Margaret Peters 0:00

Aaron. Hello everybody. Welcome to, I think, the second meeting of the Quarter today, we're very excited to have Dr Erin A Snider, who is currently a senior advisor and consultant for projects on democratic erosion and openings with the US Agency for International Development and the US State Department. She was, until recently, a professor at Texas A & M University and a Carnegie fellow with New America prior to joining the faculty at Texas A & M. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton Niehaus center and Fulbright scholar in Egypt, and a Gates Scholar at the University of Cambridge. She had worked for several years on development and humanitarian mining with the US State Department and the UN association of USA and today she's going to talk to her book about marketing democracy, the political economy of democracy aid in the Middle East. We're very excited to have her here. I'm sure she will also mention other things about USAID these days. And just a reminder that if you have questions to please use the Q and A function at the bottom of the screen. And with that, I'll let Erin take it away.

Erin A Snider 2:07

Brilliant. Okay, thanks so much. Thank you, Maggie for the lovely introduction, and let me do the screen sharing bit and see if we can get this up. Perfect, Maggie, can you hear everything and see everything? Okay? Yes, we can. Perfect, brilliant. All right, okay, so again, once, once again to thank you, to Maggie, to Alexandria and to the Burkle Central, Burkle Center at UCLA for the invitation to join virtually today. I wish I could be there in person. Much better weather in Los Angeles than there is on the east coast at the moment. It's a pleasure to be with everyone today, and I'm really thrilled for the opportunity to talk about my first book: Marketing Democracy: The Political Economy of Democracy Aid in the Middle East, and even more delighted that the cheaper, more accessible paper book version was released just a few weeks ago with Cambridge University press's Middle East series. So this book is both about the construction and practice of democracy aid in the Middle East, as well as the politics of democracy aid in authoritarian states, and how we think about the concept of democracy in democracy aid programs. So to understand the motivations for this book, let me take you back to the halcyon days of 2006 so in the mid 2000s the US government was beginning to devote much more resources for democracy promotion abroad. At the same time, many scholars, many political scientists in particular, began to devote more attention in trying to understand the impact and effectiveness of spending on democracy, on democratization itself. This was also a time when we began to first start seeing a backlash, a backlash against certain forms of democracy aid. So in 2006 USAID, the primary US agency charged with foreign aid in general, in charge of it, but also democracy aid, commissioned a really ambitious, cross national quantitative study of its efforts to promote democracy worldwide, trying to assess if again, spending money on democracy aid results in more democracy. So the study, which was later published in world politics, found that spending on democracy works, with the exception of what the authors called difficult context, bit of an understatement, like the Middle East. So at that point, nearly $2 billion had been spent on democracy aid in the region from 1990 to 2006 yet the impact of that aid was limited, and this was apparent to anyone who happened to have been working on those projects at that time. So just to go over a couple of questions and puzzles that were there for me at the very outset of this project, the first question linked to that study, why have democracy aid efforts had such little impact in the region? And a second in. Some ways more obvious question, why would authoritarian regimes even allow or tolerate such programs? You know, after all, as scholars of this aid in general note, democracy aid is inherently about challenging the structure of power in regimes. So why would an authoritarian state allow donors involved in these programs to even work on them. So some explanations, the first has to do with security and Middle East. Scholars, of course, would note that security is definitely a part of the equation, especially in thinking about the US is geopolitical and strategic interest in the region, and so security is indeed an important part of the story. But at the same time, when I was initially beginning field work in Egypt and later in Morocco, I felt that part of the story was missing, or explanations for why that aid wasn't supposedly working seemed really oversimplified. On the one hand, again, we had academic studies that were suggesting that this aid can be impactful and works. And on the other hand, scholars adopting a much more critical approach about this aid, saying that this aid didn't work because it was never intended to in the first place, in some ways, suggesting that there's a person in a back office, in the State Department or USAID deliberately trying to subvert democracy in the region, which I can tell you from having spent time in the region working on these programs and studying them, and someone who used to work in the government ascribes far too much coherence to be sure about what people in DC were doing. But what was missing from this conversation, for me, is that groups on the ground actually did see utility with forms of this aid. Many of those groups were not necessarily opposed to democracy aid, but did have major issues with the approach taken by donors, and felt that their needs and concerns weren't really driving the process, or that the interests of the donor, in this case, the United States seemed many times at a profound disconnect with the realities of civil society and the political landscape at that time. So how I approach the question of limited impact. I saw this initially as a problem that could be solved if only I could find, assemble and analyze data on democracy projects in the region, right? But the reality, as I discovered, was much more complicated, so fine grained data on democracy projects was extremely difficult to find, and US officials involved with such aid in the field, were often hesitant to share it, much less discuss it. And aid recipients and civil society activists in Egypt and Morocco also had very different ideas about the utility of democracy aid and its underlying motivations. But these sort of complications and exclusions, particularly from US agencies and organizations, signaled to me a far more interesting and complex story, and one that was missing from existing scholarship on this form of aid. So just to go over the argument of the book and the approach that I took in doing this research, so in the book, I argue that in order to understand why democracy aid may have had a limited impact in the region, we should first examine how democracy aid programs were constructed, negotiated and executed over time, I tackle these questions by advancing a political economy framework that considers how ideas, interests and institutions mediate and shape the form and function of democracy aid programs and I developed this framework in the Book to examine the design and implementation of past efforts in Egypt and Morocco, which have been two of the highest recipients of us democracy aid in the region. So previous studies, as I mentioned at the outside outset, had really, I think, paid really insufficient attention to the fact that democracy aid programs are often negotiated deals. So I show in the book that recipient governments, so recipient governments taking democracy aid from a donor, in this case, the United States, can and do help craft their design. So one of the major implications of this is that the agency and strategic behavior of recipient states can help explain the null effects of democracy aid in some countries. So because authoritarian states can choose how to accept aid democracy, aid may end up rewarding economic interests tied to incumbent regimes. So rather than promote democracy, such aid can perversely undermine it. So why this particular framework? How does it confront some of the limitations and weaknesses that we have seen maybe an existing work on democracy aid. So in the book, I highlight limitations and weaknesses