PASSO-Sustainable Development Indicators on Good Governance from Civil society perspective

On 20th and 21th May 2010 in Paris, CEDAG participated to the second working meeting of the PASSO project.
The PASSO project (Participatory Assessment of Sustainable Development indicators on Good Governance from the Civil Society perspective) is funded by the European Commission within the seventh framework Programme for R&D.

The project is coordinated by ISIS (Istituto di Studi per l’Integrazione dei Sistemi-Italy), Missions Publiques-France, University of Stuttgart-Germany, European Think Tank Pour la Solidarité-Belgium with input from different CSOs .

The starting point of the project is the EU Sustainable Development Strategy (SDS) adopted in 2001 and renewed in 2006. The SDS includes a series of ‘key objectives’, ‘policy guiding principles’ and ‘key challenges’, which serve as reference for all EU activities and policies, to keep them within a sustainable development path. The SDS required the Commission to develop a comprehensive set of Sustainable Development Indicators (SDI) to monitor progress with regard to each particular challenge, taking into account the EUROSTAT SD Monitoring Report, to be updated every two years. A first set of indicators was adopted by the Commission in 2005 and further reviewed in 2007.

In this context, which is the main objective and the methodology of PASSO?

Given the absence of a satisfactory set of indicators in the field of Good Governance, PASSO is aimed at assessing the relevance and efficiency of the current set of EU Sustainable Development Indicators on Good Governance and its cross-cutting features from a social perspective.

To do so, PASSO adopted a participatory consultation process creating a small interdisciplinary International Expert Group (20 members) composed of CSOs representatives on the one side and RTD performers, statisticians and academics on the other side.
Two high-level workshops, the first on 26-27th October 2009 in Brussels and the second on 20^th-21th May 2010 in Paris, were organised through the so-called Delphi method, which is meant to highlight viewpoint divergence and convergence on specific topics, using successive questionnaires and oral debates.
During the first workshop in Brussels, there were amendments to the EU indicators on Governance in the EU and the proposal of a Good Governance framework, while the second workshop in Paris aimed to identify a new/ alternative set of indicators and a new framework on Good Governance on the basis also the results of national consultations of CSOs on indicators.
The outcome of the second workshop will be presented and validated during a wide forum together with EU and Eurostat officials due to be held in October 2010.
Ahead of the final forum, CEDAG will carry out a Europe wide CSOs involving its member organizations. The outcomes of this consultation, to be discussed during the final forum, will feed in the overall research of the PASSO project.