Today, on June 19th, under the title “Commitment to Openness for Long-Term Success”, the Metamorphosis Foundation held a presentation and discussion of the results of the Assessment of the State of Good Governance in North Macedonia through the Openness Index for the Executive Branch.
The monitoring is being conducted for the eighth year in a row, regionally, in North Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the summarized regional results will be published in September, while the focus of today’s event was on the national results.
The results were presented by Dance Danilovska-Bajdevska, Program Director of the Metamorphosis Foundation. She emphasized that our country is the only one in the region with a Government Transparency Strategy, but the implementation of the strategy is still slow.
The main conclusions of this year’s monitoring show that progress in increasing the transparency and openness of the executive branch (ministries and constituent bodies) is stalled, the improved results from the past have stalled at a certain level, and there has been no significant shift in recent years. Therefore, it is recommended to strengthen the implementation of existing policies that promote openness by ministries and executive bodies, in order to achieve progress in openness.
The monitoring is being carried out for the eighth year in a row, and the summarized national results can be viewed at the following link.
As Danilovska-Bajdevska pointed out, all these processes, i.e. activities undertaken to promote openness, have essentially helped the Republic of North Macedonia, continuously over the last five years, to be a country whose government ranks highest on the openness scale in the region.
In this year’s Openness Index measurement (2023), the Government of North Macedonia meets 78.33% of the set openness criteria, which is again the best result at the regional level. In the first regional measurement of executive openness in 2016, the Republic of North Macedonia was in last place in the region and met only 36% of the indicators. However, it should be noted that compared to last year, the Government has a slight decline in meeting the openness indicators.
The event presented the work and significance of the Open Government Partnership (OGP), as well as the commitments of the sixth National Action Plan, which were discussed by Gordana Gapikj Dimitrovska from the Ministry of Information Society and Administration, the national coordinator for OGP.
The Open Government Partnership is a significant process that is unique in its governance structure – the Council on Open Government is comprised of an equal number of representatives from civil society organizations, elected through the Open Government Network, and state institutions.
The Metamorphosis Foundation is the coordinator of the CSO Network for OGP. The role of the network is to mobilize and coordinate civil society advocacy on OGP-related issues. It represents a network of active civil society organizations dedicated to encouraging institutions to operate more responsibly, with increased transparency, participation, and accountability. At the same time, the network serves as an organized civil initiative that will monitor and promote the process and apply pressure for improvements.
For two decades, the Metamorphosis Foundation has been working to enable the active involvement of citizens in decision-making and government accountability processes, with particular emphasis on the use of information technology and knowledge sharing.
The event is part of a synergy between the projects “Transparency and accountability of State Institutions in the Republic of North Macedonia” implemented by the Metamorphosis Foundation with financial support from the “Foundation Open Society – Macedonia,” and the project “Using New Media to Promote Government Transparency” implemented by the Metamorphosis Foundation as part of the ACTION SEE partnership consortium with financial support from the National Endowment for Democracy.
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