with past approaches to studying democracy aid, and show that existing research on aid has tended to align the contested meaning of democracy itself, as well as some of the assumptions underlying democracy aid projects. I argue that a political economy approach to the study of aid takes such meaning much more seriously, while giving us a more nuanced understanding of the motivations and the intentions of donor and recipient states and one of the utilities of this framework is that it really allows us to engage questions of meaning and power. The provision of democracy aid, while also deepening our understanding of how democracy works, especially in authoritarian state. So examining how ideas, interests and institutions interact to mediate and shape the form and function of democracy programs really illuminates our understanding of why authoritarian regimes would allow such programs to exist, and why the interest of donor and recipient states, rather than indigenous demand drive democracy programs so insights drawn from all three of these approaches really allow me to get at the richness and the complexity inherent with the politics of democracy aid in the Middle East. And again, one of the strengths, just to reiterate, of a political economy framework, is that it again allows us to directly question, confront questions of power and meaning in the execution of aid. So just to spend a couple of minutes talking through some of the methods used in this book, my work very much follows an interpretivist approach that underscores how studying the practices of the actors working in democracy aid can illuminate the ideational and institutional factors shaping democracy aid in the Middle East. So one of the benefits of studying practices is that it really allows us to see how actors interact with each other, how they see themselves within their respective institutions and the larger constellation of the field they inhabit, we can study practices through a number of ways. So for example, through participant observation, through interviews, textual analysis, diplomatic cables, meeting and conference minutes and transcripts as well as government reports. So how do I do this? How did I do this? So my research for this book drew on archival research, recently declassified government documents, and over two years of field work with over 150 interviews with development practitioners, diplomats and activists in Washington, DC, Morocco and Egypt. I also drew on data scrape from a professional networking site. I'm sure many are familiar with linkedin.com to map the movement of nearly 2000 professionals that have worked in the field of democracy and governance since 1990 so by leveraging over a decade of field and archival research, I show in the book how ideas about democracy were formed and contested and how strategies developed to challenge restrictive regimes against very, very rapidly, in some cases, changing institutional contexts. I also show the evolution of what were really rich discussions and debates about how to orient democracy programs in the region. And so in the book, my focus isn't just limited to bureaucrats within USAID, but very much extends to the larger constellation of actors involved. So we're thinking about diplomats, contractors for USAID projects, democracy advocates in the US and abroad, local activists, and in diplomatic parlance, local nationals, local foreign nationals. So Egyptians and Moroccans who are working within the missions of USAID and the US embassies. So in doing so, this book is really it's been a labor of love, especially in being the first to really offer insight into the black box of relations between donor and recipient, governments and civil society in the Middle East. So just to go over some of the findings and takeaways from the case studies in this book, so in Egypt and Morocco, US democracy programs were framed in general in terms of their benefit to the economy. So this orientation very much reflected an institutional preference in the United States for a market oriented democracy, as well as a strategy to sell democracy programs to resistant regimes. So it's worth mentioning For those not familiar with with either Morocco or Egypt. Since the early 1990s both states were able to appropriate elements of democracy aid to bolster their control over society. So they did this, for example, by using support for civil society to help fulfill government social welfare functions us, programs aiming to promote democracy often ended up reinforcing structures they intended to change or to challenge. And this is something that many on the ground were very wary of and very much aware that this could be, you know, a side effect, so to speak, of strategy. The findings overall in the book suggest that dependency matters and understanding and authoritarian regimes ability to challenge democracy aid programs, but also that it is contingent on the availability of other potential patrons, so other donors that might act as a surrogate for donor aid, so beyond suggesting evidence of the limits of linkage politics and foreign aid, my book really illuminates why democracy efforts have been limited through both the conceptualization of democracy promoted and the subsequent dilutions regimes have been able to make to aid programs over. Time. So while this book is, again, as I mentioned, about the construction and practice of democracy aid in the Middle East, it is also very much about the role of ideas in such aid more generally. So today, little attention, I think, has been devoted to really understanding how ideas about democracy, underlying democracy, aid programs are formed and how they're shaped by those executing the project. So I'm sure many listening today are aware that, of course, there are multiple conceptions of democracy that exist, ranging from procedural and liberal forms of democracy to more social democratic notions of the concept. So examining the political economy of democracy in the Middle East shows us which ideas about democracy, when and why in democracy programming so again, through archival and field research, and again, the data I mentioned on the proficient professional histories of more than 2000 professionals working in democracy promotion, I show that the ideas that ultimately won out were often those privileging a market economy, which worked to the benefit most of the time for recipient regimes. So programs privileging market reforms were ultimately very easy to sell to authoritarian regimes that were already undergoing neoliberal economic reform, programs which Egypt and Morocco certainly were at that point. They were also easier to sell among domestic actors in the United States. In the book, I show why such ideas, unfortunately, aren't likely to change given the institutional incentives governing actors engaged in US democracy promotion over time, institutional changes to the administration of foreign aid brought us a ID, which again, is the primary US agency managing democracy aid programs under the control of the State Department. So there's been a lot of news about a ID in the past couple of weeks that I look forward to talking about more in the Q and A session. But one of the things that has been mentioned is that somehow aid is rogue and outside of the State Department. And the fact is that the State Department, or the USAID was brought under the State Department nearly 20 years ago. But one of the things that's very important to understand is that the cultures of both government agencies are profoundly different. So as an agency focused on development, USAID sees its work in long term time horizons, so looking at health, education and democracy programs in five to 10, 10 to 15 year time horizons to sort of realize project goals. The State Department, however, of course, is necessarily focused on the short term, given the nature of its diplomatic work, and including, of course, maintaining good relations with recipient states. So tensions rising from this cultural difference became more pronounced in the early 2000s particularly in negotiating democracy aid with governments in Egypt and Morocco. So the effects of this change on USAIDs democracy work were significant. So in the book, I discuss how USAID lost substantial expertise through budget and staff cuts during the 1990s with most of its democracy work contracted