Spotlight on Monitoring

August 2006

Monitoring is the main focus of all EUMAP’s activities. As such, we are always interested to learn from the experiences of other civil society organisations carrying out monitoring activities. This month we are presenting two articles on recent successful monitoring projects, which we hope will inspire other organisations, and provide some useful ideas for improving monitoring techniques and outcomes. Both monitoring projects used recognised European standards as the basis for the monitoring — of the European Union and the Council of Europe, respectively. Both involved coordination between a large number of project partners – civil society organisations and individuals with specific expertise.

The first article, Monitoring of Bulgaria’s EU Accession Readiness, focuses on a monitoring project carried out by the Open Society Institute – Sofia. The monitoring was based on the European Commission’s assessment of Bulgaria’s readiness for EU accession, which identified a number of areas where progress was still required, for the country to be able to join the EU as planned, on 1 January 2007. To ensure that this crucial deadline is not missed, the OSI – Sofia initiated an independent monitoring of the Government’s progress on implementing key reforms. A novel feature of the monitoring was the formation of five expert groups to monitor each of the five ‘red areas’ identified by the Commission. Also important was the publicity provided by two major press conferences, organised to highlight the main findings of the monitoring, which brought the monitoring to wide public attention.

The second article, Monitoring of Democratic Reforms in Armenia, addresses a monitoring project carried out by the Yerevan Press Club, together with a number of organisations from the Partnership for Open Society — a coalition of independent and influential NGOs, donors, and international agencies, from Armenia and countries with an Armenian diaspora. The basis for the monitoring was commitments made by Armenia to the Council of Europe (CoE) in the field of human rights and democracy, when it became a fully-fledged CoE member in January 2001. The monitoring drew from a wide range of data sources, including detailed analysis of legislation, interviews, reports and fact-finding missions, media analysis, statistical analysis and sociological surveys. The necessary expertise for the monitoring was gained through the involvement of a large number of project partners, each with their own field of expertise.

We hope to make this ‘spotlight on monitoring’ a regular feature on eumap.org. If you would like us to feature your monitoring project, we would kindly ask you to respond to the following questions:

1. Which organisation(s) carried out the monitoring? (Please add websites if available)
2. What did you monitor?
3. Please explain the rationale for the monitoring? What factors motivated the decision to carry out the monitoring?
4. Please describe the methodology used for the monitoring
5. How did you collect data? (ie interviews, surveys, focus groups)
6. What was the final output of the monitoring? (ie a report, website) Are the final documents from the monitoring publicly available? (Please add website if available)
7. Please describe any advocacy activities carried out to publicise the results of the monitoring?
8. What do you think was the main impact of the monitoring? Do you consider it a 'success'?
9. Please describe any barriers you encountered during the monitoring?
10. Are there any 'lessons learned' you would like to share with other organisations carrying out monitoring?
11. Will there be any followup to the monitoring?