build capacity and hand off to agents in the country.

In their turn, the governments of developing countries need to make scaling up of successful interventions an explicit part of their national planning and programming, need to implement rigorous monitoring and evaluation as learning and accountability mechanisms for the political and agency leadership, and need to find ways to ensure that successful programs do not fall victim of the electoral cycle.

The good news is that progress is being made. There is now a well established body of evidence that scaling up can and does work, even in fragile states. There exists a framework for analyzing, planning monitoring and evaluating scaling up approaches, building on the scaling up pathway, drivers and incentives concepts as summarized above. Examples of governments focused on scaling up success show that it is possible to pursue this avenue to development, with China the outstanding case in point. And some aid agencies have begun to focus systematically on scaling up in their operational mission, strategy, policies, processes and incentives, among them IFAD, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The United Nations Development Program has made scaling up an explicitcriterion in its evaluation of its programs. And the Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) recently issued practical guidelines for scaling up.

What is needed now, and what development ministers and agency heads should focus on in Busan and beyond, are the following three important priorities to ensure that an operational focus on scaling up becomes the rule, not the exception, in the way governments and aid agencies work:

1. Developing country governments commit themselves to introduce the scaling up objective and practice into their own planning, implementation, evaluation and accountability mechanisms.
2. Official donors and large private donors commit to introduce the objective and practice of scaling up into their mission statements, operational policies and evaluation practices.
3. Donors specifically commit to assist development partners through their technical and financial assistance to implement systematic approaches and incentive mechanisms that help drive the scaling up of successful development interventions. Scaling up success is not rocket science. It is a simple, intuitively appealing concept. And yet in practice it has been an orphan in the development literature and practice. Fortunately, this is now changing. We do not need complex models and metrics, nor do governments and aid agencies need sophisticated operational instruments. What we need is for scaling up to become the accepted goal at the political and institutional level. We need a clear vision of scaling up pathways, an assessment of the needed drivers and spaces for scaling up. And we need a readiness to evaluate progress against ultimate and intermediate goals and to adjust the scaling up pathway in light of the lessons learned.

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Fragile states present one of the greatest challenges to global development and poverty reduction. Despite much new learning that has emerged from within the development community in recent years, understanding of how to address fragility remains modest. There is growing recognition that donor engagement in fragile states must look beyond the confines of the traditional aid effectiveness agenda if it is to achieve its intended objectives, which include statebuilding, meeting the needs of citizens, and managing risk more effectively. Current approaches are constrained by relying heavily on small-scale interventions, are weakened by poor coordination and volatility, and struggle to promote an appropriate role for the recipient state.

Scaling up (i.e., the expansion, replication, adaption and sustaining of successful policies and programs in space and over time to reach a greater number of people) is highly relevant to fragile settings, both as an objective and as a strategic approach to development. As an objective, it reinforces the logic that the scale of the challenges in fragile states demands interventions that are commensurate in purpose and equal to the task. As a strategy, it encourages donors to identify and leverage successes, and to integrate institutional development more explicitly into projects and programs. In addition, scaling up can assist donors in addressing the priority areas of improved project design and implementation, sustainability and effective risk management.

Successful scaling up in fragile states almost certainly occurs less often than is possible and does not always involve a systematic approach. Donors should therefore look to more systematically pursue scaling up in fragile states and evaluate their performance with specific reference to this objective. This can be done by incorporating relevant elements of a scaling up framework into operational policies, from strategy development through to program design and monitoring.

Contrary to expectations, there are compelling examples of successful scaling up in fragile states. While the conditions prevailing in fragile states create serious obstacles in terms of “drivers” (the forces that push the scaling up process forward) and “spaces” (the opportunities that need to be created, or potential obstacles that need to be removed for interventions to grow), and in terms of the operational modalities of donors, these can be overcome through the careful design and delivery of programs with a clear focus on creating scaling up pathways, and through close partnership and sustained engagement of governments, communities and foreign partners.

Case study evidence suggests that the pathways taken to reach scale in fragile states demand different approaches by donors. Donors need to adopt greater selectivity in determining which areas or sectors for scaling up are justified—a strategy that has also assisted some donors in managing risk. More investment and time are required in upfront analysis and building the evidence for successful scaling up pathways. In some cases, donors require longer time horizons to achieve scale, although demand from government or beneficiaries has sometimes forced donors to move immediately to scale, allowing little or no time for piloting. Regardless of the pace of scaling up, donors that were most successful were engaged early and then remained engaged, often far beyond the replication phase of scaling up, to increase the likelihood of interventions being sustained. Other common characteristics of successful scaling up were simple project design and a focus on the institutional aspects of the scaling up pathway.

Case studies also point to the crucial role of drivers in moving the scaling up process forward in fragile states. Proven ideas and practical models have often been picked up in fragile states, contrary to the expectation that actors may be less responsive to recognizing and acting on the utility of promising results. Leaders undoubtedly have a role to play in supporting scaling up, although there are clear dangers that must be avoided, including avoiding the perception that donors are picking (political) winners by nominating leaders, and tying the survival of projects too closely to the fortunes of a leader’s political career. Incentives were found to be one of the most important drivers in fragile states, and there is a good case to be made for donors introducing new inducements, greater transparency or similar reforms to strengthen the role incentives play. Finally, and in contrast to the standard scaling up framework, community demand was found to be an important driver in many fragile states, both in demanding the expansion of small-scale projects and by facilitating the community’s own resources to support the scaling up process.