out to for and not for profit organizations whose own interests didn't necessarily align with those of USAID. So looking at the changes to the movement of professionals working in democracy promotion suggests some of the impacts of these changes and to the privatization and implementation and evaluation of aid programs. The visualization that you see on your screen might be a little bit difficult to discern, but I just want to walk through a couple elements of it. So the magenta circles that you see represent us, government agencies, US government organizations. Those in blue, the National Endowment for Democracy and its partner organizations, and the circles in yellow represent for and not for profit organizations and companies that have done a lot of the contracting work for USAID the heavier lines that you see in the visualization, if you're able to pick that up, show greater circularity, or back and forth between individuals from one organization to another. So what this figure shows is that there was significant movement among for and not for profit organizations working with USAID, and we can make a few inferences from this visualization and a few others I have in my book, resource constraints and diminished authority to other actors like the State Department and Congress, led USAID to rely more on a core group of actors to run its democracy programs, and one impact of this change is that those actors had little incentive to share some of the lessons from their work to enrich USA IDs. Programming audits that were done by the US government show that many of these groups withheld information to preserve their strategic advantage in. Maintaining work with USAID against similar, competing groups. It's important to note that it's, of course, impossible to know the individual beliefs of those captured in this visualization, but through repeated interaction, you know with USAID, we can appreciate how actors might learn to market their knowledge and use their understanding of the scripts and codes particular to USAID to secure contracts and grants. I just want to highlight a couple of things that sort of get at, you know, dimensions of tensions with some of these changes. The first is from an Egyptian employee with USAID who noted the frustration with the agency tending to focus more on outside actors in its work, rather than those local actors and organizations on the ground. In her words, she said the culture of USAID was more accepting of foreigners, and that she tried to encourage the agency to devote more time and resources to working with local organizations to help them write competitive grant applications in both Arabic and English. In her words, quote, Egyptian civil society has great ideas, but they don't know how to write. And she's referring to grant applications. Americans know how to write, but they don't know how to implement programs, and they don't know Egypt. So one result of the resource cut that I mentioned during the 1990s and early 2000s and USA IDs, demotion within the foreign aid bureaucracy was a loss in the constituency for locally driven, nuanced democracy programs. So even before resource cuts constrained USA IDs, you know, capacity to engage in the way it wanted, staff members were already under, you know, extreme pressure from their superiors to orient programs in ways that ensured continued funding from Congress. And I have can talk more in detail about some of the stories of what that process looked like on the ground in the field. That same pressure very much affected how both local nationals and Americans working for USAID approached potential democracy programs, increasing the pressure to construct programs that recipient regimes would tolerate. So as I show actors at the micro, meso and macro levels that were involved in this, aid navigated what really were complex and changing fields and democracy aid, both in the United States and in the Middle East, so closely examining their responses to those changes in the domestic arena and in the field shows us the impact of institutional changes in incentivizing some forms of democracy over others, in democracy programming. So I talk in the book a little bit about how altering those incentives is going to be really challenging. And I think it's, I mean, it was challenging what I wrote that book a couple of years ago, and I think what we've seen in the last two weeks is going to exacerbate that challenge. But I do think that lessons and findings drawn from this book underscore the importance of a fundamental shift and how the US conceptualizes democracy aid in both the Middle East and in other authoritarian contexts, and how it approaches issues of impact and effectiveness, or impact and measurement more generally, in democracy aid, so many scholars of international peacekeeping, and I'm thinking in particular, of the work of severe and also Sarah and a few others have shown us that such efforts are much more effective when they involve some element of local ownership over the process, or are otherwise adapted to local context. Democracy. Aid programs that privilege local context and input seem much more likely in states that are dependent on us donor aid, but have low strategic value. And more possibilities would exist in such states for programs to be driven by and responsive to local contexts. And such states, I note, are really ideal cases, I think, for scholars to test whether democracy programs are responsive to local context and concerns in that situation. These claims, I think, also really point to a promising area for scholars to explore towards understanding how democracy aid works in hybrid regimes beyond the Middle East. And this is something that I've begun to explore a new work, and is part of my second book in progress on transitional aid to the Arab world after 2011 so by focusing on the practice and construction of democracy aid, this book really does contribute, I think, to a more enriched understanding of the processes and mechanisms at work at both the recipient and donor ends, which scholars note, has been extremely underdeveloped in The democracy and civil society a literature or scholarship, these findings also, again, really challenge how scholars and practitioners think about the practice of democracy aid and are really important, I think, for refining our understanding about the role of outside actors in the execution of such aid, particularly, again, in restrictive contexts. So just to finish up, because I'm really looking forward to a Q and A session and talking through some elements from the book, one of the things I wanted to conclude on is a question that seemed very important that emerged towards the end of my work. And the question is, what is democracy? It was very clear to me in the context of doing field work and then coming back to the US and you know, you know, interacting with colleagues that work on this aid, that when we think about that question, what is democracy? We're all not talking about the same thing. So why does this matter? I think there needs to be a new, not only just a new focus on how to make aid more responsive, but also a focus on the quality of democracy, that demo that particular donors are promoting, making democracy aids more responsive to and driven by local demand, is obviously an important challenge that donor agencies have seized upon, which I think is extremely important as the US -- up to date, I'll still use it in the present tense, even though current events might challenge that a bit -- and at the moment, states in Europe and other donors have tried to make these programs much more responsive to and driven by local demand. At the tail end of Biden's President Biden's administration, he organized a summit on democracy, kind of a high level effort to really sort of rally enthusiasm again on the need to protect and support democracy. That sort of shifted the focus again to, I think, the need to really reinvigorate the way we talk about and the way we activate democracy aid. The goal of this book in general has been really to challenge how scholars think about effectiveness and democracy aid, but also the visions of democracy that donors have advanced as well. And with that, love to thank everyone again for your time and for joining. And I would love to talk more about USAID, about democracy aid, or anything else.

