Gaps in Democracy and Governance Local Programming Across 7 Countries

This second case provides a window into Phase II of the evaluation and during this phase we focused on evaluating “relevance” of a subset of 10 programs implemented across 7 country contexts that had Freedom House’s “freedom” ratings ranging from “not free” to “partially free.” The team collected primary interview data from 12 democracy and governance (DG) experts; 21 country-level experts; 17 grantee and subgrantee staff; in addition to program-related documents of the 10 projects; 60 documents which included published DG research and gray literature on promising practices in the DG field. Not surprisingly, the part of the story revealed by our analysis highlighted that the more local the programs were the more relevant they were to stakeholders. It is not this theme of the story that we would like to emphasize. But rather, this paper investigates and exposes the gaps in several elements of the story that our analysis has revealed. Gaps concern the characters within the story, gaps in the plot lines, and gaps in point-of-view. Reflections point to alternative ways of designing evaluation and key considerations for evaluators to take into account when seeking to “localize.”