Albania Transitional Results Report 2018-2020

The Open Government PartnershipThe Open Government Partnership (OGP) is a multi-stakeholder initiative focused on improving government transparency, ensuring opportunities for citizen participation in public matters, and strengthen... More is a global partnership that brings together government reformers and civil society leaders to create action plans that make governments more inclusive, responsive, and accountable. Action planAction plans are at the core of a government’s participation in OGP. They are the product of a co-creation process in which government and civil society jointly develop commitments to open governmen... commitments may build on existing efforts, identify new steps to complete ongoing reforms, or initiate an entirely new area. OGP’s Independent Reporting Mechanism (IRM)The Independent Reporting Mechanism (IRM) is OGP’s accountability arm and the main means of tracking progress in participating countries. The IRM provides independent, evidence-based, and objective ... monitors all action plans to ensure governments follow through on commitments. Civil society and government leaders use the evaluations to reflect on their progress and determine if efforts have impacted people’s lives.

The IRM has partnered with Walter Leiva to carry out this evaluation. The IRM aims to inform ongoing dialogue around the development and implementation of future commitments. For a full description of the IRM’s methodology, please visit https://www.opengovpartnership.org/about/independent-reporting-mechanism.

This report covers the implementation of Albania’s fourth action plan for 2018-2020. In 2021, the IRM will implement a new approach to its research process and the scope of its reporting on action plans, approved by the IRM Refresh.^[1] The IRM adjusted its Implementation Reports for 2018-2020 action plans to fit the transition process to the new IRM products and enable the IRM to adjust its workflow in light of the COVID-19 pandemic’s effects on OGP country processes.

Action Plan Implementation

The IRM Transitional Results Report assesses the status of the action plan’s commitments and the results from their implementation at the end of the action plan cycle. This report does not re-visit the assessments for “VerifiabilityOGP commitments should be clear and specific enough to enable measurement of their progress. Verifiable commitments include specific activities that can be monitored. Following an action plan’s subm...,” “RelevanceAccording to the OGP Articles of Governance, OGP commitments should include a clear open government lens. Specifically, they should advance at least one of the OGP values: transparency, citizen partic...” or “Potential Impact.” The IRM assesses those three indicators in IRM Design Reports. For more details on each indicator, please see Annex I in this report.

General Highlights and Results

Albania’s fourth action plan included four commitments. According to the IRM, Commitment 2 on modernizing public services, as well as Commitment 3 on improving the regulation of public administration, were fully implemented. Commitment 1 on increasing government transparency and access to information was substantially implemented, and Commitment 4 on facilitating reporting of corruption had limited completion. The level of completion is an improvement on the 2016-2018 action plan, where six out of 17 commitments were completed.^[2] The level of completionImplementers must follow through on their commitments for them to achieve impact. For each commitment, OGP’s Independent Reporting Mechanism (IRM) evaluates the degree to which the activities outlin... More for this plan could be attributed to the fact the commitments derive from existing government programs and strategic documents on good governance and public administration reform, and implementation of some activities had started prior to the submission of the action plan in December 2018.

The IRM identified Commitments 2 and 4 as noteworthy in it 2018-2020 Design Report for Albania. The implementation of Commitment 2, in particular, is assessed to have had marginal impact in improving access to information (via the open data portal) as well as toward meeting minimum Participation and Co-Creation Standards (by having a publicly available online repository).[3]

The government point of contact elaborated on some of the key challenges faced during implementation of the action plan, including calculating the cost of planned activities particularly when they include processes that are part of the daily work in institutions.^[4] See section 2.2. on how the COVID-19 pandemic also posed a challenge for the implementation of activities.