Margaret Peters 27:04

Great. Well. Thank you so much again, Erin, for coming. This is really fantastic. You know, when I first read your book earlier in the month, I had a lot of different questions, which I'll probably still talk about some of them, but I'm gonna start out with, you know, maybe you can talk a little bit about what is happening at USAID right now, what it looks like. And maybe, I know there's not that many people on this call. But, you know, maybe just talking a little bit about, why do we even have, like, a bigger question, of like, not just, why do we do democracy aid, but why do we do aid at all? You know, what do you think the if you were just selling this to the average American citizen, of like, why this is a good idea, whether it be promoting democracy, or just aid in general. If you could just give your your little pitch.

Erin A Snider 28:06

That's a formidable ask these days. Yeah, in a nutshell, you know, should the United States, states, you know, help where it can, to support medical emergencies, health education, democracy worldwide, just, you know, as a good maybe in and of itself, yes, but I think many voters, many citizens, would like, Okay, well, that's great, but we have these other pressing domestic issues that we need to, that we need to care about too, and we maybe we can't have both. And I would argue that we indeed can have both, and should have both. I mean, the USAID, USAID, for nearly 50 years, has been, you know, an incredibly important, you know, tool in the US is foreign policy toolbox, so to speak. It's an extraordinarily important form of soft power. There are lots of academic studies that have shown you know that you know, it tends to enhance the impression that people around the world have of the United States where they are directly benefiting from, you know, vaccinations or health programs, education, etc. So we have, you know, we have an enormous amount of evidence to show its impact. And it's an important, I think, to remind folks as well that, you know us, foreign assistance in general, comprises less than 1% of the US is, you know, federal budget. And I think the number is actually point 6% but you know many people, and I'm, I'm biased in some ways because of my work in this area, but I'm also biased, because I've seen, I've seen the impact, the positive impact on the ground, directly the US is, I think, I believe, the largest provider of foreign assistance, and that soft power is extraordinarily important in projecting, again, a good impression of the United States, but also one. That I think, counteracts adversaries that the United States government is concerned about. And when I say that, you know, I thinking about Russia, I'm thinking about China. And it's notable that, you know, it just to kind of circle back in the last two weeks, the this new administration has illegally decided to shut down USAID and, yeah, the reverberations of that are just been really shocking to see. And the some of the people that have cheered on that, you know, announcement of shutting as a USAID down have been the Russian president. Have been other adversaries have been, you know, certain presidents of authoritarian countries, and that, I think, is really telling

Margaret Peters 30:46

Great. So I'm going to pick up on some of the questions in the Q and A, but also one that I was thinking would be helpful for those that have not yet read the excellent book, which could you just talk a little bit more about the differences in the definitions of democracy, that different, that say, USAID had and the Americans had, versus in the region, and also, just like, tangibly, like, what Does it look like to promote democracy on the ground. And I just had to say I loved your little diagram on where people were, like which organizations. Because prior to going to grad school, I worked for a for profit aid company, like doing democracy promotion programs and other other programs, mostly in Iraq and Afghanistan, which will date me, because, you know, that was time where we were going to, like, make the world safe for democracy, and we were going to create democracy. And I think back to a lot of those programs. We're really focused on the economy and or potentially procedural democracy. So maybe talk a little bit about what are the different aspects of democracy we were promoting and how we actually went about doing that.

