A sculpture advocating the independence of the disputed territory of Somaliland. Vladimir Lysenko/Wikimedia. Some rights reserved.In her article “How to navigate trade-offs in parliamentary strengthening”, Susan Dodsworth developed an interesting framework for parliamentary strengthening programs that identified four different approaches taken by donors, including a focus on issues versus institutions, and on narrow versus inclusive approaches.
While the framework is descriptive of donor approaches, what I would like to highlight are the implicit ideas of what success looks like to donors (outside of a few parliamentary strengthening specialists working within those donor agencies.) This is not a critique of Dodsworth’s arguments but of how these concepts reveal problems in what is valued in parliamentary strengthening.
