You're asking for my opinion on local governance and local democracy programs. In an article I published in 2003 in Democratization magazine, I examined CIDA's programs in Southeast Asia and the Philippines, where local democracy programs had been established on a few occasions.
The problem is that CIDA doesn't evaluate the impact of those programs. There was no document at CIDA to indicate whether that had produced any results or whether the situation was better than before. The only indicator I had was Freedom House, which tracks the progress of civil and political liberties in countries. I have to say that unfortunately, the score given by Freedom House was no better than before in the case of the Philippines and other countries that had been targeted for CIDA's local governance programs.
So, obviously, we can't draw any conclusions based just on the Freedom House reports, but that's all we have to go on. So, it's very difficult for experts to answer, because there has been no evaluation of those programs. As I said, there is just the United States Agency for International Development that has done evaluations because the US Congress required it to do so in 1994. There too, their work was criticized. I have published articles on that. There are limits to the USAID evaluations because there aren't enough experts going into the field, and they only stay for three weeks, which isn't long enough, and they don't meet with enough local stakeholders. So, the USAID evaluations could be better, but at least they are better than what CIDA is doing, which is no evaluation.