Editors’ note

Abstract

Over the past five decades, democracy, human rights, and governance (DRG) support has gained momentum as a critical sector within international assistance structures. DRG programs support actors such as civil society organizations, independent media, political parties, and governments, who work to build and sustain democratic processes such as free and fair elections or robust human rights protections. Dealing as they do with whose voice matters and whose priorities are addressed, DRG programs are inherently political, focusing on the allocation of power. The role of DRG in the public mind has changed in recent years, influenced by 16 straight years of global democratic crisis and decline (Repucci & Slipowitz, 2022), along with movements that challenge the allocation of political power, such as Black Lives Matter and #MeToo in the United States, and Decolonize/Localize Aid (#ShiftThePower) in international aid. Discussions about whether and how we reform democratic institutions are now commonplace headlines rather than niche topics limited to political scientists and DRG practitioners. Accordingly, this issue is relevant to anyone concerned with how our political institutions can manage political conflict, and our role as evaluators in understanding and contributing to that process. Indeed, in the American Evaluation Association’s Guiding Principles, evaluators are charged to “contribute to the common good and advancement of an equitable and just society,” including advancing a democratic society (American Evaluation Association, n.d.). DRG program evaluators have worked to develop methods and approaches appropriate to the political nature of DRG work. Much of this work takes place in the “black box,” a term that refers to the complex and often poorly specified inner workings of programs that transform inputs into outcomes. DRG programming environments are characterized by shifting power dynamics, ideological conflicts, the competitive allocation of scarce resources, and the interplay between formal and informal institutions. Designing and evaluating programs amidst these environments is complex, and thus “complexity” has often been a rallying call for DRG evaluators struggling to juggle the dynamism of highly politicized contexts and often highly politicized goals. There are three types of individual responses to the challenge of complexity: those that choose to ignore it, those that acknowledge its relevance yet admit that it is not practical to operationalize, and those that fully embrace it. DRG actors – funders, implementers, change agents, and evaluators – fall into these categories equally. Some use complexity to justify ignoring certain research methods or to hide and point to a fuzzy future when change will manifest. Others fully embrace the idea but are stymied by the challenge of making “complexity” programmatically or evaluatively useful. Still others use the term as obfuscating shorthand for a host of interrelated cultural, social, racial, historical, preferential, and structural forces without providing the specificity needed to tackle them.