It is worth noting that implementation of this action plan occurred in a context of high political polarization characterized by opposition boycotts and large public demonstrations, some of which erupted in violence. In the aftermath of a large demonstration in February 2019, opposition members of parliament resigned in an unprecedented act, demanding new elections.[5] Following months of political crisis, citing election fraud and corruption, opposition parties refused to participate in local elections held in June 2019. This led to the ruling Socialist Party winning absolute majority of seats in all municipalities. The withdrawal of the opposition from parliamentary engagement has contributed to the politicization of protests and weakening of checks and balances over an increasingly powerful executive.[6]

Furthermore, in July 2020, the OGP Secretariat informed the Albanian Government that it had acted contrary to OGP process during the development of the 2018-2020 action plan because it had not ensured a multi-stakeholder forum nor civil society engagement in accordance with the OGP Participation and Co-Creation standards.^[7] The IRM has since not found any evidence of engagement of civil society in the implementation or oversight of the 2018-2020 plan. The IRM contacted three Albanian civil society organizations (CSOs) as part of its research for this report, but did not receive any response. This may be a consequence of civil society absence during the implementation, as much as the original design process, of the action plan. It is noted that the government launched a national OGP repository during implementation of the 2018-2020 plan.[8] However, this repository failed to collect, publish, or document any information on progress or participation of at least one commitment during implementation of the 2018-2020 plan, as explained in OGP’s procedural review.[9] Nor did the repositoryAccess to relevant information is essential for enabling participation and ensuring accountability throughout the OGP process. An OGP repository is an online centralized website, webpage, platform or ... publish the self-assessment report which was shared with the OGP Secretariat and is only available on the country page of the OGP website. Both the lack of engagement with civil society and not collecting, publishing, or documenting progress in a repository, leads the IRM to assess that Albania had “no consultation” in terms of the level of public influence during implementation of this action plan.

COVID-19 Pandemic impact on implementation

The Albanian Government announced lockdown measures on 11 March 2020 and later introduced emergency legislation that, among other things, limited public gatherings and set a daily curfew to prevent the spread of the virus.^[10]

Measures were slowly lifted from the end of April onwards. Instances of COVID-19 oscillated at around 1,000 cases per week toward the end of the action plan implementation cycle (August 2020). Albania had officially banned street demonstrations during the pandemic but protest rallies erupted across the country in December 2020 after the fatal police shooting of a 25-year-old man during a COVID-19 curfew patrol.[11]

According to the government self-assessment report, the pandemic posed a challenge for implementation of action plan activities. For example, government agencies working on the creation of an online tool for asset declaration (as part of Commitment 4) had to change priorities to respond to the pandemic.^[12] It also affected the administrative capacity to deal with anti-corruption denunciations. The self assessment also states that the pandemic led to the postponement until December 2021 of a project by the European Union’s State Secretariat of Economic Affairs (SECO) that would assist Albania in producing government finance statistics, as part of Commitment 1.^[13]

[1] For more information, see: https://www.opengovpartnership.org/process/accountability/about-the-irm/irm-refresh/

[2] Open Government Partnership, IRM Albania End-of-Term Report 2016-2018, https://www.opengovpartnership.org/documents/albania-end-of-term-report-2016-2018/

[3] Open Government Partnership, Participation and Co-Creation Standards, https://www.opengovpartnership.org/ogp-participation-co-creation-standards/

[4] Evis Qaja, Government OGP Point of Contact, email correspondence, 23 February 2021.

[5] EuroNews, Albanian opposition in mass resignation, https://www.euronews.com/2019/02/22/albanian-opposition-in-mass-resignation-move-to-demand-fresh-elections

[6] Bertelsmann Transformation Index, Albania Country Report 2020, https://www.bti-project.org/en/reports/country-report-ALB-2020.html#pos0

[7] Open Government Partnership, Letter to Deputy Prime Minister, https://www.opengovpartnership.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Albania_Contrary-to-Process-Letter_July2020.pdf

[8] The creation of the website was an activity of Commitment 2, https://ogp.gov.al

[9] Open Government Partnership, Procedural Review, https://www.opengovpartnership.org/procedural-review/

[10] Reuters, Albania declares 30-day emergency to stop coronavirus outbreak, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-albania-idUSKBN21C37P

[11] Euronews, Tension in Tirana amid protests, https://www.euronews.com/2020/12/10/tension-in-tirana-amid-protests-over-police-shooting-during-curfew

[12] Evis Qaja, Government OGP Point of Contact, email correspondence, 23 February 2021.

[13] Government of Albania, Albania End-of-Term self-assessment 2018-2020, https://www.opengovpartnership.org/documents/albania-end-of-term-self-assessment-2018-2020/