On 1–2 December 2015, International IDEA’s Democracy and Development team hosted a workshop, ‘Democracy Assistance and Results Management: From upward accountability and control to ownership and learning’.

In this report, ‘results management’ is used as an umbrella term to incorporate all the various types of methods and approaches used to plan, implement, monitor and evaluate democracy assistance, while ‘democracy assistance’ refers to forms of development cooperation such as support to parliamentary development, electoral processes, political parties and party systems, civil society, media development and so on.

The purpose of the workshop was to explore how the democracy-support community and its partners could carve out more space for the learning dimensions of results management (as opposed to the current move towards the control dimensions) by using combinations of methods which can fulfil donors’ need for results, as well as partners’ needs for reflection, analysis and continued improvement.

This was a follow-up event to the June 2014 round-table event, ‘Democracy Assistance and Results: Debates and Constructive Reflection’. Both events form part of the International IDEA project Democracy in the Development Agenda.