Raising Transparency of Local Authorities in Six Municipalities in Pcinja and Raska Counties

In 2015 Transparency Serbia conducted a project "Local Transparency Index - LTI^{^[1]}" in which it evaluated transparency of all municipalities in Serbia and ranked them by LTI. Ranking was done by the methodology developed by TS. The research included evaluation of web sites, visit to municipalities and evaluation of information available to citizens at local administration premises, gathering information from local self-government and from other sources (such as Official Gazette, Anti-Corruption Agency, Commissioner for Information, State Audit Institution).

Municipalities from Raska and Pcinja region were ranked poorly - Bujanovac had LTI score 47, Novi Pazar 39, Tutin 35 and Presevo15 (on a scale from 0 to 100). On the other hand, municipality Vranje was among 10 best ranked local self-governments with LTI score 60, while Raska municipality had LTI score 57. Nevertheless, even with these municipalities, there are still a lot of areas which could be further improved.

In order to improve their LTI rank and thus improve transparency of selected local self-governments, within the proposed project TS will produce an analysis of current status in transparency of six municipalities - Novi Pazar, Bujanovac, Presevo, Raska, Tutin and Vranje - involved in the project. The analysis will be based on their results in the 2015 LTI research which would then be updated.

Based on the analysis, TS will produce recommendations to each municipality involved on how to improve its transparency. This would include recommendations for changes in documents and local acts (such as statutes, rulebooks), modifications of websites (adding new sections), changes in website administration practices (regular publishing of certain information, documents), placing notifications and information in administration premises (citizens' service centers) and other changes in practice of local self-governments. The analysis would also include deviations from obligations set up by laws or by-laws (such as Guidelines for creating web presentations of state organs and local self-governments, Instruction for the creation and publication of the information booklet on public authority work, Anti-Corruption Agency Law, Law on Budget System, Law on Consumers Protection, Law on Public Procurement, Law on Public Enterprises) noted in the research.

The project will raise awareness of local administration about importance of transparency and point to specific actions to raise transparency if there is a political will to act in accordance with the proclaimed anti-corruption principles. Beneficiaries of this project are selected local self-governments which would receive analysis of the problems and obstacles for increasing their transparency with recommendations for the removal of barriers in either normative framework or practice. Citizens of selected municipalities, local CSOs and the media will also benefit from improved transparency of local self-governments.

This project will also contribute, to a large extent, to the fulfillment of several specific objectives set by the Serbia’s Strategy for Reform of the Public Administration: IIIv, IIIg and IIId - improvement of public financial management and procurement, increase of legal certainty and improvement of the business environment and the quality of public services, as well as strengthening transparency, ethics and accountability in the performance of public administration. Thus, it will affect, in a positive way, the work of the Ministry of State Administration and Local Self-Government in this area. Project stakeholders are selected local self-governments, citizens of selected municipalities, local CSOs and the media (which are also beneficiaries of the project), Standing Conference of Towns and Municipalities (the organization that brings together all the municipalities and cities in Serbia), Anti-Corruption Agency(that will be interested to learn about implementation of Anti-Corruption Strategy provisions in practice (N.B. the Agency is in charge of oversight of this Strategy and Action plan), Commissioner for Information (related to the information booklets of selected municipalities).

[1]http://www.transparentnost.org.rs/LTI/index.html

OSCE