Erin A Snider 32:07

Yeah, so in general, I would say that, you know, you know, just to slightly nerd out a little bit when you go back through the archives and you go back to sort of the earlier discussions that a ID was having amongst amongst themselves about in the early 1990s when they were really charged with, okay, Soviet Union is no longer here's really an opportunity for us to really do much more ambitious programming to support democracy. They made a full like a really, you know, I think, in a fantastic effort to bring in scholars from scholars of various regions to sort of, you know, get their input and insight of, you know, like we're thinking of focusing, you know, on promoting market reforms as part of our democracy programs. Do you think that's a great idea? And some of those scholars were like, you absolutely should not be doing these things because of all these things that we know about this particular country, etc. And so are trying to push them to think about a broader conception of democracy than one. I think that the US was starting from, which is that, you know us, you know strongly believes in market reforms as a component of democracy. Because I think, look, we're a democracy. We have this. It's worked for us, but we have, of course, a lot of scholarship that shows problems with that understanding, right? So privatization on paper might sound good, but it can also, you know, entrench regimes. It can also give rise to crony capitalism. And, you know, to be cognizant of that in the pro programming approach and to be very dexterous, right, when you're thinking about, you know, how might the needs for Nigeria be different from Armenia versus El Salvador, etc? So I think, you know, one of the things I found really fascinating is that, you know, there is a sort of dilution that happens. I mentioned both in the field with, you know, the interaction that the US has with the recipient government, but also one that's happening domestically as well too. For example, there was really interesting material I found, you know where you know, a retired USAID official was describing that he was put in charge of putting together a democracy aid program for, I can't remember which Latin American country, but what he recommended was turned down by his superior because it sounded too socialist or too Marxist. And so his boss was basically saying to him, I can't put this forward because it's going to get shut down for these reasons. Find a different way to package things in a way that's but the program officer was merely sort of describing, you know, this is the situation, or the state of political development in this country, and this is why it makes more sense to think about equitable economic reform, shall we say, rather than just focusing in a very narrow fashion on or conceptualization. And of economic reform. To your point about different earlier, the question about different forms of democracy. I mean, one of the things that I found really interesting and frustrating amongst our communities sometimes is that those of us who study democracy, democracy, democratization and democracy aid, often have a narrow idea even of what democracy is, or what democracy aid is. So, you know, you can make the argument that programs to support social welfare reform or education could be conceptualized as part of a country's Democracy Program, right? You know, education is good. It's good if people are, you know, can read our informed citizens, etc. And then there's some, some scholars and practitioners who you know, are like, No, that's not democracy aid, right? And this is, I think, part of many problems I think, that have bedeviled, maybe more creative approaches to how we conceptualize democracy. In the field, there's lots of really great work on the strategies of donors in Europe. So in particular, our friends in the Scandinavian countries, in Sweden, in Norway, etc. Actually, Maggie, can you hold on one second? Yes. Okay. Hold on. I --

Margaret Peters 32:13

Thanks everybody for hanging tight.

Erin A Snider 36:32

Um, just to answer, this is, this is when, this is, this is when you have a dog that decides it's going to, like, run off with something critical, and so we're going to let him go and, yeah, go on his authoritarian streak at the moment. Yeah, if I could just pick up where I left. You know, it's we do have a lot of really interesting research that show again, no, I mean, there actually, there are different strategies that resonate more. So lots of great work from German party organizations on Swedish organizations that have, I think, a much broader conceptualization of democracy, and in some ways, one that resonates with people on the ground and their needs in a way more than, let's say, the US coming in and saying, this is the template you have to follow.

Margaret Peters 37:14

Yeah. Great, yeah. So just highlighting for one of the questions that was in the chat was just that, do European countries or Asian countries have things like USAID? Yes, they do, the EU and individual countries. But then also, I think, as Aaron was mentioning earlier, we have to worry about the increasing aid given by China and other countries, authoritarian countries that are sort of gaining influence in this. So when, when you think about, let me just go back to, like, this question of, like, tangible changes. So what do you think you know? Or going back to the book, and when you discuss, it's like, what, where was money actually going and where were people, what sort of reforms were getting promoted that were maybe not the most helpful. And I think this goes to some of the question about just in general. Like, how does, you know, the average person doesn't understand. Like, how does aid work, you know, like, how does this actually, how do you actually give money? And, like, what do you actually do with it?

Erin A Snider 38:22

Yeah, it's a good and complicated question. So a whole host of programs have been executed over time, if I'm just using the case studies for this book from Morocco and Egypt. Rule of law programs, right? So reforms to make the judiciary much more effective. Programs to enhance Hold on, hold on, one second the dog's coming back.

