Dialogue in Pursuit of Development - Are you looking for one of ...

251
ening of the democratic institutions for good governance, none of them are
inclined to support a complex, long-term and process-oriented project.
In implementing the Nigerian programme, there has been a good match
between the needs of the programme and the knowledge, expertise, and
personal skills of the resource persons who are mobilized to provide the
appropriate assistance. This is true of both the team of Nigerian and international
resource persons who were contracted to conduct the Democracy
Assessment and the international resource persons who provided international
comparative experience to HRVIC.
IDEA’s Nigerian programme is generally responsive in a timely manner
to the opportunities and problems as they emerge in the programme environment.
All the Nigerian stakeholders of the programme are satisfied with both
the nature of IDEA’s assistance and the programme’s results achieved so far.
The Democracy Assessment project is viewed by NGOs, political parties,
and government institutions as an appropriate and worthwhile investment
for the building of the democratic process in Nigeria. HRVIC is highly appreciative
of IDEA’s assistance, which it considers to be very significant,
professional and timely, in building its capacity to carry out its mandate.
However, some NGOs, including those who were consulted during the
Democracy Assessment exercise, are unclear about IDEA’s agenda.
Although democracy and good governance are intimately intertwined,
IDEA’s conceptualization of its development philosophy on democratic
development should be linked more explicitly with good governance, particularly
the elements of accountability, transparency, participation and the
rule of law. By so doing, apart from its own merit and rationale, these key
issues of good governance that have bedevilled many countries including
Nigeria can be more explicitly addressed in the Democracy Assessment.
Although the appropriateness of the methodology used by IDEA for
carrying out Democracy Assessment has been tested and proved, value will
be added if IDEA facilitates a greater degree of participation by a country’s
key stakeholders in the further adaptation and refinement of the methodology
to better suit a given national context without compromising its basic
rationale and paradigm.
For a more effective management and implementation of the Nigerian
programme, the organization should define the goal, purposes, expected
results and performance indicators of the programme as a whole as well as
of the programme’s constituent projects.
General lessons and challenges
Several issues of direct relevance to the subject of dialogue emerge from
the foregoing case studies. The common and by no means minor one was
that despite every effort and clear intentions of the methodology to map