The greatest challenge to scaling up in fragile states is the limited spaces these environments provide. This is especially the case in respect to those spaces which concern aspects of governance: political, institutional and policy spaces. When working in fragile states, donors must recognize that spaces for scaling up are almost always more constrained, but look for ways to expand upon them. Some of the most successful examples of scaling up used creative approaches to build space quickly or used existing capacity to the fullest possible extent. Also relevant are the lessons of robust analysis, greater realism and cost control. The case studies confirm the importance of two additional spaces in fragile states. For example, security space often imposed horizontal obstacles to scaling up which could not realistically be overcome while ownership space served as a good indication of the perceived legitimacy of the scaling up process and the likelihood that interventions would be sustained longer term.

Case studies also affirm the importance of emphasizing robust project design and implementation, and the close linkages between the scaling up agenda and the role of risk management and sustainability in fragile states. While sustainability presented a significant problem for many of the projects and programs reviewed, a more focused approach around scaling up may assist donors in addressing sustainability concerns. This would entail adopting a longer-term perspective beyond the immediate confines of any individual project, looking for available drivers and supportive spaces, and focusing on effective implementation and consistent monitoring and evaluation (M&E). Any intervention introduced on a small scale that scores well in sustainability serves as a possible candidate for scaling up.

Similarly, many of the methods used by donors for managing risk—an emphasis on analysis, scenario planning, realism and making use of specialized aid instruments—are equally relevant for supporting scaling up in fragile countries. A persuasive argument can be made that the adoption of a more explicit scaling up approach by donors can form part of a risk management strategy in fragile states. Scaling up can enable donors to more ambitiously tackle development risks without allowing institutional and project risks to grow unchecked. Ultimately, a donor approach that combines good risk management and scaling up requires strong leadership and well-aligned incentives.

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ABSTRACT—

The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) has for many years stressed innovation, knowledge and scaling up as essential ingredients of its strategy to combat rural poverty in developing countries. This institutional review of IFAD’s approach to scaling up is the fi rst of its kind: A team of development experts were funded by a small grant from IFAD to assess IFAD’s track record in scaling up successful interventions, its operational policies and processes, instruments, resources and incentives, and to provide recommendations to management for how to turn IFAD into a scaling-up institution. Beyond IFAD, this institutional scaling up review is a pilot exercise that can serve as an example for other development institutions.

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Abstract

Scaling up of development interventions is much debated today as a way to improve their impact and effectiveness. Based on a review of scaling up literature and practice, this paper develops a framework for the key dynamics that allow the scaling up process to happen. The authors explore the possible approaches and paths to scaling up, the drivers of expansion and of replication, the space that has to be created for interventions to grow, and the role of evaluation and of careful planning and implementation. They draw a number of lessons for the development analyst and practitioner. More than anything else, scaling up is about political and organizational leadership, about vision, values and mindset, and about incentives and accountability—all oriented to make scaling up a central element of individual, institutional, national and international development efforts. The paper concludes by highlighting some implications for aid and aid donors.

An annotated bibliography of the literature on scaling up and development aid effectiveness was created by Oksana Pidufala to supplement this working paper. Read more »

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Summary

At the Gleneagles Summit in 2005, leaders of the G8 group of nations committed to increase aid to poor nations by $50 billion per year. During the same year, in a meeting in Paris, donors promised to coordinate their interventions for more effective delivery. These commitments are now often referred to as the promise of donors to “scale up aid.” Increasing aid flows and improving coordination are indeed important goals and, in fact, goals that donors seem to have trouble meeting. The international donor community met this fall in Accra and will meet in Doha in November 2008 to review progress with this aspect of scaling up aid, and it is hoped that they will recommit to meet the ambitious targets set three years ago.

Scaling up aid is only one of the challenges that donors face. A more important challenge is to “scale up through aid,” meaning that aid flows should not merely support short-lived, one-time and partial development interventions—pilot projects, short-term technical assistance, programs that only address part of the problem, but leave major bottlenecks unaddressed—but should support projects, programs and policies that scale up successful interventions in a country, region or globally to reach the entire target population. Scaling up means that programs are long-term and sustained and that external support is aligned with country needs and deals comprehensively with the development challenges—often by working in partnership with other donors and pooling resources. This is the scaling up challenge that donors should address head-on, but so far have not.

This policy brief reports on the findings of an in-depth review of the literature and practice of scaling up development interventions and focuses on the role that aid donors can play in supporting scaling up for effective development. It stresses that successful scaling up with external assistance means that donor agencies need to: work with a vision and leadership; help create the political constituencies for large-scale implementation; create linkages among project, program and policy interventions; strengthen the institutional capacity of the implementing entities; provide for effective incentives and accountabilities of their own staff and management; work together with each other; monitor and evaluate the progress of programs with special attention to the scaling up dimension; and finally make sure they focus on effective preparation and flexible implementation of the scaling up process. While this is a long-term agenda, donors can take a few practical steps right away that will provide a basis for a more ambitious effort over time.

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Executive Summary

Large-scale antipoverty programs have achieved significant and positive results in many developing countries around the world in the past decade. This paper explores the challenges of “scaling up” small-scale antipoverty programs—taken here to mean the processes by which successful efforts to raise the incomes of the poorest citizens in developing counties are expanded in coverage over time and across geography. In particular, I advocate supplementing approaches that highlight resource and program constraints with an expanded focus on the political dynamics involved in expanding pro-poor policies. Thus, greater emphasis should be placed on understanding the political factors that limit the expansion and survivability of antipoverty programs. A broader view along these lines highlights the bargaining strength of beneficiaries, the need to secure public support, the potential for political misuse of antipoverty programs, and how institutional fragilities affect their sustainability. Antipoverty programs can be effectively scaled up if attention is paid to addressing these political and institutional challenges. An agenda for future research is also identified.

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