Margaret Peters 38:50

Ah, just hearing about that, I one of the things I actually worked on was a reform of the court systems in Qatar back in the day, that was like, they were literally, like doing everything on pen and paper, and they were like losing stuff. And so the reform we were doing, which, granted, was paid for the Qatari government, because, you know, they don't need aid because they pump money on the ground there, but was about like, putting in just like a computer system of like, how courts work. But, you know, here they hired, you know, us contractor who had done this for like US courts. And, you know, right, we're taking a product that's very much like us focused, and then we're trying to, like, shove it into a box of, like, a very different law system that was based on different sorts of, like, little codes and everything, and just being like, Sure, sounds great.

Erin A Snider 39:43

Okay, yeah. I mean, I think that there were a lot of compromises that were made for some of the reasons that I mentioned, with the different bureaucratic challenges that people face, not only in the host country, but also in the United States as well. And so people really did try to make. Something out of a really terrible situation that, you know, they would start, say, for example, a really ambitious program to support NGOs and civil society, and then in the process of going back and forth with the United States, and let's say the Egyptian government. In this case, that program got watered down. It ended up being such that it was able to be used by the Egyptian Government to oversee and monitor civil society groups, which is not the not where you wanted to end up. And so these are some of the tensions with that, with that, that that particular aspect of aid in authoritarian states, but to circle back to your question, I mean, there's been a whole host of programs. There's been voter education programs, programs to help disabled citizens, programs to enhance voter education, monitor elections, help political parties, put together platforms and work with their constituents, a whole host of things. And so the question I think a lot of people are, in this case Congress might have, would be like, well, how does it add up, right? So if you're if you're spending $3 million a year on activities under the umbrella of democracy aid, you know, did they work, right? And so if you ask people on the ground that question, like, how do you know if it's working? I mean, one, one response would be, well, we're not going to know if it's working. Working maybe for five or 10 years. But a more immediate factor is, well, if a program was meant to help a citizen file documents within the court system and to do so efficiently, then the project worked, right? You've accomplished that. It's a micro element of that, if you were convening a conference and people came to the conference, that it worked right? This is, this is a stretch on this part. And this is, again, there are a number of critiques I can make about elements of this where, you know, in the book, I have different Egyptians and Moroccans who are also saying, you know, like, if you're, if you have to pay people to come to your conferences, and if you have to pay people to, you know, if they're asking for a per diem to show up to things, this is probably this, this is probably this element might be problematic.

Margaret Peters 42:19

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, great, yeah. So one question I had reading the book is, thinking about, is part of the reason that there's such a focus by USAID part on sort of, like open markets, is this, you know, in part, if we go back and think about, like, the 90s and early 2000s in economic policy and governance, sort of like the capture of government by economists. I'm going to piss off my colleagues upstairs. Yeah, they're literally like, you know, econ literally like explorers above us, so, but I do think, you know, it's remarkable. So you talk about how there's this, like, conference in the early 90s, and they bring all these democracy scholars, but then they're like, open markets, and you're like, like, there's probably that was like, wait, what? Like, I don't understand what's going on here. So how much of this is, like, you know, the dominance of the economics field in human aid versus, you know, if they had more people in political science or philosophy or the area studies coming in,

Erin A Snider 43:32

yeah, I mean, the area studies professors that were involved in a lot of those discussions were the one. I remember this very clearly, because I know this colleague very well, you know, he was saying, like, look, you know, there's nothing wrong. Like, I mean, market reform can be great, but you just need to know it's not going to work in the way that you think it's going to work on the ground, right? It's not going to be this clean, neat procedure. Because, you know, you're trying to convince an authoritarian state to open up and to, you know, release control. It's not going to want to do that. It's going to resist that, right? So the privatization that you end up with, just as an example, is going to be one that very much mirrors, you know, the current regime, where, you know, it's sort of close associates are sort of the recipients of privatization contracts, etc. And it the the advice from that, that scholar in particular, was like, this is fine, but you need to think about the first, second and third order effects of what you're doing and how that's going to and again. So so you convince the authoritarian government, just as a hypothetical, to fully embrace market reform and privatization. But there's other component, like, think about the ripple effects on society, right? If you're removing subsidies, you know overnight, what's happening to again, when we think about the I was mentioning the quality of democracy, if you're if. Think the critique to AID sets various points, and not just AID by others as well too, has been again, it's, you know, what's the vision that you have for this? What do you want to see 5 to 10 years from now? And if you if you have crushing poverty and frustrated people at the outset, this is not, I, you know, I would humbly suggest your democracy strategy is problematic. And so maybe a good example is to think about to 2010 Egypt and 2011 2012 Egypt, right? So in 2011 after the uprising happens in the Arab world and the revolution happens in Egypt. You know, there are many, you know, donor governments and international organizations that were saying, you know, look, maybe we weren't thinking about things the right way before 2011 maybe 2011 people's frustrations with the economy, people's frustrations with how the economy was organized. Maybe we should, maybe we should, you know, wrestle with that a little bit. Maybe we should think about the strategies that we were pushing to be a government were problematic. And so you saw, I think at least it was more of a rhetorical discussion of, you know, political and economic reform, of like, you know, re question, rethinking what privatization looks like, rethinking what reform looks like, and extending, I think, those discussions to include more than just like, you know, the same counterparts from the government, but really making an effort to reach out to civil society actors that had been advocating for more inclusive economic reform. And you know that that discussion happened, everyone said they were going to do better, and nothing has practically changed. And so if you sort of Fast forward to today and look at a country like Egypt, I mean, the economic situation is, it's, it's terrifying, frankly. And again, it's sort of, there's a, there's a bigger question outside of what we're talking about now, but which is a part of the current book project that I'm working on, on, you know, the role of international financial institutions in times of revolutions and uprisings, and you know that's very much connected with democracy, right? And questions about democracy promotion,

