WFD organised a training workshop for women in Province Oriental, DRC. Westminster Foundation.One of the recommendations from the study completed for the Swedish International Development Agency (Sida) in 2012 by my colleague at ODI, Tam O’Neil and I, was that the parliamentary strengthening community should “move the field forward by conducting or commissioning evaluation work that can address identified knowledge gaps and build the evidence base in a more systematic and rigorous manner.” It is exciting to see the Westminster Foundation for Democracy (WFD) and the University of Oxford collaborating to do just that in this project on ‘The Political Economy of Democracy Promotion’.
Everyone knows or talks about the fact that context matters, but the policy brief on ‘Navigating trade-offs in parliamentary strengthening’ does a good job of examining what the concrete implications of this might be, focusing in particular on the longevity of the legislature and the nature of social cleavages in a given country.
