Period of implementation: September 2020 – June 2021
Moldovan Branch of the Romanian Centre for European Policies (CRPE -MD) is launching the project Enhancing the capacity of the civil society at local level for monitoring of local public administrations. The project is designed to respond to the necessities of local civic organizations and activists, especially in small urban areas, in providing support to active citizens and motivating their involvement in watchdog and monitoring activities of the local public administrations (LPA). All these in order to increase the efficiency and transparency of public policies and services.
Project activities and its results/products are intended to civil society representatives and activists from the Republic of Moldova, to local and central public authorities, as well as to citizens willing to get involved in the decision-making process at local level in Moldova.
The project team propose a set of activities aimed at enhancing the expertise of civil society on how to monitor public administrations and how to engage with authorities in their day-to-day work. Below you can consult the list of activities envisaged in our project:
1. Drafting of a civic activism guide on how local public administration (LPA) works and its main attributes, the role and functioning of NGOs, collaboration opportunities between LPAs and civil society, best practices. The guide comes up with a set of tools on how to plan and implement successful local advocacy campaigns. The guide is available in Romanian here.
2. Designing a training program for representatives of civil society from three counties: Basarabeasca, Causeni, and Cimislia. The training sessions will be facilitated by CRPE and guest experts in the field of civic activism and LPA. During the activity, the participants will discuss how public authorities work and what problems they encounter in their interactions with authorities,
what a transparent LPA looks like, how an efficient collaboration between civil society and authorities can be fostered, how to ensure their access to local public debates, as well as how to efficiently monitor LPAs.
3. Making use of theory: preparing a watchdog campaign on local public authorities. During 3 months, together with 10 selected activists from the participating three counties, we will monitor public authorities in order to assess how they ensure transparency and open access to their data and activities, how they react to requests and petitions, whether they organize or not public debates for local projects, as well as what’s the impact of the pandemic on the relationship between public authorities and citizens/civil society.
4. Publishing a conclusive report based on the results of the monitoring campaign. The report will include the problems, as well as best practice cases encountered during the assessment. The authors of the report – experts and participants of the monitoring campaign – will offer a set of recommendations on how LPAs can improve transparency and ensure access to public documents and debates to citizens and what are the fields in which cooperation between LPAs and civil society can bring promising results. The report is available in Romanian here.
5. Organizing a final public conference to assess the project results and the monitoring campaign together with LPA representatives, journalists and activists from Moldova and Romania. A summary of the online conference is available in Romanian here.
The project is financed by the European Union and Konrad Adenauer Stiftung in the Republic of Moldova through the grants program The Development of the local civil society in the Republic of Moldova. The program envisages to promote civic engagement of youth in regions in the field of community development and good governance.
Enhancing the capacity of the civil society at local level for monitoring of local public administrations