Margaret Peters 47:11

great, before I fully turn it over to like questions from the audience, I have one more question. This more theoretical, maybe ways, but can a government ever promote democracy in another country that is at all allied with it, whereas do, or there's always, or there will there always be too much tension there? So it's one thing, I think you know, to try and promote democracy in North Korea, which I think would be, we could try, but that's, that's a tall order, but you could think about, you know, with our allies, is there's always just too much conflict of interest going on that, as you mentioned in the top of the book. You know, these are states that we want to have friendly relations with, but we're also like, we would like you to completely change your government. You know, is that? Is that ever really possible?

Erin A Snider 48:11

Yes and no. So let me, I think it's a great question, and it's one I wrestle with, especially towards the end of the book. You know, it's geopolitical interest, strategic concerns are what they are, right, just realistically and the US tomorrow. You know, it's not going to like fully advocate for Egypt to, you know, have another revolution, or to push the current president more aggressively in a more pro reform direction. It's just not going to happen. But I do think that aid does make a difference. I think, you know, this is what I've said to many people, and I've seen this for myself as well too. Even when you have the reality of the current situation, I think there are a number of strategies that one can take. So if we're talking about the US, and we're talking about a country like Egypt, I think the mere existence, the mere point that you even have a program, an existing program, on democracy, is something right. It keeps it on the agenda. When diplomats from both countries meet and talk it's a talking point, and you can bring it up behind closed doors again and again. We also found in Egypt, I think, that you again the fact that we haven't had a Democracy Program, and that, you know, at various points, had a, you know, was high on the agenda, I suppose, and discussions between both countries, diplomats, you know, it effectively makes the country, or that that state, less likely, less likely to disappear people, right? It's, it's a foot, it's a foot in the door. And, you know, over the course of my research, I met with so many different organizations who, I mean one at the very outset, maybe in 2005 or 2006 they didn't, the organization didn't have the climate wasn't such that they could. Formally have a program, but this woman was, you know, basically saying, Look, you know, we care about helping people here. We care about supporting reform where we can and where people want it, and it's going to take a while for us to be able to operate legally and appropriately, but in the meantime, it's important to establish relationships, right? It's important to meet people and make the investments and really understanding the local context. And that's something that I, you know, that I do appreciate, because what we saw in 2011 on the on the flip side of that is, you know, tons of like a helicopter democracy promoters who knew nothing about the region, didn't speak the language, who are just, you know, flying in there, trying to get pieces of aid programs that were being launched to help what we saw in Egypt in 2011 for example. So, yeah, I mean, I think that you, you know, you know, is the United States going to have, you know, a significant amount of room to, you know, do what it might want to do in Egypt? No, but it can maintain a foot in the door, and it can, I think, importantly, work in a multilateral fashion with other actors who have much more room to do so. So I think there's a lot of creative approaches to supporting democracy in places, maybe where the US doesn't have a solid foundation. Great.

Margaret Peters 51:21

All right, so, um, one sort of like question. This is sort of a combination of a couple questions of, you know, is, so the Trump administration's come up with all sorts of reasons why they're shutting down USAID, besides, like, I don't know. He just doesn't like it. Like, but do you think you know any of them really, really hold water? So, like, I would say the ones that potentially are like, the most like, the most likely to resonate are like, you know, waste and fraud in USAID. Concerns about misalignment with us in interest. Are you all just a bunch of communists over at USAID or or does? And here's maybe a different one. Does it make sense for USAID to be separate from as separate as it is now from state, or should it just all come under state?

