Municipal Council to work out decision drafts for ensuring transparency in decision making

The Chisinau Municipal Council (CMC) will set up workshops for working out decision drafts on ensuring transparency in decision making. The Urban Development Institute (IDU) in partnership with the City Hall and the CMC have launched “Transparency in Community’s Interest” advocacy campaign on March 16 According to the director of IDU, Veaceslav Bulat, the goal of the advocacy campaign is to have the CMC Regulations and other acts amended in order to increase the level of information and transparency in the local decision making. The documents which will be worked out are to be publicly debated upon. The director of the Soros Foundation Moldova’s Programme “East-East: Partnership Beyond Borders”, Ana Coretchi, mentioned that the programme works for more than ten years in Moldova, having the aim of encouraging initiatives which support partnerships between social actors from the countries of central and eastern Europe, and the second year in row, encouraging partnership programmes between Moldova, Romania and Ukraine. The aforementioned project is one of these programmes. Foreign experts say that decision makers in Moldova understood the importance of the public opinion, but did not understand that there is need to cooperate with the civil society. Therefore, Ala Coretchi expressed hope that such an agreement would be achieved at local level because this is where authorities collaborate directly with the representatives of the civil society and do not regard them as opponents but partners. The advocacy campaign is implemented within the “Active participation on nongovernmental organisation in participatory democracy” project, conducted by the Euroregional Centre for Democracy (Timisoara, Romania), INRECO Conflict Resolution Institute (Chisinau) and Cross-Border Cooperation Regional Agency of “Lower Danube” Euroregion (Reni, Ukraine) with the financial support of the “East-East: Partnership Beyond Borders” Programme of the Soros Foundation Moldova. The advocacy campaign in Moldova is held concurrently with a similar action implemented in Reni. After the implementation of the project the results obtained in the campaigns are to be assessed. The most successful advocacy campaign will be awarded in late March.