Transparent Financing of Civil Society Organizations (RS0004)

Commitment aim:

This commitment aimed at increasing the transparency of public funding for CSOs through the publication of expenditure reports, open calls, public tenders, evaluation and ranking lists, as well as other relevant documents on the e-government portal. In addition, the commitment provides training to civil servants on how to cooperate with CSOs and on how to ensure that funding is transparent.

Status

Midterm: Limited

During the first year of implementation of the action plan, this commitment had limited completion. The preparation of annual summary reports on the expenditure of funds to support programs and projects activities lagged behind the set timeline. Moreover, there was no evidence of the summary reports on expenditure being available online at the time of writing the IRM progress report. Obligatory publishing on e-government portal was unclear, and there were no indications that implementation had begun in the first year of the action plan cycle. Lastly, while the capacity-building trainings were conducted as a part of the third commitment, the Guide for Transparent Financing was prepared only for internal use and was not formally adopted or published.

End of term: Substantial

Since the midterm report, the IRM researchers found that some progress was made on the three activities described in the commitment. Regarding the reports on annual expenditures, only the report for 2013 was published in October 2015.^{[Note 14: Republic of Serbia, “Consolidated Annual Report on Expenditures,” 2013, [Serbian] http://bit.ly/2cshGEJ]} The report for 2014 was not available online, but government sources indicated that progress on the report has been made and that it should be published late in 2016. No evidence was found to show progress of the obligatory publishing of calls and tenders on the e-government portal. The e-government portal does not feature most of the documents envisioned in the commitment yet. Moreover, the Guide for Transparent Financing still exists only as an internal document and has not been published. The Office for Cooperation with Civil Society has the 2013 version of the guide available on its website.^{[Note 15: Republic of Serbia, “The Guide for Transparent Financing,” 2013, [Serbian] http://bit.ly/2gaPQux]}

According to the government, 211 civil servants were trained from 70% of municipalities. Although the IRM researcher verified that the trainings happened, there is no detailed information available aside from three short paragraphs in the annual report of the Office for Cooperation with Civil Society for 2015 that indicate only the number of participants, percentage of local self-government units included, timespan, and goals of the training. The detailed report on the trainings is not available online and there is no evidence of evaluation of these trainings, nor analysis of their impact^{[Note 16: The website of the Office for Cooperation with Civil Society indicates that ten trainings were held between January and April 2015. However, the link for a report about these trainings does not work: theshttp://civilnodrustvo.gov.rs/%D0%BF%D0%BE%D1%87%D0%B5%D1%82%D0%BD%D0%B0.122.html (access attempted in July and September 2016, and again in January 2017). The only other available information on the trainings is in the annual report on the work of the Office for Cooperation with Civil Society for 2015, which indicates that these ten trainings encompassed 211 civil servants covering 73% of local self-government units.]}.

Did it open government?

Access to information: Marginal

Public accountability: Did not change

Multiple media and civil society investigations in Serbia revealed that public resources destined to fund programs in CSOs were allocated without open calls to organizations affiliated to political parties and overall lack of transparency.^{[Note 17: Branka Pavlovic, “Serbia: Transparency in Spending Local Public Funds for CSOs Activities,” Reports, Technical Assistance for Civil Society Organizations (TASCO), 6 September 2011, http://tacso.org/documents/reports/?id=5316 ]} Given that the progress of implementation of this commitment has been largely internal, for example the 2014 report and revised Guide were not published, nor were there any reports on the success of the civil servants trainings, this commitment had only a marginal effect on access to information in terms of the greater number of publicly available documents such as the 2013 expenditure report and trainings provided to civil servants.

Regarding public accountability, this commitment had no impact given that there were no mechanisms put in place for civil society and the wider public to engage with civil servants regarding the new information provided through the commitment activities.

Carried forward?

Although this commitment was not directly carried over to the 2016-2018 action plan, a commitment related to transparent financing of CSOs was included, namely, Commitment 11: Development of a uniform methodology for planning, monitoring and performance evaluation of programmes and projects implemented by civil society organisations and monitoring the spending of allocated funds.