Since the last post on the results of our civic monitoring of public policies, nearly 300 new monitoring reports have been added to the monithon.eu platform, more than twice the number that we had in 2016: 300 new studies, each focusing on one of many projects taking place throughout Italy that are funded by Cohesion (or Regional) Policy. This increase is an extraordinary achievement, making us proud to be part of this experiment in civic monitoring as a proactive way to use public data and to bolster civic engagement and public policy accountability.
Every since its creation, Monithon has positioned itself as both a tool and a research method, putting itself at the service of schools, universities, NGOs and local communities, nearly always as a group of volunteers and following with the philosophy of civic hacking. To learn how Monithon came into being and about the people who are the driving force behind it, you can read our post from last year.
This year we are prouder than ever, because the quality of the reports we are publishing is constantly improving. The studies conducted over the last two years have, in almost 90% of cases, included an on-site visit to the project headquarters – the infrastructure or the location where a project financed with public funding is being conducted – involving the collection of data, videos, photos, and documents. During these last 2 years, over 95% of our monitoring groups have conducted on-site interviews: 76% interviewed the public or private party that received the funds, and 56% interviewed residents of the local community to assess the project’s effectiveness from the perspective of the final beneficiaries of public policies. 38% were able to directly interview the public representatives responsible for the initiatives (mayors, town or regional councilors, province presidents, etc.) That’s not all: the ability to reconstruct the “administrative history” of funds provided, and the details of that reconstruction, are qualitative aspects that can be observed when reading the monitoring reports, beginning with the map or the list. In almost every case, you can find original videos containing the content of the interviews and each study’s principal findings – investigative data journalism on a small scale!
These results are largely the fruits of incredible work on the part of the project team from the OpenCoesione School (or ASOC), from the Italian “A Scuola di OpenCoesione), which uses Monithon during “Esplorare” (Explore), the most important phase in its educational programme in Italian high schools. It is where we can see how adept the students have become at interpreting, understanding and using public data, so as to hold institutions to account for the investments made in their neighborhoods or cities. In the most recent edition alone, spanning 2017-2018, around 5000 students were involved, under the direct guidance of 300 instructors working throughout Italy. Nearly 88% of the reports you can find on monithon.eu are the result of these research activities.
The OpenCoesione School is constantly growing and raising its profile. Indeed, in recent years, the OpenCoesione initiative, which provides funding and coordination for ASOC from within the Italian Presidency of the Council of Ministers, has contributed to imparting an awareness of the practice of civic monitoring within regional public administrations and within national and European institutions.
There is no lack of similar programs at the university level. Thanks to the impetus provided by the Europe Direct center, every year the University of Turin holds a course devoted specifically to European policies and civic monitoring. The work carried out by the MoniTOcamera (2017) and MoniTOsitadela (2018) teams speaks for itself, taking its place alongside earlier studies, which are likewise of the highest quality. In Turin we also find a super interesting spin-off project, whose progress deserves to be closely followed: Monitorino.
In addition to providing support to schools and these early experiments in universities – of which the University of Pescara has recently become a part, with its course in Urban Planning – another of the Monithon community’s newest initiatives is the Sibari Integrity Pact (Calabria), which, thanks to Action Aid, has truly taken off, with the introduction of the first civic monitoring schools for members of the local community. This initiative is a game changer, not only for the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and for local communities, but also for the European Commission, which recently adopted it as a model (see p. 26) for similar future initiatives aimed to fight corruption and encourage civic engagement.
In this post, we would like to share with you some of the enthusiasm and enjoyment that we experienced, as well as some of the discoveries – both positive and negative – that were made while putting together these monitoring reports. Here, too, we will begin with an analysis of our civic monitoring results: Which projects were examined? What were the main “assessments” reached? Then we will move on to recommendations for public decision-makers.
Monitoring of European Funds to reduce regional disparities
From the end of 2016 to May 2018, the number of monitoring reports rose from 177 to 475 – quite a leap! Each report, with a few limited exceptions, provides detailed information on a project initially chosen by a monitoring group from a list of approximately 950 thousand projects published on OpenCoesione.gov.it. Thanks to the open data, we can link the findings of the monitoring projects to the principal characteristics of the projects being monitored, such as scale, funding sources, and thematic categories.
We thus discovered that the total funding for the projects monitored amounted to over 4.5 billion euros, of which over 3 billions’ worth had been subject to monitoring in the last 2 years alone. Over half of these projects are financed by European Structural and Investment funds (ESIFunds). These are funds managed by the central and regional administrations, intended to reduce the gaps that exist between the different parts of the country (which is why there are many more projects in Southern Italy than in the Central and Northern regions). However, the number of monitored projects funded using resources that the Italian government makes available with the same objectives (“national funds”) is growing. Whatever the case, whether these funds are allocated from national, European, regional or local budgets, they are all taxpayers’ money.
Using open data from OpenCoesione, we can also categorize projects according to theme. It goes without saying that the enormous resources needed to build or improve transportation infrastructures are also reflected in the sample of projects monitored. Indeed, the 53 projects that fall into this category account for nearly 3 billion of the total amount of funding. Take, for example, the Crotone Airport, which is expected to provide an essential stimulus for the local economy.
As in our last post, the theme that users once again found most interesting was culture and tourism. This category is comprised of 141 projects, for a total of 530 million euros – investments which are essential for our nation and to which the competent authorities, who might be encouraged to participate thanks to civic monitoring, could make a significant contribution. We are talking about a truly vast number of different projects: from the restoration of the Royal Palace of Caserta to the renovation of the Apollo Theatre in Lecce (here is a link in English), from the Capuchin Monastery in Grottaglie (Taranto) to the Chilli Pepper (“Peperoncino”) Festival in Diamante, in Calabria.
There is also a new entry to our list of themes: social inclusion, and it is the sixth-most monitored to date. 38 projects, for instance, finance the reuse for social purposes of property confiscated from criminal organizations (e.g. the creation of the Centre for Antimafia Studies in Calabria) or the development of welfare services (such as the “Casa della Salute” health clinic in Bosa, Sardinia).
The assessments from the monitoring groups
The monitoring groups’ assessments of the public projects they investigate is the most essential element of their activities. Taken as a whole, their assessment has remained largely unchanged over the last two years. The majority of financed projects (64%) earned positive assessments. Of these, over two-thirds have already been completed and deemed to be useful, while the remainder are still ongoing, but what has been observed so far bodes well.
Some investments came as a pleasant surprise to the monitoring communities, who had a chance to discover them and explore them in more depth. One such investment assessed during the 2017 and 2018 monitoring was the renovation of the historic town center of Barletta, in Apulia. According to the team, called Reconstructing History (“Ricostruendo la Storia”), the project “led to an improvement in the quality of life for residents of the historic center and a moderate increase in tourism flows”. The solar power plant in Montefiascone, near Viterbo, has also had a positive impact in terms of “economic savings and a decrease in pollution in the surrounding area”. Yet another example is the MArTA (National Archaeological Museum) in Taranto, which, thanks to public funding, “received its highest ever number of visitors in 2016”.
The young people from the team “Cristallo dello Zingaro” in Trapani, while monitoring the safety projects at the Zingaro Nature Reserve, were struck by what they found: “The first thing that captures tourists’ attention is the unparalleled beauty of the land and seascapes”. The “masterful skill of the expert laborers in attempting to make everything as natural as possible, without however forgetting the primary purpose of their work, which is to safeguard people who are walking there, unaware of the dangers that the local area may present, was clear to see.”
The projects that did have problems represented approximately one-third of the whole: 11% have been completed but appear to be ineffective, while the remaining 21% are still ongoing but are having difficulty moving forward. The assessment remained deferred on 3% of projects, which had only just begun. In a little while, we shall go into more detail regarding the difficulties encountered.
First, however, let us examine whether or not assessments changed depending on projects’ geographical locations. In this post, we will focus on the 4 regions with the greatest number of civic monitoring reports.
They are the main Southern Italian regions in terms of total European and domestic cohesion policy funding received. The region with the highest percentage of positive assessments (68%, just slightly higher than the national average), shown in green in the chart, is Apulia. The region with the greatest number of problems, on the other hand, is Calabria, where just over half of projects received negative assessments. The statistic relating to projects which have been completed is striking, since these are more difficult to remedy. Nevertheless, these assessments are not set in stone. According to the authors of the reports, as we shall see below when we discuss recommendations, actions targeting “surrounding conditions” may restore even these projects’ effectiveness.
Moreover, as a general disclaimer, it goes without saying that Monithon’s sample of monitored projects is not statistically representative of the projects funded in the 4 regions. The projects in this sample are way too few and their selection depends on the choices and interests of the students. So this comparison is not about the regions’ performances on managing ESI Funds.
What factors determine a negative assessment? The 300 reports most recently included in our calculations all basically confirm the same problems. Aside from the projects which never even got off of the ground – for example due to issues associated with access to funds, the granting of permits or licenses – a large number of public projects (10.9%) became blocked when already underway, due to problems of an administrative nature.
The principal problem found, however, was once again a general delay during the implementation phase of projects with respect to planned schedules (on OpenCoesione, for example, you can find information on planned timetables). This issue affects 18.1% of total projects monitored. This is the case, for example, with the construction of a biotechnology center, which should be quick to keep pace with the newest developments in scientific research, but at the time of the monitoring visit was already 7 years behind. In some cases, funds are linked to a specific project, one which cannot be separated from its context of implementation. Thus, in the province of Milan, the redevelopment of the wetlands along the Olona River is 2 years behind, “because the park’s redevelopment is linked to other projects related to the river, which have been impacted by bureaucratic complications”.
There is no lack of projects which are entangled amidst different funding sources, public administrations which are only partially responsible for them or who do not provide direct access to the work undertaken. In some cases, the students’ dedication is not enough to help us understand whether or not the money has been spent. And if it has been spent, what for? Why, despite public data stating that a large amount of funds have already been spent and accounted for to the European Commission, is there still a “lack of funding”? Here below you can find the doubts expressed by the young people in the “newscast” they put together about the renovation of the old historic district of the village of Senerchia, in Campania (in Italian).
Let’s now take a moment to examine the final phases of public project monitoring, which are even more intriguing: results and impact. It is during this phase that the assessments of residents can provide a valuable source of information for administrations. However, with the exception of the most notable projects, residents are unfortunately not able to accurately gauge the usefulness or effectiveness of every financed project. Bear in mind that, even taking into account only those cohesion policy investments made between 2007 and 2015, there were about 1 million financed projects! Civic monitoring groups, however, can come to our aid by applying the principles of “crowdsourcing”, in other words, the ability of “crowds” to collect accurate data by dividing up the work of an assessment – immense in and of itself – into small tasks assigned to individuals (or, in this case, one project per group), in the same way that Wikipedia is collaboratively written.
In our case, an analysis of the qualitative data collected shows that only 3.6% of the projects examined were found to be unsatisfactory. This percentage is in line with the findings of our last report, and is relatively low. These are cases in which funding did not lead to adequate implementation. One such example, it would seem, is the water treatment plant in the municipality of Paola (Cosenza), where “sludge disposal issues and problems relating to plant management continue to exist”. We find a similar issue with the funding for the development of a social computing platform for the University of Milano-Bicocca. In this case, due to a lack of additional financing that the university had been counting on, it was unable to do anything beyond the creation of a prototype, which can no longer even be viewed, as it was created using obsolete technologies. Graver still is the case of the Papardo di Messina Hospital’s Oncology Centre, which has unfortunately featured on the news. It simply “does not exist”.
Much more common (10%) are those projects that were implemented with good results, only to be deemed ineffective when viewed in the wider context in which they were made available. Even if the funds allocated for these projects in and of themselves were spent correctly, the effectiveness of the projects for their final beneficiaries remains a fundamental criterion on which any assessment of the success of public policies must be based. This is the case with the Multimedia Mountain Museum in Sicily, which only was open on one occasion, “due to high operating costs and a lack of staff”. Three very similar cases are those of three civil protection plans, for the Municipalities of Marcianise, Palomonte and Casalnuovo di Napoli respectively, which received development funding but invested nothing in communicating what they had done to their local communities – which, as was discovered in the course of the interviews conducted, did not even know these plans existed. Another example is that of the redevelopment of Piazza Savignano in Aversa (Naples), which was a complete success but, according to the monitoring group “did not bring about the social inclusion which had been the true crux of the project”.
Here you can find the video by the extremely capable young people from the FreeDam team, who monitored the Lordo Dam project in Calabria, with the interviews they conducted with local residents and the press conference they organised with the mayor, the bishop, and the president of an environmental monitoring centre.
A considerable number of the projects described immediately above constitute a significant subgroup: successfully implemented but useless in the absence of complementary initiatives which could unlock all of their potential effectiveness. The center for the terminally ill in Oristano is complete, but “is still not hooked up to the electricity grid or city water” and “has yet to receive accreditation from the Local Health and Social Services Department (ASSL)”. It is therefore unable to be used, “a cathedral in the desert”. More glaring still is the case of the South Fort in Reggio Calabria, whose redevelopment left our young people “open-mouthed”. “The structure is welcoming and attention has been paid to even the smallest details. The Fort appears suddenly around the last curve in the road, in all of its restored majesty and military linearity.” What a shame it is that the public cannot get to the fort, because the road is impassable and there are no signs to show the way.
The most recent recommendations from our monitoring groups
In 2017 and 2018, the quality and variety of suggestions has continued to grow – a true goldmine of “good ideas” for local decision makers!
Overall, the types of recommendations have followed the same trend from year to year.
A portion of the projects monitored (12%) are so useful that the main recommendation is to continue to further develop these projects in order to have an ever greater impact. Thanks to public financing, some of the buildings in the “Oasi la Valle” nature reserve on Lake Trasimeno have been renovated. Other buildings in the park, however, could be repurposed to “serve as laboratories for the education of young people, including those with disabilities, to help them learn skills such as how to manage a small botanical garden”. Let’s look at another example. Once the renovation of the Santissima Trinità Complex in Torre del Greco (Naples) is completed, thanks to over 4 million in funding, a “virtual exhibition” could be created, “which illustrates the history of the local area and the places that are its heart and soul, through the creation of a special app that encourages visitors to visit those places in real life”. For another example, let’s take the repair and renovation of the Barletta stadium: after the initial 1.3 million invested, why not “increase the number of people who want to get more involved with sports, including through the many events organized by the different sports clubs that use the field on a regular basis?”
In other cases (7%), the monitoring groups complained of “governance” problems. These occur when public administrations “don’t talk to each other”, and political conflicts and a lack of coordination are piled on top of existing bureaucratic problems. Unfortunately, this was the case with the project for the improvement of the Messina-Palermo and Messina-Syracuse railway lines, worth 28 million in financing. According to the monitoring group, the work is stopped, with only 10% of total implementation achieved, given an absence of “clear objectives on an institutional policy level”. In addition, it appears “essential” that “a network that can coordinate the actions of all of the parties involved be created”. In other cases, recommendations encourage the creation of a collaborative governance system, one which could involve local residents, schools and communities as active participants. For instance, the students from the “Dream Energy” group in Casal di Principe (Caserta) have offered to design and implement “projects that are in the interest of the community, with the active participation of local residents”, so as to raise awareness regarding the extremely useful “Pio La Torre” Centre for Environmental Education and Documentation, a bastion of legality. This is possible thanks to “constant contact between schools and public institutions”.
As in past years, the last two years have seen numerous (14%) recommendations for improving communication on the amount of good that public investments – including European funds – are doing for local areas. This applies to projects, both large and small, that have been monitored over the past two years. Even the simple construction of a multistory parking garage in Somma Vesuviana (Naples) can help to meet the need for improved mobility, but it is necessary to have “greater publicity for the project and encourage more people to use it”. Turning our attention to the Municipal Selective Waste Collection Centres in Martina Franca (Taranto), the “civic monitoring team intends to actively contribute to the implementation of an information programme, which has been planned to help raise awareness and communicate methods of use and the importance of this new service. The team is offering to create videos to disseminate this information, to participate in ‘environment days’ in the square, to organise and lead educational-play activities for children, [and] to implement a Telegram bot to inform people about selective waste collection services”.
Lastly, the bulk of recommendations focused on specific suggestions regarding individual projects, dealing with issues such as how to unblock a problematic situation or how to improve a key aspect in terms of effectiveness. Dozens of civic monitoring reports contain specific recommendations, which are at the disposal of the local administrations and the companies that are implementing these public projects. For example, with regard to the project dealing with the redevelopment of the Seveso in Sesto San Giovanni (Milan), the students are convinced that “one way to stop the Seveso from overflowing its banks would be to construct a stormwater holding basin, but before the water enters such a basin, it must first be filtered”. The excellent study conducted by the Corsari Assetati team contains a fair number of suggestions on how to use the wastewater generated by the Acqua dei Corsari water treatment plant in Palermo: “uses include irrigation, street cleaning, machine cooling, extinguishing fires, but it could also simply be used for periodic cleaning of the sewer system, so as to prevent the streets from flooding.” These types of recommendations were also discussed on May 22, at a ForumPA workshop.
The potential of civic monitoring: assessing effectiveness from the user standpoint
The most interesting potential application of civic monitoring may, however, lie in its ability to determine to which specific project, within the broader area of implementation, funding should be allocated. In this way, it is possible to provide precise recommendations to enable a more fully effective use of public finances, one which includes not only those aspects related to the implementation of planning within predetermined timeframes and administrative and financial constraints, but also takes into consideration the actual usefulness of the project within its local area.
It is extremely interesting to note that many monitoring reports, especially during the last two years, have placed great importance on “surrounding conditions”, those which make it possible for financing to truly serve to meet the needs of community residents and local businesses.
A case in point is the Epizephyrian Locris National Archaeological Museum, “one of the most important archaeological sites in the world”, which is in need of commitment on the part of national, regional and local institutions for its development and promotion, for example to help “improve the quality of the roads that lead to it, making them more accessible to more effective modes of transport, and for more welcoming hotels and accommodation facilities”. The funding for the Scalea (Cosenza) airfield is also of scant effectiveness if “the Regional public services and hotel infrastructures are not improved so as to better manage tourist accommodation during the summer season”.
The same is true for much smaller-scale projects as well, such as the expansion of the Restricted Traffic Area in Aversa (Caserta), which is useless without the “presence of traffic police at the entry points and constantly operating video cameras” or a “geolocation system for bicycles, to prevent them from being stolen”.
In conclusion, the potential applications of civic monitoring in the public policy sphere are becoming apparent. What began as a game in 2013 and gained structure as a method in 2014 has taken root, in following years, as a part of actual “classes for the citizens of tomorrow” that are being taught in schools, universities and civic communities, with more people trying it out in ever more useful ways. The monitored projects, while still far from representing any sort of statistically significant sample, have been the object of in-depth studies, which have led to the generation of new data and information and, in many cases, “good ideas” as well. To the public administrations falls the task of knowing how to make the most of them!
Italian multi-stakeholder Open Government Partnership forum includes civic monitoring among strategic objectives
/0 Comments/in News /by MonithonThe Italian Open Government Forum (Forum Governo Aperto) has confirmed civic monitoring as one of the strategic objectives contained in the current version of the National Strategy for open government, within the framework of the Open Government Partnership, the international initiative that promotes transparency, citizen participation, the fight against corruption, and the use of new technologies to strengthen public governance.
The Forum, which replaces the Multi-Stakeholder Forum and is therefore composed of representatives from both public administrations and civil society, including Luigi Reggi from Monithon Europe, met last September 19th and 20th at the Department of Public Administration of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers.
The objective on civic monitoring is part of the broader priority of “Implementing open government practices in areas of significant impact or for reducing inequalities, promoting social equity, and ensuring integrity.”
Here is the text of the objective:
The aim is therefore to invest in the publication of open data that enables civic monitoring activities by citizens and stakeholders (for example, data on the progress of public projects). Civic monitoring and evaluation focus both on how public decisions are made and on what has been achieved (results and impacts in terms of public value produced). Civic monitoring and evaluation are therefore considered key tools for improving the integrity and transparency of public policies.
Eurozine’s Article Highlights Challenges in EU Recovery Fund Transparency – Featuring Insights from Monithon
/0 Comments/in News /by MonithonA new article in Eurozine tackles the challenges surrounding the European Union’s Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) and its implementation across member states. It painstakingly explores critical issues such as transparency, fraud prevention, and the effectiveness of the RRF in achieving its intended goals. Key sources cited in the article are representatives of European institutions and civil society organizations such as the Open Spending EU Coalition.
The article also includes an interview with Dr. Luigi Reggi, co-founder of Monithon, who shares his insights on enhancing accountability and public oversight of EU funds. Dr. Reggi emphasized the importance of civic engagement and public oversight in promoting transparency and accountability. Monithon has been at the forefront of these efforts, working to involve citizens in monitoring EU-funded projects within their communities.
Dr. Reggi advocates for a practical solution that has been proposed by Monithon and other Italian civil society organizations in recent years, such as the umbrella-organization Osservatorio Civico PNRR: replicating the OpenCoesione model. This government platform, which is currently Italy’s national portal for the transparency of EU Cohesion Funds, allows for detailed, accessible data on project funding and progress. These data can be used by the public to monitor and evaluate the use of funds effectively.
Join the Conversation
We encourage you to learn more about Monithon’s ongoing efforts to promote transparency and civic engagement in the monitoring of EU funds by reading our news and projects. Stay tuned for more updates and insights from Monithon on social media!
iMonitor Project Presented at the G20 Anticorruption Working Group: Highlights from Panel Discussion
/0 Comments/in Events, iMonitor, News /by MonithonMonithon Europe had the privilege of being represented by its president Luigi Reggi at the recent G20 Anticorruption Working Group event “Just and Sustainable Procurement for People and Planet” held in Paris, France. This gathering saw key discussions on the role of public procurement and the monitoring of public spending through open data and digital technologies. These topics are central to the G20’s agenda leading up to the summit in Brazil in November 2024, where global commitments, including the recent resolution on digitization, data, and ICTs in procurement, will be finalized.
The event featured prominent panelists such as Sally Guyer and Kristen Robinson from the Open Contracting Partnership, Giuseppe Busia, president of ANAC [here his speech and presentation], and Mr. Henrique de Oliveira Andrade, Chief of Staff of the Secretariat of Internal Control, Office of the Comptroller General, Brazil. Their collective insights underscored the significance of transparency and technological advancements in fighting corruption.
The G20, as the primary platform for global economic cooperation, has played a crucial role in leading the global fight against corruption. G20 countries, accounting for 75% of world trade and 80% of global GDP, committed to ensure they have in place “systems of procurement based on transparency, competition and objective criteria in decision-making to prevent corruption” in 2014. They also approved G20 Principles for Promoting Integrity in Public Procurement in 2015 and a G20 Compendium of Good Practices for Promoting Integrity and Transparency in Infrastructure Development in 2019, emphasizing the need for openness and transparency of such procurement. The States parties to the United Nations Convention against Corruption also committed, in 2021, to “increasing transparency and accountability in the management of public finances and in government procurement, funding and contracting services to ensure transparency in government actions in the use of public funds and during the whole public procurement cycle” to fully implement article 9 of the Convention and approved a resolution entitled Promoting transparency and integrity in public procurement in support of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development last December.
Monithon, created in 2013 as an independent initiative supporting citizens in the participatory assessment of the effectiveness of EU projects, has, since 2023, offered a specific methodology and a tool for gathering input on potential misuse of public funding to anyone. The input from local communities is primarily used to foster collaboration with local authorities responsible for local investments, but it can also be forwarded, if deemed relevant, to national anticorruption authorities.
Citizens can select relevant public tenders to monitor on the OpenTender portal, which gathers open government data on millions of contracts in the EU from different official sources and calculates corruption risk indicators for each tender. In Italy, citizens can also start the selection process by identifying an EU-funded project in their town or neighborhood through the Project Finder map, where projects are georeferenced with high precision based on the address. Once they find an interesting project for their community, they can look for related public tenders through the Unique Project Code, which all Italian public administrations use.
The panel discussion indeed highlighted the importance of including civic actors in the procurement process, by “giving stakeholders clear channels to turn insights from open data on public procurement into policy changes, better resource allocation, stronger contract negotiation and smarter more efficient delivery of goods, services and infrastructure”. For this to happen, citizens should be able to access sufficient training on technical matters. The discussion also focused on the crucial availability of high-quality and interoperable data, such as those connecting investment projects, public tenders, business registers, company ownership, and beneficial ownership. The AI application ALICE presented by the Brazilian government seems a very promising tool when based on the right data.
We extend our gratitude to the delegates of the G20 countries for their engaging questions and to the French government team for their excellent organization of the event. The outcomes of this session will be shared with the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) to support the implementation of CoSP resolution 10/9.
For more information about the iMonitor project, visit the iMonitor website.
We need more data on how Italian RRF projects are progressing
/0 Comments/in News /by MonithonThe Italian Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) was approved by the European Council on 13 July 2021. Since then, a complex administrative machine has started with the aim of implementing such an ambitious and financially relevant plan. A machine that involved all levels of government, from national to local.
PNRR investments are made through projects. Each project is a piece of a jigsaw puzzle. For example, to achieve the objective of “increasing the educational offer in the 0-6 age group throughout the national territory” it is necessary to build or renovate 2550 nursery schools and create 150,000 new places. Every nursery is a project.
What is happening now is that this complex administrative machine is struggling to collect information. Some analysts, including those at the Openpolis foundation, have questioned whether the Government really has a clear picture of how PNRR projects are going, especially those managed at a local level.
One thing is certain. On the website of the official government portal Italia Domani, aimed at communicating the results of the PNRR, there has never been any trace of information on the progress of the projects. Since April 2023, we have known, for example, what projects are called, where they are, how much they cost, which administrations are responsible, and which public tenders are associated. The publication of that data was certainly a big step forward. But we still don’t know which projects are underway or completed, how much funding has been spent, or whether administrative procedures are progressing or blocked.
We promote “civic” monitoring of public funds, based precisely on the analysis of these individual pieces of the puzzle. Without this information, it is much more complicated for citizens to understand and control how the funds are spent, evaluate their effectiveness, and help make the infrastructures and services created more useful and closer to real needs. Reconstructing this information from the bottom up is not impossible, but it is necessary to contact each administration directly, with time and patience, and a response is not guaranteed.
We too therefore join, with the “Dati Bene Comune” campaign and the PNRR Civic Observatory , the Openpolis Foundation’s proposal to send a new #FOIA request on the data of the #PNRR projects and tenders . We ask the President of the Council of Ministers Giorgia Meloni and Minister Raffaele Fitto for full transparency on the Plan.
▶️ Learn more about the missing data on the PNRR on the OpenPolis website [in Italian]
▶️ Go to the “Dati Bene Comune” campaign on the PNRR [in Italian]
Monithon elected as member of the Italian Open Government Forum for 2024-2027 term
/0 Comments/in News /by MonithonFollowing the vote on March 4, 2024, the composition for the new mandate of the Italian Open Government Forum (FGA) for the term 2024/2027 has been officially approved. A total of 44 organizations from the Open Government Partnership Italy (OGPIT) community participated in the voting process, including 15 public administrations and 29 civil society organizations.
Monithon, as one of the newly elected civil society organizations, is honored to join the FGA. According to the regulation, the Forum plays a crucial role in governing the OGPIT community, which brings together stakeholders from both the public and civil sectors. The FGA acts as a platform for equal dialogue between organized civil society and institutional actors, with the mission of implementing public policies relevant to the strategy, implementation, and impact monitoring of the national strategy for open government.
Monithon, during its mandate, will act according to the principle of leading by example, contributing to the implementation of commitments in line with the national open government strategy.
Monithon looks forward to contributing to the advancement of open government principles and engaging in this significant collaborative effort to enhance transparency, collaboration, and participation in public governance.
Here is the complete list of the new members of the Open Government Forum.
Government Organizations
Civil Society Organizations
iMonitor, a civic monitoring network to prevent corruption, is launched: join us!
/0 Comments/in iMonitor, News, Projects /by MonithonDecember 9th is the International Day against Corruption, an opportunity to raise awareness of the consequences of this social, political, and economic phenomenon which affects all countries and deprives citizens of fundamental rights, slows down economic development, undermines the institutions, and the rule of law.
We take this opportunity to announce Monithon’s participation in the iMonitor project network, which has been active for a few months in 4 European countries (Italy, Spain, Romania, Lithuania).
Combining the analysis of public procurement data and the results of civic monitoring to help improve the efficiency of the fight against corruption: this is the key objective of the project coordinated by the Government Transparency Institute, financed by the Internal Security Fund and supported by the Italian national anticorruption authority (ANAC).
Starting from the Opentender platform, which has made public procurement data and corruption risk indicators available, and using Monithon’s reporting tool for citizens dedicated to monitoring public spending, iMonitor will, on the one hand, try to provide useful information authorities to address corruption and fraud in public procurement, on the other hand, to promote civil society networks for ongoing anti-corruption efforts in the 4 European countries/regions involved.
To date, the iMonitor network is finalizing a common monitoring reporting template in Spain, Italy, Lithuania, and Romania, and a methodology to engage civic communities in this delicate activity.
The monitoring activities will begin in 2024, and will involve groups of interested citizens with civic monitoring laboratories.
iMonitor brings together Monithon, Oficina Antifrau de Catalunya (Anti-Fraud Office of Catalonia), Transparency International Lithuanian Chapter , Romanian Academic Society, National Integrity Agency / Agenția Națională de Integritate (Romania), Collegi de Professionals de la Ciència Política i de la Sociologia de Catalunya (COLPIS, Spain).
If want to participate, shoot us a message at info@monithon.eu!
Italian government releases open data on Recovery projects
/0 Comments/in News /by MonithonThis is one of the most awaited news by Italian transparency advocates, journalists, and researchers. Two years after the launch of the Italian Recovery Plan (PNRR) and countless calls for transparency, it is now possible to access the information contained in the monitoring system of the Ministry of Economy and Finance on the individual projects financed (“REGIS”).
The data is updated to 1 March 2023 and concerns over 50 thousand validated projects , therefore 10 times more than those published in the last release. The total number of projects, including those not yet validated, is almost 140,000.
Data are published in the Open Data section of the national RRF portal “Italia Domani”. The following tables are available:
Our first impression
In the coming days, we will analyze this data to verify its completeness and quality. We aim at contributing to a wider analysis involving content and technical aspects in collaboration with other civil society initiatives such as the Dati Bene Comune transparency campaign.
In the meantime, this data release looks like a big step forward in terms of transparency and accountability of the RRF. Knowing exactly which projects are financed and where, on which topics and with which objectives, it is possible for interested citizens and organizations to verify the progress and the effects of RFF funding on the ground. While other public datasets like OpenCUP contain information about projects only potentially funded by the Recovery Plan, these new data allow to identify which projects are actually being funded by the RRF. Through the Unique Project Identifier (CUP) it is easy for tech-savvy citizens to match RRF data with other existing Italian datasets such as ANAC, Servizio Contratti Pubblici, or OpenBDAP.
Also, information about the location of the projects is included, allowing interesting spatial analyses. The link to the related tenders makes it easier for the users to access the data from the National Anticorruption Authority. Finally, data are accompanied by a minimal set of metadata, briefly explaining the meaning of each variable.
Of course, there is room for improvement. A few initial examples:
We look forward to using these new datasets in our civic monitoring of the Recovery Plan!
Environmental monitoring in Salento
/0 Comments/in Ambiente, Progetto Civic Monitoring for EU /by MonithonThe long work of the Mobius Circle APS – Precious Plastic Salento association concluded yesterday, which used the Monithon method for its first work of civic monitoring of public projects. A work that began last year thanks to the European project Civic Monitoring for the future of Europe , for which Monithon provided a specialized training course on the civic monitoring of European funds.
The monitoring report – the first of a series in various European countries, which we will publish in the coming weeks – deals with the renovation of an ancient rainwater collection channel in the naturalistic oasis of the Canale della Lacrima (financed with the Funds for POR FESR 2014-2020) in the municipality of Campi Salentina. The intervention also involves the strengthening of the surrounding riparian vegetation, in order to reconstitute a woodland nucleus, starting from some very rare specimens of Virgilian oaks found on site.
The monitoring process lasted about a year and was developed with data collection and analysis activities, starting from the information available on the Open Coesione website in the resolutions published on the website of the Municipality of Campi Salentina. Public debates, working groups, inspections, and interviews which also involved a group of students, active protagonists of the monitoring activities, completed the activities.
The outcome of the research highlighted that it is a useful project which, however, could have been developed in a more complete way, especially since a management plan for the area was not foreseen.
Italian civil society asks the Government for data on the projects funded by the Recovery Plan
/0 Comments/in News /by MonithonOn November 30th, 2022, more than 60 Italian civil society entities (here is the full list, updated daily) representing citizens, associations, groups, movements, universities, and research centers, sent an open letter to the Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, and to the Minister for the European Affairs, Cohesion Policies and the RRF, Raffaele Fitto, denouncing the serious delay in making available the data that are essential for monitoring the progress of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan. The campaign is called “Italy Tomorrow, Data Today”, inspired by the name of the government website ItaliaDomani (“Italy for Tomorrow”).
Monithon has been advocating for years for better data on the planning and implementation of EU funding, including, more recently, on the Recovery and Resilience facility. Detailed and high-quality data are essential for allowing citizens to increase awareness of the use of public funding and collect new information on the individual projects funded through interviews or questionnaires. Have a look at our civic monitoring reports in Italy and other EU Countries.
According to Italian civil society, information on the National Recovery and Resilience Plan and its management remains scarce and inadequate. The national government website ItaliaDomani does not yet contain information on the funds actually spent. A the moment, only 4 tender procedures and around 5,000 projects are listed. This data is updated to May 2022 and concerns only 1 billion euros.
In short, there is no single and easily accessible place in which to find what projects are funded, where, and how they are progressing.
The following is the complete text of the open letter (here is the original Italian version, which we have translated into English – sorry for any inaccuracies).
Civil society asks for transparency on the Recovery Plan with a letter to the Prime Minister
Despite the continuous promises from the Government and Parliament, information on the National Recovery and Resilience Plan and its management is still very scarce and inadequate. For citizens, associations, groups, movements, universities, and research centers it is not yet possible to monitor the progress of a project and assess its impact.
The budget law for 2021 committed the Government to detect the financial, physical, and procedural implementation data relating to each project of the PNRR and to make them available in an open format, but there is still very little evidence of all this. Currently, published data do not show the state of implementation, or provide any evidence of the impact at the local level.
In the open data catalog ItaliaDomani, the national portal of the PNRR launched by the Government in August 2021 has the goal of allowing citizens to monitor the implementation of the plan and the progress of each investment. However, at the moment there is no available information on the funds actually spent.
According to the second report to Parliament on the state of implementation of the Plan, sent to the Italian Parliament on October 6th, 73,000 projects should have been uploaded to the REGIS system, a national information system for the monitoring of the Plan. However, in the ItaliaDomani portal we can only find:
Furthermore, there is no single and easily accessible place where it is possible to access project documents or files, which is essential to understand the projects’ goals and context.
Obtaining this information, which is essential for citizens to be able to fully exercise their role of control over the work of the public administration, has so far been delegated to the ability or goodwill of individual local administrations, resulting in unequal access to information in different areas of our Country.
As if that were not enough, the absence of information and data accessible to citizens seems to reflect a general lack of reliable data and information also for the decision-makers themselves, who have a duty to guarantee the correct implementation of the plan and to report on it.
For some time, civil society organizations have been calling for a greater and constant commitment to ensuring transparency in the implementation of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan. Most of these requests have so far gone unheeded.
We therefore ask the new Government for a concrete commitment to publish:
The RRF represents an unprecedented opportunity and a challenge for our Country, which involves a substantial commitment and enormous responsibility, considering that a large portion of the funds involves public debt that will concern our generation and future ones. This challenge needs all parties are fully involved, starting with citizens. Transparency and availability of data are the conditions for guaranteeing citizens the possibility of promoting debate and carrying out civic monitoring actions, as well as intervening to avoid waste of public money and wrong public decisions.
Let’s talk about open data and education at The State of Open Data Roundtables
/0 Comments/in News /by MonithonMonithon will participate in the second round of The State of Open Data Roundtables taking place between November 2-4 to gather perspectives regarding the use and impact of open data. The Data for Development Network will convene experts to discuss recent developments around Education, Corporate Ownership, Crime and Justice, Agriculture, and Land Ownership.
Our own Luigi Reggi will discuss perspectives on the use and impact of open data on education in the session “State of Open Data: Education“, hosted by Javiera Atenas, Principal Researcher at ILDA. The panel includes Marwan Tarazi, Director of “Design and Innovation” at the Center for Continuing Education (CCE), Dr. Victoria Marín, Senior Research Fellow at the University of Lleida (Spain), and Priscila Gonsales, Co-founder at Instituto Educadigital.
You can find some background on Open Data and Education in the latest version of the State of Open Data Report.
The session will begin on Wednesday, November 2 at 02:00 pm (CET). Please register here!
The event will also be streamed on YouTube.
Welcome Kohesio, the new tool for discovering projects for territorial cohesion throughout Europe
/0 Comments/in News /by MonithonWell done European Commission! Kohesio – the online platform that collects data and information on over 1.5 million projects financed by Cohesion Policy all over Europe – was launched earlier today by Commissioner Elisa Ferreira, after being published in beta version for a while.
We at Monithon had a look at Kohesio’s contents, which at the moment are only in English, but will be available in all EU languages. On the homepage, Kohesio presents a map that allows you to easily and intuitively discover the European projects active in your territory. The projects can then be further filtered by theme; Research and Innovation, Social Inclusion, Public Administration Efficiency, Climate Change and Risk Prevention are just some of the categories used on the platform.
Kohesio’s source for Italian projects is OpenCoesione, to which Kohesio adds nothing in terms of data quality, georeferencing (projects are displayed on the map at the municipal level), or information return. However, the real value is the opportunity to compare projects funded in all EU countries! Through the project search interface, you can navigate between similar projects in all countries through filters and keyword research. It is also possible to search by funding recipients (beneficiaries). The data can be downloaded in CSV or XLSX format for each country, as separate files for beneficiaries and projects.
We will be testing these tools in our civic monitoring activities during the coming weeks, by focusing on data quality. In the meantime, we suggest the Kohesio’s team at the European Commission to publish APIs: it will be much easier for civic initiatives like ours to access data (only the ones they need), interpret them, and add value.
Edit 9PM: We asked for APIs, but it turns out that a super helpful EU Knowledge graph endpoint is in fact available, which also includes data from Kohesio. Can’t wait to play with it! https://query.linkedopendata.eu
Monithon meets the New York Public Library
/0 Comments/in News /by MonithonYesterday we had the honor to have a conversation with brilliant Daphna Blatt and Caitlyn Colman-McGaw from the New York Public Library (NYPL) about future applications of civic monitoring in New York City.
Daphna Blatt, who is Director of Strategic Research & Analytics at the NYPL, learned about us in the book Mistrust by our friend Professor Ethan Zuckerman, a well-known media scholar and Internet activist, former director of the MIT Media Lab and now an associate professor of public policy, communication and information at the University of Massachusetts.
Public libraries have a key role in promoting citizen engagement in “smart city” initiatives and cultivating civic impact. In particular, the NYPL is recognized as one of the world’s most innovative institutions and a real beacon of legitimacy and identity in New York. NYPL’s programs combine exceptional expertise in data and information with the ability to act as a facilitator of civic initiatives for public accountability and for increasing trust in public institutions. Have a look at the NYC Open Data portal.
We were impressed by their interest in both Monithon’s method and the At the School of OpenCohesion application. Caitlyn Colman-McGaw, Manager of Young Adult Educational Programming, asked about the emotional response of high-school students when exposed to controversial public issues – a response that eventually leads to creative suggestions for improving public policies.
Our own Luigi Reggi also mentioned EU policies and initiatives for reducing inequality and promoting social inclusion, which are particularly interesting in the context of New York City.
A final recommendation from the NYPL was to collect more detailed information about the civic impact of our monitoring, for example by assessing civic skills and awareness before and after the monitoring activities.
Stay tuned for future developments 🙂
Civic monitoring of EU policy in Turin shows both positive and negative aspects of funded projects
/0 Comments/in News /by Cristina ScarasciulloOn May 21, the student laboratory of the University of Turin – one of the activities of the project “A civic monitoring network for the civic monitoring of the European funds for the environment, promoted by Monithon and Lunaria and co-financed by the European Commission – delivered its results. The event was organized with the support of the Metropolitan City of Turin, Europe Direct Turin and the OpenCoesione initiative of the Department for Cohesion of the Presidency of the Council. The discussion was designed for the students to meet the authorities and hear their positions on the possibilities offered by monitoring.
A training experience not only for the students – involved in monitoring six projects funded by the European Union in the Turin area – but also for the administrators who attended the final event during which the students presented the results of their monitoring, highlighting the shortcomings.
The monitoring activity allowed the students to conduct fieldwork activities and check the progress of the projects – selected through the interactive Project Finder map made available by Monithon -, which also allowed them to meet the recipients of the funded projects, and therefore see the real impact they have on citizens’ lives. What basically emerged during the project was that, although useful and well-realized, the users of the services complain of shortcomings, not only due to the lack of maintenance, but also to the implementation of the interventions, which do not always exactly meet the needs of the beneficiaries of the projects.
After the first phase of “inspection”, the students then contacted the public managers responsible for the National Programme “Metropolitan Cities” to ask for clarification regarding the shortcomings they found. This has therefore made it possible to open a round table with the European Commission and the City of Turin not only on the issue of civic monitoring – a very useful tool in monitoring the management of funds – but also on the importance of involving citizens in all phases of the project for a better success of the project itself.
Read the civic monitoring reports [IN ITALIAN]
Cristina Scarasciullo
Contributor
164 teams from “At School of OpenCohesion” have completed their civic monitoring!
/0 Comments/in News /by MonithonWe want to congratulate the students, teachers, and the “At School of OpenCohesion” team for completing the long civic monitoring program in such a difficult year.
164 monitoring groups – two-thirds of those that started in October last year – have reached the end of the course and are ready to participate in the final selection for finding out which groups will emerge as winners in this edition.
It is an extraordinary result obtained also thanks to the partners and territorial networks that have supported the groups and facilitated the interviews with the subjects responsible for the projects financed by the Cohesion Policies.
Our editorial team supported the groups and commented on the civic monitoring reports that were developed in the third phase of the educational path. The overall quality of the reports is very good, with about 50 reports that resulted particularly effective thanks to their critical analysis, in-depth information, communicative capacity, and the ability to reach a wide audience of subjects in their investigations. About 45% of the reports published on our site received specific comments from our editorial team on the various sections of the report, which guided the development of the research and greatly improved the final result.
READ ALL THE REPORTS HERE, starting with the last one sent.
In such a particular year, it was hard to physically visit the projects, but the students were great at interviewing the responsible parties remotely. To all the teams that have not yet been able to send their Monithon civic monitoring report, we remind you that there is no deadline for sending the report to us!
There is always time to continue monitoring, and we are here to support you.
There is a new app in town: Monithon Project Finder helps you discover EU-funded project in your city
/0 Comments/in News, Scegli il progetto /by MonithonOn Friday 16 April was presented to the public the “Monithon Project Finder” – a new web application created by Monithon in collaboration with the designers and developers of Sheldon Studio, starting from the open data published by OpenCoesione, which helps to locate the projects financed in the environmental sector from European funds 2014-2020.
An interactive map allows to perform a search related to funded projects in Italy per municipality and districts: each pin on the map calls out a project. There are over 7 thousand projects displayed, for an amount of approximately 8.9 billion euros, which can be filtered by Municipality, theme, project category, budget, starting year, and implementation progress. The map displays projects financed by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) in the 2014-2020 programming period, as classified by OpenCoesione in the following “synthetic themes”: Environment, Energy, Culture, and Tourism. The data update is as of 31st December 2020.
Among the projects, there are all those relating to energy efficiency of public buildings and enterprises, sustainable mobility, prevention and mitigation of hydrogeological risk and climate change, management of the waste cycle, modernization of water networks, wastewater treatment, protection of biodiversity, enhancement of the environmental and natural heritage.
By the means of the Project Finder, the user can select the most interesting projects to evaluate. Once the project has been identified, anyone can start their civic monitoring activities by clicking on the button contained in the description of the selected project. The civic monitor will automatically access the Monithon work area, where she will be guided step by step in the development of the Civic Monitoring Report thanks to the online guide MoniTutor.
4 steps for finding the projects near you and starting the civic monitoring
The map can be navigated freely, although we recommend that you follow the steps below.
1. Locate your municipality
From projectfinder.monithon.eu, the first step is to look for a municipality to start from (top left). The map will focus on the chosen municipality: each dot corresponds to a project, and the color depends on the thematic area (e.g. sustainable mobility or environment). By moving the distance indicator just below right and left, you can establish the size of the radius starting from the center of the municipality, for example to consider only the municipal area, neighboring municipalities or the entire province or metropolitan area.
2. Filter the projects to find something interesting
At the bottom, you can raise the green panel to select the projects: you can filter by “category” (there are 28 and they distinguish the projects on the basis of the main activity carried out), or by budget, year of start, progress and presence of civic monitoring reports on the project, indicating that the same project has already been monitored in the past.
3. Pick a project from the list
To see the resulting list of projects, you need to click on the white panel, bottom right. The projects can be sorted by distance, theme, financial value or starting year.
4. Start monitoring!
By clicking on each project, you access a summary sheet that contains the essential data on the progress and description of the project. From here you can start monitoring: by clicking on the button at the bottom right of the card you will be accompanied immediately (if you are not logged in, just log in) on our work area for creating the report and access all the information and suggestions of the MoniTutor. Of course, you can also access the project sheet by simply clicking on each dot!
“Monithon Project Finder” was created to accompany the activities of the project “A national network for civic monitoring of European funds for the environment and sustainable development”, implemented by Lunaria and Monithon – and co-funded by the Directorate General for Regional and Urban Policy of the European Commission.
Let’s learn how to monitor the EU funding for the environment!
/0 Comments/in Events, News, REMO /by MonithonWe are happy to invite you to two free online training events (in Italian) on the civic monitoring of EU funding for the environment in Italy on April 16 and May 21. On the second day, we will launch a national civic monitoring network. Here you can find the program and all the info to participate.
If you are interested in participating or collaborating with us, please send us an email at retemonitoraggiocivico@gmail.com!
Two online events, free and open to all, are scheduled for next Friday 16 April and Friday 21 May, from 2.00 pm to 5.00 pm, organized in collaboration with the Sbilanciamoci! Campaign, with the laboratory “European cohesion policies and territorial communication strategies” (Prof. Alba Garavet), and the course “Communicating Europe: institutions, representations and public opinion” of the University of Turin (Prof. Marinella Belluati). What are the environmental projects financed in Italy by the European Union through the resources of the European Cohesion Policy? Where exactly are they located, and what kind of interventions do they envisage? How much are the resources allocated to them, and who manages them in our country? How to monitor their progress and evaluate the real impact on beneficiaries and territories? These are the questions to be answered in the two initiatives in April and May, thanks to the participation of experts, activists from Italian environmental organizations and networks, students, institutional representatives.
This training is co-funded by the Directorate-General for Regional and Urban Policy of the European Commission thanks to the project “A national network for civic monitoring of European funds for the environment and sustainable development”, created by the NGOs Lunaria and Monithon. The project is supported by the Sbilanciamoci! Campaign, the OpenCoesione initiative of the Department for Cohesion of the Presidency of the Council and the Department of Culture, Politics and Society of the University of Turin, the Metropolitan City of Turin, and the Europe Direct Turin.
Download the complete program of the two events on April 16th and May 21st (in Italian)
In particular, the afternoon of Friday 16 April will open with a session aimed at providing – thanks to the interventions of Anguel Beremliysky (Directorate-General for Regional and Urban Policy of the European Commission) and Francesca De Lucia (expert in environmental issues) – an overview on the EU Cohesion Policy and European funds for the environment in Italy. Following, the best practices of civic monitoring animated by Monithon, by the laboratory on European cohesion policies of the University of Turin and by the University of Turin will be presented with contributions respectively by Luigi Reggi (Monithon), Alba Garavet (Europe Direct Torino), Simona De Luca, and Gianmarco Guazzo from At School of OpenCohesion (ASOC).
Besides, the Monithon team will offer specific training on the civic monitoring of EU funds for the environment and sustainability, which finance thousands of projects throughout Italy. On this occasion, a new interactive platform will also be illustrated – created in collaboration with Sheldon Studio starting from the open data published by OpenCoesione – to discover and promptly locate the projects financed in one’s territory, and access all the information already available such as the financial dimension, the description, the subjects involved, the implementation schedules and the progress. The objective of the event on April 16 is to launch initial experimentation of environmental civic monitoring by “triggering” the autonomous initiative of the training participants.
The event scheduled for the afternoon of Friday 21 May will open with the presentation of civic monitoring initiatives – their challenges, strengths, and the preliminary results achieved – launched on an experimental basis following the training day of 16 April. The discussants for this session will be Willebrordus Sluijters and Andrea Mancini of the Directorate-General for Regional and Urban Policy of the European Commission. During the second session, the foundations will then be laid for the process of setting up a national civic monitoring network of European funds for the environment and sustainable development, with a round table of comparison and extended discussion between various organized subjects of Italian civil society. Among the organizations and participants who confirmed their presence at the round table are: Sergio Andreis (Kyoto Club), Gianluca Catullo (WWF Italy), Sabina De Luca (Forum Inequalities Diversity), Anna Donati (Alliance for Sweet Mobility), Paola Dottor (Transparency International Italia), Emanuele Genovese (Fridays for Future Italia), Anna Lisa Mandorino (Cittadinanzattiva), Maria Maranò (Legambiente), Luigi Reggi (Monithon), Sara Vegni (ActionAid), Duccio Zola (Lunaria).
The impact of civic monitoring: the relations with the media and public institutions
/0 Comments/in Annual report /by MonithonSince 2013, Monithon has been developing tools and methods for enabling the “civic monitoring” of public funding. Our “civic monitoring reports” include information on how the projects are developed, how they are progressing, and what is their impact from the point of view of the final beneficiaries, such as citizens and enterprises.
In 2020, 125 new reports were developed and published on our website. The reports mainly come from the students participating in the “At the School of OpenCohesion” (ASOC) initiative, a European educational best practice carried out by the Italian Government. Its goal is to stimulate public engagement thanks to the use of open government data published in the OpenCohesion portal. The ASOC project has been using the tools and methods from Monithon for its civic monitoring activities since the very beginning.
In this post, we present some of the main results of Monithon’s civic monitoring from 2013 to 2020.
But there is more. While our usual statistics on results are included in our complete infographics, we added new figures and cases on the actual impact of this civic monitoring in Italy. We asked ASOC students if and how they could reach the media and the policy makers, and what was the main result of these interactions. We also analyzed the interactions among all actors involved via Twitter.
We found that the monitoring teams were very good at creating connections with policy makers and the media. However, the actual impact on policymaking was limited to a few interesting cases.
Click here to download the complete infographics
The results of civic monitoring
Considering all civic monitoring reports since 2013, the total amount of public funding monitored increased from 7.35 in 2019 to 9.41 billion Euros in 2020. Most of these projects (about 70%) are large transportation infrastructures such as train or metro stations and railways. This is a pretty impressive figure, considering that the total value of the projects tracked in the OpenCohesion website is about 180 billion euros.
Overall, most of the projects that have been assessed obtained a positive evaluation. However, some projects were judged as ineffective (10%), blocked (8%), or in progress with some problems (15%). In particular, problems found were both administrative (11%) and technical (11%), while there were cases in which results did not match the expectations (2.8%), or the project was not effective without the necessary complementary interventions (3.2%).
Each report, of course, includes much more detailed information about different qualitative aspects of implementation. The projects were described from the final beneficiaries’ perspective, and assessed by considering their strengths, weaknesses, and future opportunities. Moreover, the civic monitors always added suggestions for improving the project or replicate it in other contexts. Here is a list of the reports published in 2020.
These results were disseminated using different means, with the aim of reaching out to the people responsible for programming and implementation of a specific policy, as well as to foster an informed debate in the media around the issues that were found.
Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook were the most used social media. In addition, students were suggested to organize local events, especially during the Italian “Open Data Week” (50% of the cases). It is interesting to note that about one-fifth of the projects managed to be formally audited by local public administrations to discuss their results.
The impact of civic monitoring
The media coverage of civic investigations could be considered one first measure of impact.
63% of the monitoring reports were somehow covered by the media. In particular, local TVs and newspapers were interested in giving attention to the research process and the results. Almost 50% of the teams that responded to our questionnaire stated that they were featured in the local press. Others were interviewed on the radio or featured in local web magazines.
The team Terra di Mezzo created their own web radio on Spotify called Radio Raid featuring interviews with political leaders and key people in the fight against the local mafia. The team told Monithon that “our broadcasting helped to involve not only the population but a wider national and international audience. It made the reuse of confiscated assets, a topic that the media do not usually cover, a symbol of the fight against ‘Ndrangheta in Isola di Capo Rizzuto”.
The students also described if and how they could reach policy makers. 76% made contact with local or national public agencies, responsible for programming or implementation of the monitored project. In some limited cases (7%), the administration did not respond to the requests at all. In other cases, more than one contact request was made to different agencies, with some agencies that responded and others did not (18%). In 2020, the COVID pandemic provided for additional barriers to civic monitoring.
The logo of the monitoring team “Terra di Mezzo” from Calabria
The type of responses also varied. The students received formal or generic replies to their requests (18%), or more specific promises (32%).
For example, the team Watershed from the 2018-2019 ASOC edition monitored the construction of a canal to prevent natural disasters in Palma di Montechiaro, Sicily. They got very concrete promises. “We noticed that the works, although completed, had several limitations. The sinkholes were full of weeds and debris that did not allow the water to enter the pipeline and then drain into the sea, and that some manholes have been stolen and then replaced with boulders that allowed debris to enter the canal. […] Following our suggestions, the Mayor signed a memorandum of understanding for the maintenance of the canal”.
In some limited cases, the suggestions from the civic monitoring were successfully implemented to improve the project’s effectiveness (8%).
The students of the team Panta Rei, who evaluated a set of water purifiers near Naples in 2020, told us that “Our inputs have helped to turn the spotlight on the issue of the project Regi Lagni, stimulating a series of initiatives that have multiplied in this period, […] such as the establishment of a “Special Investigation Commission on Water Pollution” by the Municipality of Castel Volturno (Naples).
In 2018, another monitoring team – Veni Vidi Vico – monitored a renovation project of their own school, the “Giambattista Vico” high school in Laterza, Puglia. “The works, which concerned the water and fire protection system, financed with European funds, were completed, but the fire certification was lacking because the electrical system was not in accordance with current regulations. […] Thanks to our continuous reminders to local authorities, the following year the electrical system was modified and certified”.
Finally, we assessed the degree to which the students were able to form relations with the other actors through the analysis of their Twitter connections. The use of Twitter to document the different steps of the investigations, as well as the public encounters, was one of the requirements of the ASOC program. Therefore, the vast majority of the monitoring teams created a Twitter account and used it to post photos, videos, as well as to mention people and organizations.
We mapped the complex network of interactions among these accounts, each representing an individual or an organization that used the ASOC official hashtags such as #ASOC2021. We considered not only the students (civic monitoring teams) but also all different actors with different roles that participated or were interested in the ASOC program.
More than one thousand national and local actors created about five thousand connections. The two central nodes represent the two main official accounts of the ASOC team, that is @OpenCoesione and @ascuoladioc. We removed another big node in the center, our own @monithon, which systematically re-tweeted and mentions a large number of student teams. Some Europe Direct Centers and the Managing Authorities of the regional programmes from Southern Italy often act as hubs.
Apart from the ASOC team, the students were able to form Twitter relations also with the Policy Makers, including supporting regional authorities (445 connections), NGOs (268), and the media (132).
Increasing impact
We showed how monitoring teams and communities are usually very good at creating relations to conduct field analysis of the funded projects and disseminate their results both on social media and more traditional media.
The results of our questionnaire, which now is embedded in “step 3” of the civic monitoring report, also showed that the average impact of this monitoring on projects’ effectiveness is still limited. Nevertheless, we also received very interesting stories about the creation of real partnerships between the students (including their teachers and communities) and the administrations involved in project implementation.
We think it is crucial to multiply the opportunities for the establishment of such effective partnerships, both at the local and national levels. OpenCoesione, our biggest partner and one of the main open data providers for civic monitoring in Italy, could facilitate this process by further increasing the chances for the creation of new connections, as well as to promote the actual use of the input from the bottom-up in the policymaking cycle. For example, the ASOC team recently organized a series of meetings with selected monitoring teams and representatives of regional and national authorities programming or implementing Cohesion Policy in Italy, with the aim of discussing students’ suggestions for better policymaking. This initiative, called ASOC Talk – a dialogue with public institutions, seems to be perfectly in line with our suggestion.
In addition, we think that Italian NGOs, already involved in civic monitoring as authors of reports or supporters of the activities of ASOC students, could do more for advocating better EU policy and projects’ implementation based on the results of civic monitoring. Students and NGOs should find common topics and interests and form a strategic alliance. The creation of stable connections among interested actors, associated with policy mechanisms for real citizen engagement, could be the way to take civic monitoring to the next level.
MoniTutor is the new online mentor for citizens monitoring how public funding is spent
/0 Comments/in Methods and tools /by MonithonMoniTutor is a new, Italian online guide developed by Monithon, a civil society initiative that provides methods and tools for citizens that want to monitor how public money is used. Since 2013, anyone can use the Monithon online platform to send “civic monitoring reports” evaluating the effectiveness of public projects funded by the European Union and other funding in Italy. Almost 600 reports have been submitted, which are the output of investigations usually taking months to be carried out.
Now the experience of developing a report is enriched by a step-by-step guide that is tailored to the specific project to be monitored. This means that each public project has its own unique guiding content, based on its size, topic, policy goal, status, and other characteristics. For example, the guide will distinguish between a completed large infrastructure like a railroad and a small research grant. Moreover, MoniTutor’s algorithms support the citizens in making sense of the open data already available for each project by providing an initial interpretation (to be confirmed by a visit or by interviewing people responsible). Open Data are accessed and seemlessly integrated through the APIs of OpenCoesione.gov.it, one the main open government portals on public investments in Italy, currently tracking over 1.5 million publicly-funded projects.
Additional suggestions are provided based on the experience of a network of policy analysts and experts, who volunteered to offer specific recommendations on interesting readings, policy documents, websites, interesting questions for interviews. Thematic suggestions now cover 90% of the different types of projects already monitored in the past.
MoniTutor is accessible directly through the Monithon web page for submitting the reports. Once the user is logged in, she can create a new report and then copy and paste the URL of the selected project from OpenCoesione.gov.it to Monithon. The guide will be immediately generated and displayed through 3 steps: Desk Analysis, Evaluation, and Impact.
The “civic monitor” can read the guide and then fill in the related fields for each step, following the standard structure of a journalistic investigation, or field research. Starting from the collection and analysis of avaialble data and documents on the policy goals and motives to finance a specific project, the user then proceeds to collect information on the ground. This civic monitor – who is often not a single user but organized as a team – collects hard evidence of how the project is progressing and its results by paying a visit to the project, making videos and photographs, and interviewing people responsible. If the project is funded by the EU, for example, MoniTutor provides the names, phone numbers and addresses of the Managing Authorities that decided to finance that interventions, as well as of the organizations responsible for its implementation.
This form of “thick participation” to public policies also includes the possibility for citizens to offer specific suggestions and collaboration to local and national governments responsible for programming policies and delivering public value.
Now the MoniTutor is being tested by thousands of high school students in Italy thanks to the governmental initiative “At the School of OpenCohesion” (A Scuola di OpenCoesione, or ASOC), which has been the main source of reports for Monithon, by far. A replication of the same initiative in additional 5 EU Countries (Spain, Bulgaria, Greece, Croatia, and Portugal) is currently under way thanks to the support of the EU. We really hope those young ladies and gentlemen will find it useful!
The results of our civic monitoring: an overview from 2013 to 2019
/0 Comments/in Annual report /by MonithonIn 2019, 114 brand new civic monitoring reports have been added to the pile of Monithon’s reports, each evaluating the progress and effectiveness of one project funded by the public money in Italy. Considering the total amount of funding that has been monitored, this year marks a new record with more than 3 billion € of public funding, most of which are European money for regional development.
This year, all reports but one have been created by high school students participating in the “At the School of OpenCohesion” (ASOC) initiative, an European educational best practice promoted by the Italian Government to stimulate public engagement thanks to the use of open government data published in the OpenCohesion portal. Since the beginning in 2013, the ASOC project has been using the tools and methods from Monithon during their civic monitoring activities.
The remaining report was developed in June by a group of students from the University of Turin, as the final step of a course that was co-created by the University and the Europe Direct Center in Turin. This annual course is devoted specifically to European policies and civic monitoring.
In this post, we are proud to present an update of some of the main aggregated results of the Monithon’s civic monitoring from 2013 to 2019, with the aim to disseminate this practice to interested policy makers, government employees, journalists and citizens. Therefore, the results include also reports by the students of the previous editions of ASOC, and those created by NGOs and informal groups in the past few years.
Click here to download the complete infographics with the aggregated data from 2013 to 2019
What is monitored
Considering all civic monitoring reports from 2013, the total amount of public funding monitored increased from 4.53 in 2018 to 7.35 billion euros in 2019. Most of these projects (about 70%) are large transportation infrastructures such as train or metro stations, and railways. This is a pretty impressive figure, considering that the total value of the projects tracked in the OpenCohesion website is 140 billion euros. This means that about 5% of the total amount of public funding for Cohesion Policy from 2007 to 2019 has been somehow covered by a civic monitoring report.
We can also note that the European funds are considered particularly interesting for the civic monitoring groups, given that the 72% of the funding monitored cames from the European Union.
Civic monitoring results at a glance
Overall, most of the projects that have been assessed (63%) get a positive evaluation. In particular, 41% are found to be completed and useful, while 22% are still in progress and not showing major problems.
One third of the projects, however, presents some relevant issues. 18.1% of the projects show delays or other problems during the implementation phase. Other projects have difficulties in starting-up, due to administrative or financial reasons (10.7%). More interestingly for the policy makers, the monitoring groups have dedicated special energies to assess the results and effectiveness of the projects, from the point of view of the final beneficiaries.
While the expected results are not achieved only in the 3.2% of the projects, 9.2% are considered completed but also show some problems regarding the effectiveness. The effectiveness of an investment is evaluated in the broader context where the intervention takes place. For example, 2.7% of the projects fullfill their promises in terms of the implementation goals that were defined on paper, but they are also found to be useless without the provision of complementary interventions.
The ideas from the Monithoners
Each civic monitoring report end with a section about ideas and suggestions from the monitoring groups. One third of the reports contains suggestions on how to improve the specific intervention, coming from the analysis of the implementation and from the evidence collected during the visit. Other comments and suggestions can be classified into three main types. The first type of suggestion is to further develop these projects in order to obtain greater impact. In some cases, this means funding contexual interventions to get the most out the initial investment. The second type is about improving the governance of the funding, for example when ministries and local administrations “don’t talk to each other”, or when the voice of the final beneficiaries is not heard by policy makers. Finally, in some cases the projects were so appreciated by the monitoring groups that the main suggestion is to disseminate the results even further by improving the communication to potential targets.
Towards a new year of civic monitoring
We at Monithon are very excited about next year of civic monitoring. For the first time, the “At School of OpenCohesion” initiative will be replicated in 7 other European Countries and Regions during the 2019/2020 school year: Bulgaria, Croatia, Alentejo (Portugal), Catalonia (Spain), Peloponnese, Thessaly and Ionia Nisia (Greece). This is thanks to the efforts and funding from the European Commission, which has been supporting civic monitoring from the very beginning. The nice coincidence is that the first edition of ASOC included exactly 7 schools.
We love this experiment and will be happy to share our knowledge, methods and tools to interested teams in the EU. It will interesting to see how the ASOC method will be adapted to different contexts, while maintaining its focus on Cohesion Policy, which comes with common rules and regulations for all EU countries.
Two More Years of Civic Monitoring of EU Funds in Italy: The Results of the Students’ Investigations
/0 Comments/in Annual report /by Luigi ReggiSince the last post on the results of our civic monitoring of public policies, nearly 300 new monitoring reports have been added to the monithon.eu platform, more than twice the number that we had in 2016: 300 new studies, each focusing on one of many projects taking place throughout Italy that are funded by Cohesion (or Regional) Policy. This increase is an extraordinary achievement, making us proud to be part of this experiment in civic monitoring as a proactive way to use public data and to bolster civic engagement and public policy accountability.
Every since its creation, Monithon has positioned itself as both a tool and a research method, putting itself at the service of schools, universities, NGOs and local communities, nearly always as a group of volunteers and following with the philosophy of civic hacking. To learn how Monithon came into being and about the people who are the driving force behind it, you can read our post from last year.
This year we are prouder than ever, because the quality of the reports we are publishing is constantly improving. The studies conducted over the last two years have, in almost 90% of cases, included an on-site visit to the project headquarters – the infrastructure or the location where a project financed with public funding is being conducted – involving the collection of data, videos, photos, and documents. During these last 2 years, over 95% of our monitoring groups have conducted on-site interviews: 76% interviewed the public or private party that received the funds, and 56% interviewed residents of the local community to assess the project’s effectiveness from the perspective of the final beneficiaries of public policies. 38% were able to directly interview the public representatives responsible for the initiatives (mayors, town or regional councilors, province presidents, etc.) That’s not all: the ability to reconstruct the “administrative history” of funds provided, and the details of that reconstruction, are qualitative aspects that can be observed when reading the monitoring reports, beginning with the map or the list. In almost every case, you can find original videos containing the content of the interviews and each study’s principal findings – investigative data journalism on a small scale!
These results are largely the fruits of incredible work on the part of the project team from the OpenCoesione School (or ASOC), from the Italian “A Scuola di OpenCoesione), which uses Monithon during “Esplorare” (Explore), the most important phase in its educational programme in Italian high schools. It is where we can see how adept the students have become at interpreting, understanding and using public data, so as to hold institutions to account for the investments made in their neighborhoods or cities. In the most recent edition alone, spanning 2017-2018, around 5000 students were involved, under the direct guidance of 300 instructors working throughout Italy. Nearly 88% of the reports you can find on monithon.eu are the result of these research activities.
The OpenCoesione School is constantly growing and raising its profile. Indeed, in recent years, the OpenCoesione initiative, which provides funding and coordination for ASOC from within the Italian Presidency of the Council of Ministers, has contributed to imparting an awareness of the practice of civic monitoring within regional public administrations and within national and European institutions.
There is no lack of similar programs at the university level. Thanks to the impetus provided by the Europe Direct center, every year the University of Turin holds a course devoted specifically to European policies and civic monitoring. The work carried out by the MoniTOcamera (2017) and MoniTOsitadela (2018) teams speaks for itself, taking its place alongside earlier studies, which are likewise of the highest quality. In Turin we also find a super interesting spin-off project, whose progress deserves to be closely followed: Monitorino.
In addition to providing support to schools and these early experiments in universities – of which the University of Pescara has recently become a part, with its course in Urban Planning – another of the Monithon community’s newest initiatives is the Sibari Integrity Pact (Calabria), which, thanks to Action Aid, has truly taken off, with the introduction of the first civic monitoring schools for members of the local community. This initiative is a game changer, not only for the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and for local communities, but also for the European Commission, which recently adopted it as a model (see p. 26) for similar future initiatives aimed to fight corruption and encourage civic engagement.
In this post, we would like to share with you some of the enthusiasm and enjoyment that we experienced, as well as some of the discoveries – both positive and negative – that were made while putting together these monitoring reports. Here, too, we will begin with an analysis of our civic monitoring results: Which projects were examined? What were the main “assessments” reached? Then we will move on to recommendations for public decision-makers.
Monitoring of European Funds to reduce regional disparities
From the end of 2016 to May 2018, the number of monitoring reports rose from 177 to 475 – quite a leap! Each report, with a few limited exceptions, provides detailed information on a project initially chosen by a monitoring group from a list of approximately 950 thousand projects published on OpenCoesione.gov.it. Thanks to the open data, we can link the findings of the monitoring projects to the principal characteristics of the projects being monitored, such as scale, funding sources, and thematic categories.
We thus discovered that the total funding for the projects monitored amounted to over 4.5 billion euros, of which over 3 billions’ worth had been subject to monitoring in the last 2 years alone. Over half of these projects are financed by European Structural and Investment funds (ESIFunds). These are funds managed by the central and regional administrations, intended to reduce the gaps that exist between the different parts of the country (which is why there are many more projects in Southern Italy than in the Central and Northern regions). However, the number of monitored projects funded using resources that the Italian government makes available with the same objectives (“national funds”) is growing. Whatever the case, whether these funds are allocated from national, European, regional or local budgets, they are all taxpayers’ money.
Using open data from OpenCoesione, we can also categorize projects according to theme. It goes without saying that the enormous resources needed to build or improve transportation infrastructures are also reflected in the sample of projects monitored. Indeed, the 53 projects that fall into this category account for nearly 3 billion of the total amount of funding. Take, for example, the Crotone Airport, which is expected to provide an essential stimulus for the local economy.
As in our last post, the theme that users once again found most interesting was culture and tourism. This category is comprised of 141 projects, for a total of 530 million euros – investments which are essential for our nation and to which the competent authorities, who might be encouraged to participate thanks to civic monitoring, could make a significant contribution. We are talking about a truly vast number of different projects: from the restoration of the Royal Palace of Caserta to the renovation of the Apollo Theatre in Lecce (here is a link in English), from the Capuchin Monastery in Grottaglie (Taranto) to the Chilli Pepper (“Peperoncino”) Festival in Diamante, in Calabria.
There is also a new entry to our list of themes: social inclusion, and it is the sixth-most monitored to date. 38 projects, for instance, finance the reuse for social purposes of property confiscated from criminal organizations (e.g. the creation of the Centre for Antimafia Studies in Calabria) or the development of welfare services (such as the “Casa della Salute” health clinic in Bosa, Sardinia).
The assessments from the monitoring groups
The monitoring groups’ assessments of the public projects they investigate is the most essential element of their activities. Taken as a whole, their assessment has remained largely unchanged over the last two years. The majority of financed projects (64%) earned positive assessments. Of these, over two-thirds have already been completed and deemed to be useful, while the remainder are still ongoing, but what has been observed so far bodes well.
Some investments came as a pleasant surprise to the monitoring communities, who had a chance to discover them and explore them in more depth. One such investment assessed during the 2017 and 2018 monitoring was the renovation of the historic town center of Barletta, in Apulia. According to the team, called Reconstructing History (“Ricostruendo la Storia”), the project “led to an improvement in the quality of life for residents of the historic center and a moderate increase in tourism flows”. The solar power plant in Montefiascone, near Viterbo, has also had a positive impact in terms of “economic savings and a decrease in pollution in the surrounding area”. Yet another example is the MArTA (National Archaeological Museum) in Taranto, which, thanks to public funding, “received its highest ever number of visitors in 2016”.
The young people from the team “Cristallo dello Zingaro” in Trapani, while monitoring the safety projects at the Zingaro Nature Reserve, were struck by what they found: “The first thing that captures tourists’ attention is the unparalleled beauty of the land and seascapes”. The “masterful skill of the expert laborers in attempting to make everything as natural as possible, without however forgetting the primary purpose of their work, which is to safeguard people who are walking there, unaware of the dangers that the local area may present, was clear to see.”
The projects that did have problems represented approximately one-third of the whole: 11% have been completed but appear to be ineffective, while the remaining 21% are still ongoing but are having difficulty moving forward. The assessment remained deferred on 3% of projects, which had only just begun. In a little while, we shall go into more detail regarding the difficulties encountered.
First, however, let us examine whether or not assessments changed depending on projects’ geographical locations. In this post, we will focus on the 4 regions with the greatest number of civic monitoring reports.
They are the main Southern Italian regions in terms of total European and domestic cohesion policy funding received. The region with the highest percentage of positive assessments (68%, just slightly higher than the national average), shown in green in the chart, is Apulia. The region with the greatest number of problems, on the other hand, is Calabria, where just over half of projects received negative assessments. The statistic relating to projects which have been completed is striking, since these are more difficult to remedy. Nevertheless, these assessments are not set in stone. According to the authors of the reports, as we shall see below when we discuss recommendations, actions targeting “surrounding conditions” may restore even these projects’ effectiveness.
Moreover, as a general disclaimer, it goes without saying that Monithon’s sample of monitored projects is not statistically representative of the projects funded in the 4 regions. The projects in this sample are way too few and their selection depends on the choices and interests of the students. So this comparison is not about the regions’ performances on managing ESI Funds.
What factors determine a negative assessment? The 300 reports most recently included in our calculations all basically confirm the same problems. Aside from the projects which never even got off of the ground – for example due to issues associated with access to funds, the granting of permits or licenses – a large number of public projects (10.9%) became blocked when already underway, due to problems of an administrative nature.
The principal problem found, however, was once again a general delay during the implementation phase of projects with respect to planned schedules (on OpenCoesione, for example, you can find information on planned timetables). This issue affects 18.1% of total projects monitored. This is the case, for example, with the construction of a biotechnology center, which should be quick to keep pace with the newest developments in scientific research, but at the time of the monitoring visit was already 7 years behind. In some cases, funds are linked to a specific project, one which cannot be separated from its context of implementation. Thus, in the province of Milan, the redevelopment of the wetlands along the Olona River is 2 years behind, “because the park’s redevelopment is linked to other projects related to the river, which have been impacted by bureaucratic complications”.
There is no lack of projects which are entangled amidst different funding sources, public administrations which are only partially responsible for them or who do not provide direct access to the work undertaken. In some cases, the students’ dedication is not enough to help us understand whether or not the money has been spent. And if it has been spent, what for? Why, despite public data stating that a large amount of funds have already been spent and accounted for to the European Commission, is there still a “lack of funding”? Here below you can find the doubts expressed by the young people in the “newscast” they put together about the renovation of the old historic district of the village of Senerchia, in Campania (in Italian).
Let’s now take a moment to examine the final phases of public project monitoring, which are even more intriguing: results and impact. It is during this phase that the assessments of residents can provide a valuable source of information for administrations. However, with the exception of the most notable projects, residents are unfortunately not able to accurately gauge the usefulness or effectiveness of every financed project. Bear in mind that, even taking into account only those cohesion policy investments made between 2007 and 2015, there were about 1 million financed projects! Civic monitoring groups, however, can come to our aid by applying the principles of “crowdsourcing”, in other words, the ability of “crowds” to collect accurate data by dividing up the work of an assessment – immense in and of itself – into small tasks assigned to individuals (or, in this case, one project per group), in the same way that Wikipedia is collaboratively written.
In our case, an analysis of the qualitative data collected shows that only 3.6% of the projects examined were found to be unsatisfactory. This percentage is in line with the findings of our last report, and is relatively low. These are cases in which funding did not lead to adequate implementation. One such example, it would seem, is the water treatment plant in the municipality of Paola (Cosenza), where “sludge disposal issues and problems relating to plant management continue to exist”. We find a similar issue with the funding for the development of a social computing platform for the University of Milano-Bicocca. In this case, due to a lack of additional financing that the university had been counting on, it was unable to do anything beyond the creation of a prototype, which can no longer even be viewed, as it was created using obsolete technologies. Graver still is the case of the Papardo di Messina Hospital’s Oncology Centre, which has unfortunately featured on the news. It simply “does not exist”.
Much more common (10%) are those projects that were implemented with good results, only to be deemed ineffective when viewed in the wider context in which they were made available. Even if the funds allocated for these projects in and of themselves were spent correctly, the effectiveness of the projects for their final beneficiaries remains a fundamental criterion on which any assessment of the success of public policies must be based. This is the case with the Multimedia Mountain Museum in Sicily, which only was open on one occasion, “due to high operating costs and a lack of staff”. Three very similar cases are those of three civil protection plans, for the Municipalities of Marcianise, Palomonte and Casalnuovo di Napoli respectively, which received development funding but invested nothing in communicating what they had done to their local communities – which, as was discovered in the course of the interviews conducted, did not even know these plans existed. Another example is that of the redevelopment of Piazza Savignano in Aversa (Naples), which was a complete success but, according to the monitoring group “did not bring about the social inclusion which had been the true crux of the project”.
Here you can find the video by the extremely capable young people from the FreeDam team, who monitored the Lordo Dam project in Calabria, with the interviews they conducted with local residents and the press conference they organised with the mayor, the bishop, and the president of an environmental monitoring centre.
A considerable number of the projects described immediately above constitute a significant subgroup: successfully implemented but useless in the absence of complementary initiatives which could unlock all of their potential effectiveness. The center for the terminally ill in Oristano is complete, but “is still not hooked up to the electricity grid or city water” and “has yet to receive accreditation from the Local Health and Social Services Department (ASSL)”. It is therefore unable to be used, “a cathedral in the desert”. More glaring still is the case of the South Fort in Reggio Calabria, whose redevelopment left our young people “open-mouthed”. “The structure is welcoming and attention has been paid to even the smallest details. The Fort appears suddenly around the last curve in the road, in all of its restored majesty and military linearity.” What a shame it is that the public cannot get to the fort, because the road is impassable and there are no signs to show the way.
The most recent recommendations from our monitoring groups
In 2017 and 2018, the quality and variety of suggestions has continued to grow – a true goldmine of “good ideas” for local decision makers!
Overall, the types of recommendations have followed the same trend from year to year.
A portion of the projects monitored (12%) are so useful that the main recommendation is to continue to further develop these projects in order to have an ever greater impact. Thanks to public financing, some of the buildings in the “Oasi la Valle” nature reserve on Lake Trasimeno have been renovated. Other buildings in the park, however, could be repurposed to “serve as laboratories for the education of young people, including those with disabilities, to help them learn skills such as how to manage a small botanical garden”. Let’s look at another example. Once the renovation of the Santissima Trinità Complex in Torre del Greco (Naples) is completed, thanks to over 4 million in funding, a “virtual exhibition” could be created, “which illustrates the history of the local area and the places that are its heart and soul, through the creation of a special app that encourages visitors to visit those places in real life”. For another example, let’s take the repair and renovation of the Barletta stadium: after the initial 1.3 million invested, why not “increase the number of people who want to get more involved with sports, including through the many events organized by the different sports clubs that use the field on a regular basis?”
In other cases (7%), the monitoring groups complained of “governance” problems. These occur when public administrations “don’t talk to each other”, and political conflicts and a lack of coordination are piled on top of existing bureaucratic problems. Unfortunately, this was the case with the project for the improvement of the Messina-Palermo and Messina-Syracuse railway lines, worth 28 million in financing. According to the monitoring group, the work is stopped, with only 10% of total implementation achieved, given an absence of “clear objectives on an institutional policy level”. In addition, it appears “essential” that “a network that can coordinate the actions of all of the parties involved be created”. In other cases, recommendations encourage the creation of a collaborative governance system, one which could involve local residents, schools and communities as active participants. For instance, the students from the “Dream Energy” group in Casal di Principe (Caserta) have offered to design and implement “projects that are in the interest of the community, with the active participation of local residents”, so as to raise awareness regarding the extremely useful “Pio La Torre” Centre for Environmental Education and Documentation, a bastion of legality. This is possible thanks to “constant contact between schools and public institutions”.
As in past years, the last two years have seen numerous (14%) recommendations for improving communication on the amount of good that public investments – including European funds – are doing for local areas. This applies to projects, both large and small, that have been monitored over the past two years. Even the simple construction of a multistory parking garage in Somma Vesuviana (Naples) can help to meet the need for improved mobility, but it is necessary to have “greater publicity for the project and encourage more people to use it”. Turning our attention to the Municipal Selective Waste Collection Centres in Martina Franca (Taranto), the “civic monitoring team intends to actively contribute to the implementation of an information programme, which has been planned to help raise awareness and communicate methods of use and the importance of this new service. The team is offering to create videos to disseminate this information, to participate in ‘environment days’ in the square, to organise and lead educational-play activities for children, [and] to implement a Telegram bot to inform people about selective waste collection services”.
Lastly, the bulk of recommendations focused on specific suggestions regarding individual projects, dealing with issues such as how to unblock a problematic situation or how to improve a key aspect in terms of effectiveness. Dozens of civic monitoring reports contain specific recommendations, which are at the disposal of the local administrations and the companies that are implementing these public projects. For example, with regard to the project dealing with the redevelopment of the Seveso in Sesto San Giovanni (Milan), the students are convinced that “one way to stop the Seveso from overflowing its banks would be to construct a stormwater holding basin, but before the water enters such a basin, it must first be filtered”. The excellent study conducted by the Corsari Assetati team contains a fair number of suggestions on how to use the wastewater generated by the Acqua dei Corsari water treatment plant in Palermo: “uses include irrigation, street cleaning, machine cooling, extinguishing fires, but it could also simply be used for periodic cleaning of the sewer system, so as to prevent the streets from flooding.” These types of recommendations were also discussed on May 22, at a ForumPA workshop.
The potential of civic monitoring: assessing effectiveness from the user standpoint
The most interesting potential application of civic monitoring may, however, lie in its ability to determine to which specific project, within the broader area of implementation, funding should be allocated. In this way, it is possible to provide precise recommendations to enable a more fully effective use of public finances, one which includes not only those aspects related to the implementation of planning within predetermined timeframes and administrative and financial constraints, but also takes into consideration the actual usefulness of the project within its local area.
It is extremely interesting to note that many monitoring reports, especially during the last two years, have placed great importance on “surrounding conditions”, those which make it possible for financing to truly serve to meet the needs of community residents and local businesses.
A case in point is the Epizephyrian Locris National Archaeological Museum, “one of the most important archaeological sites in the world”, which is in need of commitment on the part of national, regional and local institutions for its development and promotion, for example to help “improve the quality of the roads that lead to it, making them more accessible to more effective modes of transport, and for more welcoming hotels and accommodation facilities”. The funding for the Scalea (Cosenza) airfield is also of scant effectiveness if “the Regional public services and hotel infrastructures are not improved so as to better manage tourist accommodation during the summer season”.
The same is true for much smaller-scale projects as well, such as the expansion of the Restricted Traffic Area in Aversa (Caserta), which is useless without the “presence of traffic police at the entry points and constantly operating video cameras” or a “geolocation system for bicycles, to prevent them from being stolen”.
In conclusion, the potential applications of civic monitoring in the public policy sphere are becoming apparent. What began as a game in 2013 and gained structure as a method in 2014 has taken root, in following years, as a part of actual “classes for the citizens of tomorrow” that are being taught in schools, universities and civic communities, with more people trying it out in ever more useful ways. The monitored projects, while still far from representing any sort of statistically significant sample, have been the object of in-depth studies, which have led to the generation of new data and information and, in many cases, “good ideas” as well. To the public administrations falls the task of knowing how to make the most of them!