Project for Accountable, Transparent and Efficient Communities (POTEZ) addresses one of key democratization challenges in Montenegro – establishment of principles and rules of good governance at local level. The project is designed to evaluate progress in introducing good governance standards in Montenegrin municipalities, through measuring and analyzing achievements of each of 21 municipalities in few main areas.
The overall goal of the project POTEZ is to contribute to transparent, accountable and effective local self-governments in Montenegro, by benchmarking performance of local self-governments and providing analytical support to local authorities, state organs and civil society organizations.
POTEZ will provide local self-governments and state bodies at national level with essential information about the implementation of principles of good governance at local level and identify key shortcomings and the examples of good practices that should be followed in order to adhere to democratic standards. Based on the data gathered through research, ranking list of municipalities will be created, in order to provide local self-governments with suggestions on how to improve the current condition. CDT will endeavor to repeat the research after a certain period of time, in order to compare the results and measure progress of reforms.
In October 2010, with the support of the Foundation Open Society Institute – Representative Office Montenegro and in cooperation with Croatian NGO GONG, CDT started the implementation of first phase of the project POTEZ. During this first phase, CDT successfully conducted an analysis of legal framework, i.e. a detailed analysis of legislation at local and national level, as well as the analysis of international standards, which represents a basis for creating methodology and recommendations. Also, the database has been successfully developed by our IT expert, and two researchers had training on data collection and entry.
In 2011, the implementation of the second phase of POTEZ has started, with the support of the Local Government and Public Service Reform Initiative of the Open Society Institute - Budapest. CDT’s research team, in cooperation with NGO GONG’s experts, came to a final list of 6 dimensions with a certain number of indicators within every dimension. These 6 dimensions are: 1 - publicity of work of local assemblies, 2 - publicity of local authorities, 3 - implementation of Free Access to Information Law, 4 - cooperation with nongovernmental organizations, 5 - functioning of sub-municipal governments, 6 - analysis of the openness of the budgets. The sources of information are official websites of municipalities, their statutes and rules of procedure as well as answers received through the questionnaires that we sent to all the municipalities. After the data collection and analysis, we intended to publish research report, to prepare manual of good practices with conclusions and recommendations and present the manual at the conference.
As we already mentioned, CDT will endeavor to repeat the research after a certain period of time, in order to compare the results and measure progress and dynamics of reforms in local self-governments in Montenegro.
More information on www.potez.cdtmn.org.
- Transparency and Good Governance - Final Research Findings of Project POTEZ with Examples of Good Practice
- Press Statement - October 03, 2011
- Preliminary Report - June 2011 (available only in Montenegrin language)
- Press Statement - July 16, 2011
- Analysis of the openness of the budgets of local self-governments (available only in Montenegrin language)