April 08

Center for civil society development PROTECTA

[GENUINE CHOICE]
This document is written in the form of Concept proposal

Background
On the turn of the new century Serbia went through turbulent political period. Fight for power between political parties, focused on arguments between Milosevic regime and democratic opposition in 90-ies and between political parties after October 5th 2000, brought changes to the way the government functions each 3-4 years, and sometimes even more frequently. Sets of laws on local authorities went through 3 different changes since 1996, while each new government in Serbia creates new ministries and cancels old ones. Still, even though it sometimes looks like a chaotic and incoherent process, there is a clear trend of empowering the roles of political parties which is completed with changes in the Constitution from 2006 and sets of laws on local self-government from 2007. On the other hand, citizens role in decision making is reduced to voting on elections where they usually choose the programs of their favorite political parties based on national interest and pure feeling of affiliation. Consequently, citizens interests are out of focus of political acting in Serbia (even among citizens themselves), while political parties interests are enforced through media and work of governmental/political parties representatives. With the initiatives presented in this document, PROTECTA would like to emphasize the need to involve citizens in decision making. We would like to increase pressure on National Investment Plan (NIP) Office to, instead satisfying the needs of political parties, addresses the needs that citizens choose as their priority.

Action
May 15th 2008 is the deadline for the NIP call of proposals. On local level, in Nis and 5 Nis city municipalities, dominant political parties are preparing the proposals that will be sent in the name of respective institutions where they have authority. Still, in this process most of the proposals are not new ideas, but are recycled ideas that were previously left without funds i.e. Nis airport support, EXPO building and railway dislocation. We plan to address NIP office, immidiatelly after the deadline, with the request to provide us the list of received proposals from Nis. Being information of public importance, they are obliged to provide this data.i Once gathered, we will inform the citizens about the projects and short summaries provided by initiators of the ideas. Through this one month activity we will organize press conferences, 2 TV shows and print info materials. The second stage of the project is the most important one: we plan to ask citizens to vote for the project they consider the most important from Nis. We will provide a list of projects sent to NIP with short description. Citizens will need to vote on one of them. The voting will be organized in 2 models: research model and open model.

Research model
This model envisages covering of selected 20 polling stations in the city (more than 10% of total number of voting stations). How are we going to select 20 stations? 2

These stations will be selected in a manner to equally represent the voters from city core (10 stations), suburb and villages up to 4 km away from the city center (5 stations) and settlements and villages located farther than 4km from the city core (5 stations). In addition to that, using the results from the parliament elections, we will assure the just representation of voters of different political parties. How are we going to have a just representation of different needs within the local communities? After selection of the 20 polling stations, in each of them we will have 100 questionnaires targeting different age, gender and educational structure. A professional researcher would be engaged to make the model and formulate text that can be understood within different citizens structures. With total of 2.000 people participating the survey we will be able to have representative answers.

Open model
During the project promotion, we will give NIP voting lists to citizens on streets and invite them to share their NIP priorities with us. A REAL VOTING BOX will be set up on streets and our media appearance will be focused on the issue of true democracy and citizens participation in decision making. We hope to gather additional 2.000 votes in this manner. Also, our website will have a survey for internet users.

What are we going to do with the resultsof voting?

A printed version of the project results will be sent to: - NIP office in Belgrade, - Future Serbian Ministry in charge of NIP, - Future Prime minister of Serbia, - Headquarters of political parties in Belgrade, - Headquarters of political parties in Nis, - Nis local and regional media and journalists, - MPs elected for Serbian parliament with permanent address in Nis, - MPs elected for Nis and city municipalities parliaments. The results of the project would also be presented through media appearances and press conference.

Results of the project?

With each of our target group we would like to achieve different results: - Citizens we want to focus citizens attention to their own needs in political life, trying to show that there could be good ways of thinking and acting out of political parties. Citizens need to be actively engaged in selection of priorities for reforms with NIP financed projects have the goal to directly increase the quality of life. They need to be asked! The problem were facing is that the citizens also became too passive and too aceptive to the dominance of political parties. - National and local government in previous years political party interests expressed through priorities of cities and municipal parliament were the key for decision making. Even that local voice wasnt eventually respected with City of Nis first priority (airport development) being rejected. This time we will make a loud public announcement what citizens of Nis consider as their priority. This voice shouldnt and cannot be 3

marginalized if political parties want to have citizens support. In this way we are slowly introducing citizens into political life and decision making. Political parties we would like to increase pressure on political parties to be more in contact with citizens. Only the public pressure that is strong enough so far affected the decision making. i.e. VAT reduction for baby equipment, Serbian MPs increase of salary etc... Still, on local level it is possible to increase the level of public presence and interest to such a state that public becomes watchdog of political parties work and behavior of elected candidates.

In case NIP office doesnt reply we plan to gather information locally from institutions that sent applications for NIP financing.