On July 5th, BCSDN organized the second official working group meeting of the project that aimes to develop a monitoring matrix for an enabling environment of civil society development. The meeting gathered 10 experts from the Western Balkans and Turkey together with BCSDN and ECNL staff.
As previously reported, the project “Cross-Sector Regional Partnership for Enabling Legal Environment for CSDev” is supported by ECNL and ICNL's Legal Innovation Fund financed by USAID and PACT. The meeting focused on how to continue the work on the matrix, the added value of this initiative, the finalization of the priorities/standards and the development of indicators for the matrix. Once this support and pressure mechanism is developed, the matrix will serve as a shadow-monitoring tool for CSOs, a monitoring tool for the EC, and a self-assessment tool for the Government so that it can regularly follow the progress in the area. The first draft of the matrix was already presented at a policy workshop organized in Brussels on 30th May.