On July 19th the Institute for Development of Freedom of Information (IDFI) together with the Georgian Young Lawyers’ Association (GYLA) presented the reports of the interim alternative monitoring (second half of 2020) of the 2019 – 2020 PAR action plan implementation.
Event participants were welcomed by Levan AVALISHVILI – Programs Director of IDFI, Colombe DE MERCEY – Team leader for Governance and Human Capital, Delegation of the European Union to Georgia, Vakhushti MENABDE – Democratic Institutions Support Program Director, GYLA and Ani Barisashvili – Representative of the Department of Policy Planning and Coordination of the Government Administration of Georgia.
During the presentation participants discussed the following directions of the PAR Action Plan for 2019 – 2020: Policy Planning and Coordination, Accountability, Public Service Delivery, and Public Finance Management. As the monitoring of the Action Plan revealed:
- The objectives and indicators of the of the Public Administration Reform Action Plan need to be refined according to S.M.A.R.T. criteria. In addition, in order to actually achieve the objectives, more activities are necessary to be defined and real efforts need to be made for their implementation;
- The Action Plan provides insufficient and less ambitious indicators for the measurement of some objectives which undermine the importance of the objectives;
- In some cases, the fulfillment or non-fulfillment of the activities specified in the Action Plan for the objectives does not affect the implementation of the objective;
- The monitoring process revealed a number of shortcomings and challenges that characterize the policy-making process in Georgia, including the absence of mechanisms for reduction or elimination of identified risk in the action plan, lack of cooperation and coordination between agencies, weakness of oversight, etc.
- The responsible agencies do not seem to take the PAR Action Plan and the commitments set out in the plan seriously. This is evidenced by the use of the pandemic as a deterrent to most commitments as a template without specific indication of specific factor caused by the pandemic and how it caused the failure to take a specific measure.
- Out of the four objectives envisaged by the Action Plan for the reporting period in the Policy Planning and Coordination direction one objective is mostly implemented and three are unimplemented. Out of nine activities, two are fully implemented, one is mostly implemented, two are partly implemented and four are unimplemented;
- Out of the five objectives envisaged by the Action Plan in the Accountability direction, three are partly implemented and two are unimplemented during the reporting period. Out of six outcome indicators (including one additional indicator), one is fully implemented, one is partly implemented and four are unimplemented. As for the activities, six activities were outlined for the second half of 2020, out of which two are partly implemented and four are unimplemented. Out of nine output indicators, three are partly implemented and six are unimplemented;
- Out of the seven objectives envisaged by the Public Service Delivery direction of the Action Plan, one is fully implemented, one is mostly implemented, three – are partly implemented and two are unimplemented as of the second half of 2020. Out of nine outcome indicators two are fully implemented, four are partly implemented and three are unimplemented. As for the activities, out of six activities outlined for the second half of 2020, two are partly implemented and four are unimplemented. Out of six output indicators, two are partly implemented and four are unimplemented;
- Out of three objectives envisaged by the Action Plan for the reporting period in the Public Finance Management direction, two are mostly implemented, while one is unimplemented. Out of seven activities, one is fully implemented, three are mostly implemented and three are partly implemented.
Read the reports here:
Direction 1: Policy Planning and Coordination
Direction 3: Accountability
Direction 4: Public Service Delivery
Direction 5: Public Finance Management
Reports have been produced with the assistance of the European Union. Its contents are the sole responsibility of the Institute for Development of Freedom of Information (IDFI) and GYLA do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union.
