The Government of Serbia falls short of ensuring transparency of its work. By regularly publishing cherry-picked information from its sessions, access to all adopted decisions becomes hardly possible and the approach to provision of information unjustifiably selective. In addition, by irregularly reporting to the public on its performance, the Government reduces possibilities for public scrutiny of its results. Also, irregular reporting on budgetary performance adds to the overall picture of insufficient and low-quality reporting. Civil society in Serbia recognises these problems and holds the view that the Government’s decision making is for the most part hidden from the eyes of the public. If the Government wishes to adhere to the principles of good governance, it can only do so by thoroughly and regularly publishing detailed information about its activities and results, thus paving the way for free exercise of public scrutiny and facilitating the accountability for its actions.

The PAR Monitor is the result of research undertaken over the past year by the Think for Europe Network, with the goal of providing a systematic civil society monitoring of public administration reforms (PAR) in the Western Balkans. This exercise was motivated by the need to strengthen domestic, bottom-up pressure from the civil society sector in the long run, in order to ensure that post-EU accession, when the leverage of the EU’s conditionality in the governance area weakens, the reform drive endures. Based on a robust methodological approach, combining quantitative and qualitative techniques, and building on the EU’s Principles of public administration, the PAR Monitor measures the countries’ state of play in PAR, benchmarks them against each other, and provides recommendations for improvement. The PAR Monitor also ensures complementarity with the monitoring carried out by SIGMA/OECD and the European Commission. It, therefore, provides a citizen and civil society focused perspective on the EU-SIGMA principles. The PAR Monitor comprises an overall comparative regional report and six country reports, each including findings on the 23 compound indicators designed by the WeBER project team to monitor a selection of 21 EU-SIGMA principles. All findings can be accessed via the Regional PAR Scoreboard at www.par-monitor.org. This document provides a summary of the key regional findings in the six areas of PAR.