WeBER Policy Briefs

Effective communication between public institutions and the citizens of Kosovo is pivotal for the nation's democratic development. Transparency, trust-building, and public engagement hinge on the successful implementation of proactive and reactive informing strategies. Effective communication between public institutions and the citizens of Kosovo is essential for the nation's democratic development. Transparency, trust-building, and public engagement rely on successful proactive and reactive informing strategies. To strengthen democratic governance in Kosovo, policymakers should address these challenges and capitalize on the opportunities to enhance public information access and transparency. This paper examines the complexities of proactive and reactive informing in Kosovo, encompassing, the principle of proactivity, limited resources, institutional coordination, the law on access to public documents and civil society's concerns regarding access to public documents. Download the paper here (English) and here (Albanian)

The governments worldwide have been approaching toward more open and out-and-out reporting of their performance, yet regardless of this Kosovo’s governments throughout the years lack this approach. Measuring the performance of government lend a hand to shed light on and define government objectives and responsibilities as well as making performance more transparent through enlightening the public. Government work reports based on their performance should be an indicator for their continuing performance improvements, by calling attention to the upcoming improvements in addition to the objectives set up previously in the work plan. Over the last 5 years in this regard, accountability and openness are moving towards the real definition of transparency, Kosovo still has work to do. This is because they do not provide information and even access on which the public can hold the government accountable. The transition from one government to another and the institutional vacuums created, may be a factor of the problem but it does not stand as basis for an excuse. A Good Government should be defined by openness, therefore this policy note will give a background and an understanding of the problems regarding Government taking responsibility towards its citizens when reporting on their work [...]

Public perceptions from four out of six countries in the Western Balkans suggest that state administration has become more citizen oriented in the past two years. Citizens throughout the region are increasingly aware of electronic access to administrative services, even though the COVID-19 pandemic has had a limited impact on using this type of access. Interesting country-level variations are noted in different aspects of the survey. Click to download the survey.