This is a perfect win-win situation: citizens can receive better public services and goods while the public sector can enormously benefit from increased transparency and trust. This is the bottom line of an article with title “Tenders under civic control”, featured recently in the weekly supplement of the Rzeczpospolita daily (one of the biggest newspapers in Poland). It draws from the direct experience Poland is gaining thanks to the use of the so-called “integrity pacts&rdquo
The Integrity Pacts in Poland: transparent decision making through civic participation
- 14 April 2020
This is a perfect win-win situation: citizens can receive better public services and goods while the public sector can enormously benefit from increased transparency and trust. This is the bottom line of an article with title “Tenders under civic control”, featured recently in the weekly supplement of the Rzeczpospolita daily (one of the biggest newspapers in Poland). It draws from the direct experience Poland is gaining thanks to the use of the so-called “integrity pacts” for an important railway project co-financed by the EU cohesion policy. This is part of a joint initiative of the European Commission and Transparency International, implemented in the country in close cooperation with the Stefan Batory Foundation.
The article also reflects the main findings of a conference on ‘Preventing corruption in public procurement’, which took place in Warsaw in January 2020.
The article analyses the concept of the integrity pact against the broader context of public sector opening up to civic participation – direct participation of citizens in making public decisions. Tenders are a specific type of public decision to spend specific money to meet social needs or solve social problems. In that text, it argues that even in the case of such a special type of public decision there is room for civic participation – through involvement in decision-making, providing advice to authorities or monitoring the process. This is also very much in line with the growing importance the European Union attaches to a genuine and meaningful involving citizens in decisions regarding the spending of EU funds.
The article stresses that the integrity pact can be a successful tool of such civic participation. The experience in Poland clearly shows the benefits of the tool. Among others examples of how it helped to identify a conflict of interest between the contracting authority and the contractor, and how it contributed to limiting the possibility of starting construction works without the necessary permits and the curing risks of irregularities associated with this.
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