More answers, more questions...

The day began for the committee focusing on political reform with a meeting at Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (FES), a German non-profit organization that aims to promote democracy and to build civil society capacity in Jordan.  The program manager, Mr. Mohammed Khalil, spoke with us about the internal challenges facing Jordan regarding political reform, including the current electoral law and the political parties law.  One interesting aspect of democracy promotion we discussed during the course of our meeting was the intersection between international NGO's and IGO's efforts to promote democracy and the efforts of domestic, Jordanian NGO's to build civil society.  

Another important actor in this arena of democracy promotion in Jordan is USAID.  Today, the committees examining political reform and the Iraqi refugee crisis had the opportunity to meet with the Director of Program Management of USAID as well as numerous other technical team leaders and directors of USAID projects for health, water, education, economic development, and governance.  We discussed numerous issues during the course of our meeting, including the crisis level of water scarcity in Jordan and Jordan's ability to cope with Iraqi refugees in its health and education services.  Most interesting for myself, as a member of the political reform subtopic, was the discussion of USAID's governance project.  Similar to other international organizations we've encountered, USAID has focused on the infrastructure and capacity building underlying democratic development, such as equipping courts with automative capabilities and IT as well as channelling funds through Freedom House and the National Democratic Institute to carry out political party training among other activities.

However, the day's meetings left me with many questions.  For instance, how do international actors promote bottom-up momentum for political and civil society development in another country?  While foreign organizations such as USAID partner with Jordanian civil society organizations, what are the aims of the domestic organizations?  How does an organization carry out a needs assessment for political and civil society development?  Civil society is a term we hear often but is not clearly defined.  How can organizations claim to have effectively built the capacity of civil society actors without clearly defined goals?  How do we assess the success of the variety of governance projects in Jordan?  We will continue to investigate these questions as our time in Jordan progresses. 

On a separate note, this evening was another pleasurable example of the discourse achieved between the civilian and military members of our delegation.  Not only have we been able to hash out various issues we contend with in our research, but our dialogue this evening spanned our personal aspirations for what we as individuals, from our very different perspectives as global actors, can hope to accomplish in the world.  The content of the JRP while a stimulus for dialogue in itself, has additionally provoked the members of our delegation to reach other levels of intellectual engagement.  

--Alex Taylor