BCSDN for the 7th consecutive year has analyzed how the European Commission has treated the issue of civil society development and assessed the progress made in the Enlargement countries within the Enlargement Strategy 2015 and the country Progress Reports recently being published.
In brief, this year’s analysis shows the civil society has indeed become one of the key criteria for accession, and the Commission has put an increasing attention to the enabling environment for civil society development in the Enlargement countries through more systematic and unified monitoring methodologies. The biggest focus again is on the relations between public institutions and CSOs with enhanced attention to basic freedoms and financial visibility and sustainability.
Similarly to last year, BCSDN analysis of how the EC is assessing civil society development in the individual country reports is presented through the framework of the Monitoring Matrix on Enabling Environment for CSDev. The Monitoring Matrix, developed by BCSDN and its partners, including ECNL, in 2012, provides a set of principles and standards accompanied by 151 indicators for legislation and practice that needs to be in place in a country to have an optimum enabling environment for CSDev.
You can read the full analysis here. Also available is the integral excel table with extracts from the Progress Reports related to CSDev since 2006 that we used as a basis for our analysis.