Big news! Today, we received word that the Romanian Academic Society (SAR) earned a grant to implement its Global Integrity Impact Challenge project proposal. With this new funding, SAR will conduct a year-long assessment on the effectiveness of transparency and accountability mechanisms in the Romania’s energy procurement process — a weakness noted in the Global Integrity Report: 2008.
Last April, SAR was recognized by Global Integrity as a winner of the Impact Challenge, a call for project concepts that use the Global Integrity Report to inform anti-corruption efforts on the ground. In addition to receiving a cash prize from Global Integrity, each winning organization’s proposal was passed along to our colleagues at the Partnership for Transparency Fund (PTF) for potential project funding. After an extensive review process, PTF has agreed to partner with SAR by funding its Citizens for Energy project, meaning this project concept will soon be a reality.
Congratulations to SAR! You can read their original Impact Challenge entry below.
Global Integrity has big plans for this year’s bigger, better Impact Challenge. Watch this space! And if you’re designing an anti-corruption project, contest-winning or otherwise, ask us how Global Integrity data might accelerate your work by targeting your interventions to the right issues and opportunities. Email me at info{at}www.globalintegrity.org.
SAR proposal:
“The project will monitor (for one year) and raise public awareness about the activities of two regulatory agencies which are crucial for the transparency and competitiveness on the Romanian market – ANRE (energy) and ANRMAP (procurement) – in order to improve their performance and accountability to the citizens.
The regulatory framework in Romania was largely set up based on international best practices, with support and pressure from the EU and other international partners. In theory, a good regulator should be competent, independent from the regulated industry, transparent, and open to consultation and public participation. Administrators must be accountable for their decisions, regulatory activities non-arbitrary and responsive, and adequate mechanisms should exist for the review of administrative decisions by courts or other bodies.
While such a formal framework has been indeed created, enforcement has always been a problem, as the Global Integrity Index 2008 for Romania shows. What is more, external pressures from abroad for accountable governance have subsided once Romania entered the EU in 2007, and it remains the responsibility of local institutions and civil society to ensure the effectiveness of regulatory mechanisms in the years to come. The purpose of the project is to introduce better mechanisms for monitoring the performance of governmental agencies by complementing the gap of public information, checking the agencies’ effectiveness and independence, and creating the prerequisites for an increased accountability to the citizens. The project will thus improve the independent oversight of government activities, and promote the citizens’ active participation in the supervision process.”
The Romanian Academic Society (SAR) is a Bucharest-based independent think tank, established in 1996 with the mission to raise the public awareness on policy issues, contribute through research and advocacy to informed policy formulation and assist administrative reform through performance assessments. We believe that countries in our region benefit more or less out of their European accession depending on how fast their improve their domestic governance and accountability systems. Our annual turnover is around $300,000, and the budget exclusively project-based, with the EU, German Marshall Fund, the Soros Foundation and the British government among its main clients.
— Norah Mallaney