Erin A Snider 52:26

I mean, it technically all comes under state. And this is the thing you know, as someone who works in this area, it's like one of many things that have driven me crazy, because what we've heard clearly reflects the the people don't have any idea of how the organization works or its sort of position within the foreign aid bureaucracy, there's contact between, you know, the Defense Department. The Defense Department has its own equivalent programs. The State Department has its, you know, Bureau of human rights, DRL, Department of Human Rights and Labor. They work together. But USAID is under the umbrella of state, and that's existed for, I think, almost 20 years. Do they have a good point in saying that aid can be, you know, we can always, you know, make things more efficient. There might be incidences of waste, sure, yes, of course. You know, point to any institution, company, university, federal agency that doesn't have an issue or, you know, a quirk that we could sort out, but it's, you know, that saying you don't throw the baby out with the bath water, right? You know, I can just again, just from my own experience working with AID folks in the Middle East, what's over them always is the State Department, the embassy and I mentioned in the presentation that there's a tension between that, and I don't think that's a bad tension to have, because, again, as I mentioned these, these are two very different institutions with different priorities. And what concerns me, I have many concerns about in last couple of weeks, but this idea of subsuming a ID completely understate or bringing it into we haven't heard the final details of this. One thing I've heard is that they're bringing it, they're maybe going to cut some bureaus or departments and then kind of collapse them in a more smaller form, in the State Department. You know, the big questions I have are, who's who's doing what? Again, if everything is actually about making things more effective and powerful and impactful. This is not the way to do it. You have experts who have devoted their entire lives in this particular field, and then to toss it over to, you know, civil servants and foreign service officers in the State Department, who I would, I feel confident in saying, don't want to do that, because that's not their job, that's not their area of expertise, but the two should be working together. Again, the State Department can do some things that aid can't do. And again, I just, you know, a ID has had a lot of problems, and a lot of those problems, you know, were much more apparent in the early. 1990s and a huge amount of reform issue initiated by the GOP, you know, cut a ID, I think, by 1000 1000 employees, these were the things that eventually brought it under the State Department. So to me, again, in a very crude way, it just seems like the US is shooting itself in its own foot if you really want to make the US more robust, you keep a diverse toolbox. You think about creative things and ways that you can help, provide assistance, promote, you know, a good vision, I guess, of the United States. And you know, what concerns me also is that the person that they've appointed to lead all of this as someone who was pushed out of USAID at the tail end of Trump's administration, and someone who employees, you know, are quoted, I think there's a political, political story on this, quoted as saying, you know, he's, he's a destroyer. In other words, you know, when they talk about reforming aid, I don't, I honestly, I'm, I don't think there's an honest, full faith effort to do that. I think it's just a more of a blonde, you know, not a great word, but massacre. And that's, it's really, it's really a shame,

Margaret Peters 56:16

yeah, so then I'm gonna use this last question from the audience to end on if we do see the demise of USA ID, especially in your area of democracy promotion, but thinking about what are the broader sort of potentially disabling effects in the region of the loss of the aid and the programs,

Erin A Snider 56:43

yeah, I mean, this is something I've started to think about, and it's sort of paralyzing when you start going down that pathway, honestly, because aid is very big, right? So they have, of course, a democracy and governance unit, which is sort of the the universe that I usually work in, their health programs, education programs, you know, programs that support women's rights, etc. And, you know, I think of the the countries that are the most vulnerable, right, and for whom the US is their only source of funding. You know, there are lots of good discussions about, you know, making local organizations, you know, not dependent on donors, which is great, right? But again, in this discussion of, you know, if, if the actual intent was to have a thoughtful discussion on how to strengthen foreign assistance and to make it more robust, make it, you know, eliminate waste, fine, but this is not the way to do that. And what we've seen is, you know, the the wording has changed just in the last two weeks, where we had the idea that maybe for 90 days, the administration is going to sit and reflect and hopefully consult experts, and now that seems to have changed just to a full scale cutting but I think it's disastrous. I think it's disastrous for the relationships that we have the relationships that we could have with countries, the ability to deliver needed care. And thinking even again about, you know, if there are certain outbreaks, if vaccinations don't meet, where they are. I mean, you know, we live in a borderless world, effectively, right? And so I again, if you have a tiny bit of imagination, as I do, you can easily see where this can just be really catastrophic in a way, I think that maybe a lot of American citizens maybe don't appreciate. That's why it's important, I think, to have those connections and relationships and doing that the important work I think that aid has been doing along with other other donor organizations.

Margaret Peters 58:41

Great. On that happy note.

Erin A Snider 58:47

Im always full of sunshine.

Margaret Peters 58:48

Yeah, yeah. Rays of sunshine.

Erin A Snider 58:51

We all I do want to say, Maggie, I mentioned to your colleague as well at the outset, I, you know, I, for the past few months, I've been working with a few other colleagues on a project, a USAID project, to help the agency better respond to democratic backsliding across the world and how to respond to democracy. Openings, so openings, you know, in authoritarian regimes that might suggest the possibility of greater reform. And this project has been, you know, amazing to work on. And two weeks ago, we received stop work orders, like so many others. And I, you know, it's, it's a very sobering moment, but one again, I'm hopeful that maybe with more more pushback and more discussion, there might be a realization of what you have. Indeed, there is tremendous utility in preserving USAID, yeah,

Margaret Peters 59:44

I mean, just hearing this morning about vaccine programs it runs dealing with, you know, distributing impacts vaccines, distributing like, dealing with outbreaks like hemorrhagic fever, things like that. Like, we don't really want coming spreading. We don't want it coming here. We don't want it spreading. We any further thinking about things like food assistance programs, education, all this stuff that's so important, and just thinking about how, you know, connecting to my workers for a second, like the if countries really get to stabilize, it's going to lead people to move. And if we're trying to stop people moving, like you can't have it all. So, yeah, I

Erin A Snider 1:00:31

mean creating conditions in which conflict could develop just seems like a very bad strategy to me. And so to the extent that you could, you know, retain a status quo towards rethinking things that would have seemed more ideal, but this is where we are at the moment, unfortunately. Well,

Margaret Peters 1:00:46

thank you again for coming to talk to us today. It was really interesting. We've put the link to the book in the chat. It's a really interesting book. It's a really great book if you're interested just in like democracy promotion, if you're interested in the politics of foreign aid, just super interesting, great book. And thank you again, so much for being here today. We really

Erin A Snider 1:01:10

Thank you so much. Thank you so much for the time. Wish you all the best. Thank you so much.

Margaret Peters 1:01:16

All Right. Thank you Everybody.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai