The NGO Mladiinfo Montenegro attended the online conference “Civil Society and Public Policies in the Western Balkans” organized by the Politikon Network on October 15.
The conference panelists spoke about the key challenges of democratizing society, helping the civil sector and key challenges for creating and implementing public policies in the Western Balkans. An important segment of public administration reform is precisely the provision of public policies in an inclusive manner that enables the active participation of civil society. Citizen participation is very important and increasing that participation in order to have the best possible public policies. The inputs of civil society can be seen as a significant resource for policy making and are very important for both central and local staff and decision makers.
“We cannot talk about quality public policies if we do not have the maximum involvement of the civil sector and the maximum involvement of all stakeholders to reach a quality society. What has often been a problem in our country is just defining what public policy is. Public policies are essentially a way to solve certain problems that citizens have. Public policy is not only an institutional and legislative framework, public policy implies the quality of implementation”, said Goran Jovetic, State Secretary of the Ministry of Public Administration.
One of the conclusions of the conference is that there should be increased transparency of services provided by public administration with which citizens are not sufficiently familiar or there are certain difficulties in using them. In this regard, there is room for greater cooperation with the NGO sector through the development of strategic documents or through the implementation of new projects.
The conference was organized within the project “Participatory, informative, open public administration” which is implemented by the Politikon network in partnership with the Open Dialogue Network (MOD) with the support of the Ministry of Public Administration. The project aims to contribute to the process of public administration reform and improve the policy-making process.