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Trifun Kostovski
Synergy for common good!
The advancement of democratic processes in the Republic of Macedonia cannot be imagined without the development of civil society organizations. Local self-government is necessarily directed to synergy with the civic sector as an essential opportunity for identification and organization of citizens’ needs and interests.
That is the reason why the City of Skopje has chosen this issue to be one of its priorities and approaches to the preparation of the Strategy of the City of Skopje for cooperation with civil society organizations. We have prepared the Strategy along with the Center for Institutional Development and the whole project has been financed by the OSCE monitoring mission in Skopje.
The administration of the City of Skopje bases future cooperation with the civic sector on the following principles: partnership, mutual trust, participation and consultations, transparency, independence and responsibility. The Strategy is a mid-term plan document covering the period 2007-2010. Its main objective is to enable active involvement of the civil society organizations in the processes of defining development activities and initiatives of the City of Skopje, as well as creating preconditions for forming efficient partnerships.
The Strategy’s main objective has been considered in details through a series of seven specific objectives. The first objective is to establish mechanisms of cooperation between the City of Skopje and the civil society organizations and it is necessary to prepare a resource database of the civil society organizations, to form discussion working groups in different fields, to form a city forum for cooperation and coordination with civil society organizations, to adopt and publish the criteria for support of nominated projects and application procedures.
For the same objective, preparation of mechanisms for protection of intellectual property in terms of the submitted projects has been projected.
The second objective is to increase the information flow between the City of Skopje and the civil society organizations and for its realization it is projected to form common electronic (e-mail) groups by fields, to form discussion blogs as part of the website of the City of Skopje, to form a city NGO-center, to provide expert assistance and information to the civil society organizations in the part of interpreting legal regulation which is in direct relation with the authorities of the City of Skopje and its decisions, as well as some other measures that shall contribute to strengthening of this segment.
The main objectives also include increase and strengthening the capacities of the city administration, development of strategic partnerships between the city and the civil society organizations, increase of the level of environmental protection and improvement of city cleanness as well as increase of the participation of civil society organizations in the processes of planning and preparation of specialized strategies.
This Strategy is based upon the win-win concept and the model of long-term cooperation (as an alternative of the prevailing ad hoc cooperation), where resources that civil society organizations have at their disposal on one hand and the administration of the City of Skopje on the other hand, are complemented with synergy and it is inevitable to result in improvement of the results from the so far work.
We are convinced that the realization of this Strategy shall have a quality impact on the overall democratic process and strengthening of the civil society in the country, as it is, and remains, in the spirit of the motto “think globally – act locally”.
(the author is the Mayor of the City of Skopje)
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