Democracy assistance foundations are proliferating and, alongside other donors and institutions in the field, adapting – albeit with varying degrees of speed and innovation – to a challenging environment marked by newly assertive authoritarian regimes. But donors and grant recipients don’t always see eye to eye on how to best balance accountability, transparency and efficacy, a World Movement for Democracy workshop heard.

The European Union and its democracy assistance flagship – the European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights – have been criticized for opaque and onerous regulations that deter activist groups from applying for funds.

But that is starting to change, said Vera Rihackova, summarizing a new report produced for the Prague-based PASOS think-tank network. The EU’s new approach puts democracy on an equal footing with development and human rights, while the EIDHR is now prepared to fund activists working within authoritarian states, no longer insisting on the previous requirement for host-government approval.

The study and the EU’s approach raised issues with which practitioners have been struggling for over 25 years, said the National Endowment for Democracy’s Barbara Haig, moderating the panel. How to deliver assistance to democracy activists operating in closed societies? How should donors relate to host-country governments?

The UN Democracy Fund has grappled with many of the dilemmas confronting democracy assistance donors, said its director Roland Rich, including whether to insist on on-line-only applications (it does, due to resource constraints); whether to give small or large grants, to widen or deepen civil society (it opts for the latter); whether to fund local or international NGOS (UNDEF supports grass-roots groups); and how to determine what role governments should play (advisory rather than holding a veto).

Asia currently exhibits a diverse set if challenges to democracy assistance groups, said Peter Manikas, regional director for the National Democratic Institute, from post-conflict reconciliation in Sri Lanka and Nepal to acute security challenges in Af-Pak, from the intimidating prospects for changing closed societies like North Korea and Burma to the highly-polarized polities – and civil societies – of Thaiand and Bangladesh.

But the overriding challenge, he believes, is the threat of the China Model – Asian Values Mk II – which holds out the autocratic promise of economic growth and social stability without democracy. The much-neglected Shanghai Cooperation Organization presents the same threat of an authoritarian axis at the regional geo-strategic level.

Democracy assistance actors have arguably neglected the socio-economic dimensions of democracy at their cost, leaving a vacuum for populist and anti-democratic forces to exploit, feeding off the material insecurity that poverty breeds. The NED-affiliated Solidarity Center and Center for International Private Enterprise address these challenges from the perspective of organized labor and business, respectively.

Labor unions are in the democracy business because workers tend to perceive their interests in the round, says the Solidarity Center’s Tim Ryan said, as it is hard to divorce political concerns from issues of economic security. The plight of Asia’s migrant workers provides a case in point: their social and economic marginalization often leads to political disenfranchisement.

CIPE’s John Sullivan endorsed  Indonesian President Yudhoyono’s call for a democracy that delivers, but insisted that democracy isn’t worth the name without property rights that underpin the distribution of income and pluralist  dispersal of power. He cautioned against subsuming – and thereby diluting – democracy under the development rubric  and insisted that references to good governance be exposed for the euphemistic evasions that they are: democratic governance is the only meaningful way to frame the decision-making and leadership-selection that are central to any genuine concept of democracy.

A sometimes-charged discussion of donor-client roles and responsibilities eventually generated several specific recommendations:

• A regional, geo-strategic and ideological counterweight is needed to confront the China Model and SCO;
• Donor demands for transparency and accountability should also pay heed to the security of activists operating in authoritarian regimes;
• Don’t unduly accentuate the tensions between democracy and development: they are interdependent;
• Democracy assistance isn’t enough: funds matter, but activists and NGOs need the political support of democratic states who should employ other foreign policy instruments – aid, trade, diplomacy – to defend activists and pressure autocrats;
• Insist on property rights as an essential element of democracy and demand democratic governance;
• Don’t underestimate the force of religious sentiment as a factor in political allegiance and mobilization, or focus overmuch on secular elites;
• Donors should help build small, local NGOs’ capacity to meet the demands for auditing and other forms of accountability that donors demand.