Serbian Local Government Reform Program Helps Officials Connect With Citizens
While public budget hearings began in smaller Serbian communities two years ago, implementing the same mechanism among the residents of Belgrade's 12 municipalities required a great deal of strategic planning and time. USAID's Serbian Local Government Reform Program (SLGRP), implemented by Development Alternatives International (DAI), is now assisting the capitol region with its first unified campaign to conduct a transparent and comprehensive public budget hearing process.
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| Belgrade Mayor Nenad Bogdanovic and the Belgrade municipal presidents initiate their first public budget hearing campaign |
The SLGRP's Citizen Participation Team provided technical assistance to municipal officials in rolling out the public hearing campaign in three phases, the first of which took place in spring 2005. During this phase, the SLGRP Citizen Participation Team met with representatives of BeoKom (the municipal department dedicated to citizen outreach and communication), local media, the City Information Secretariat, the Belgrade Mayor's Office, and involved municipalities to form a Task Force for Budget Hearings. The Task Force's main goal was the formulation of a media campaign and a citizen budget input questionnaire.
The media campaign included an informational seminar on the budget hearings for Belgrade journalists and municipal media relations personnel, as well as a promotional video featuring the 12 presidents of Belgrade's municipalities and the mayor. Citizen input questionnaires, which showed budget allocations and asked for citizens' budget priorities for 2006, were mailed to approximately 450,000 households in late May. The City of Belgrade covered the cost of return postage to enable citizens to return the questionnaires free of charge. Citizens returned a total of 18,901 questionnaires, most anonymously.
One resident reflected on the campaign in a comment returned with the questionnaire, "You are going in a good direction-keep on. I am 80, and for the first time in my life I can see that somebody has presented an understandable overview of [Belgrade's] revenues and expenditures."
Phase Two of the public budget hearing project will see citizens from Belgrade's 12 municipalities gathering for town-hall meetings to discuss budget priorities. Held in the afternoons and evenings at venues in each municipality through the middle of December 2005, the public forums are designed to encourage maximum citizen participation.
Phase Three of the project is planned for late December 2005 or January 2006. In this phase, budgets prepared with residents' input will be adopted by each municipal assembly. The final year's budgets will then be presented to each municipality's citizens in an official letter detailing how citizens' suggestions and funding input is reflected in budget allocations.
Municipalities will refine and repeat the public budget hearing process next year, continuing to give citizens a voice in local government and providing Serbia a clearer path to developing the strong civil society required for full Euro-Atlantic integration.
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