Knowledge
Civil society organizations working in democracy promotion throughout Europe are generally speaking relatively young organizations, constituting a very young branch with roughly 20 years of experience. According to some academics, institutional learning is lacking in this young branch.
The sharing of learned lessons amongst democracy support organizations from Europe should therefore become one of the instruments to strengthen the European efforts in world-wide democracy assistance. Under this function the associated organizations to the EPD will be encouraged and facilitated to share an emerging body of lessons learned, secluding experiences from democracy assistance practices. The purpose is to better understand what colleague-organizations are doing in the field, to avoid overlap and to identify blanks.
Peter Burnell on another note underlines that there is a long way to go in further developing the methods for assessing democracy promotion and democracy assistance. He underlines that what we are not short of is explanations of why democracy assistance fails, assuming it is not difficult to agree on what failure means in this context, or even worse: where democracy assistance does more harm than good. Just like the efforts within international development cooperation, there may be cases where the endeavors actually do a disservice to the cause that is sought, or if not quite that, cases where democracy support leads to excessive collateral damage. The methods for assessing democracy assistance, are underdeveloped in more than one respect. Considerable conceptual and methodological difficulties stand in the way of achieving more scientifically verifiable knowledge about them and understanding
the connections with actual political change. Under its Knowledge Hub function, the EPD aims to contribute to the development of parameters and methodologies for assessing the impact of democracy assistance. More thorough assessments can further upgrade the methodologies in democracy assistance.
The EPD Knowledge Hub furthermore aims to contribute to the development of more common European lexicon, where terms like democracy promotion, democracy support, democracy assistance, democracy aid, political development aid and so on are currently used without consensus on what these definitions mean. A great variety of activities are currently understood under the heading democracy assistance. The EPD would like to contribute to some clarity in the debate on the lexicon European foundations for democracy assistance use. Burnell again uses the definition of the European Council of Ministers where ‘democracy promotion' is defined as "to encompass the full range of external relations and development cooperation activities which contribute to the development and consolidation of democracy in third countries ", which is to say "all measures designed to facilitate democratic development". This broad definition could serve as a starting point for discussions.
Through the Knowledge Hub, the EPD will actively search for and disseminate the available lessons learned with the associated organizations on various topics and regions. The main tools under the Knowledge Hub are Knowledge Sharing Meetings and the prior dissemination of position papers about the theme to be addressed at the meeting, using relevant policy documents, research findings and case studies. In follow-up of these meetings the joint writing of position papers or research proposals can be facilitated by the EPD Secretariat, which can provide for overviews of relevant policy documents and a list of must-read literature. The EPD website and modern multi-media tools can support the Knowledge Sharing processes on the basis of which lacunas and complementarities in expertise, and opportunities for collaboration, can be identified.