Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 27th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview WG6: Evidence-Based Public Policy Making Author(s) Milena Lazarevic European Policy Centre Belgrade Serbia Title Civil Society in the Western Balkans and the Public Administration Reform Sandwich Strategy File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Milena Lazarevic Abstract In the European Union pre-accession context, the limitations of the policymaking capacities of the governments coincide with a highly intensified dynamics of preparation of policy and legislative documents and the necessity to prove a track record of implementation of newly adopted instruments. Moreover, the quality of the policy cycle that the countries aspiring to join the EU need to achieve is prescribed by the Principles of Public Administration, developed jointly by SIGMA/OECD and the European Commission. Those principles require the governments, inter alia, to ensure high quality of policy planning, monitoring and reporting, creation of policies based on evidence and ensuring public consultations. Yet, the results of SIGMA’s 2017 monitoring reports show that the indicators related to these requirements are among those with the lowest average results, not only in the area of policy development and coordination, but also in the wider public administration reform (PAR) framework. Against this background, civil society organisations have initiated research and monitoring projects, aimed at providing an independent view of the governments’ performance in the field of policymaking. The WeBER project has created a comprehensive monitoring methodology, relying to a large extent on the civil society experience and perceptions in relation to the governments’ work. The methodology translates results of a combination of qualitative and quantitative research into numerical indicator values (scale 0-5), ensuring maximum regional comparability of all findings. Although WeBER monitors all areas of PAR, the results of the first monitoring cycle (2017-2018) show that the Western Balkan region on average fares the worst on indicators in the area of policy development and coordination. Perceptions of civil society are particularly negative when it comes to the public consultation practices, governments’ pursuit of policy objectives and transparency of decision-making by the governments. This paper will present some of the key findings of the WeBER monitoring in the area of policy development and coordination and draw cross-regional comparisons and highlight the region’s outliers. The paper will link the findings to the ongoing reform efforts in the countries, as shown by SIGMA and other available sources. Finally, it will present the case for the creation of the “sandwich strategy” by the civil societies of the Western Balkan countries towards their national governments. This strategy relies on the top-down conditionality by the European Commission and harnesses it to give power to the findings and demands of the domestic civil society, in the interest of motivating improved performance on key reform areas, particularly on public participation in policymaking processes and transparency of government’s decision-making and reporting. The argument will be based on the initial experiences of the WeBER project in the period 2017-2018 and provide a perspective for further development of the strategy.
