Monitoring the Enabling Environment for Civil Society Development Project

The Monitoring Enabling Environment for Civil Society Development project was implemented between December 2012 and November 2014 with the financial support of the European Union in partnership with the European Network of National Civil Society Organizations (ENNA) and the European Centre for Not-for-Profit Law (ECNL). The project was coordinated by the Balkan Civil Society Support Network (BCSDN) and implemented simultaneously in the Western Balkans (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovenia) and Türkiye.

As part of the project, civil society experts from BCSDN members and partners developed a “monitoring matrix” for monitoring the enabling environment for civil society development.

The purpose of the Monitoring Matrix was to design and implement a monitoring mechanism that focuses on creating an enabling environment for the development of civil society, to prioritize European Union progress reports to highlight issues related to creating an enabling environment for civil society, and to support key stakeholders in their EU engagement, legislative reform initiatives and monitoring activities. Within the framework of the monitoring matrix methodology, the environment in which civil society operates has been analyzed according to the following criteria Enabling environment for civil society development; basic legal guarantees of freedoms; financial capacity and sustainability of CSOs; and relations between the public and CSOs. This methodology has been updated over time and continues to be an effective method, and as of 2023, it remains one of the leading monitoring methodologies in the field.

The monitoring matrix was simultaneously applied by BCSDN member CSOs in the Western Balkans and Türkiye at the regional level, and the final report was written in this context, providing access to comparative results across countries.