Transparency is not an ornament added to a project; it is how the project’s purpose, distribution of benefits and resilience to risk are tested
In Serbia, there is a formal planning system that legally shapes the processes in which society decides what is important to it. This system is based on the Development Plan of the Republic of Serbia and the Spatial Plan of the Republic of Serbia. The foundation was never laid: the Development Plan was not adopted, and the new Spatial Plan was not adopted. National priorities are determined in secondary ways: through sectoral programs, international financial arrangements and lists of projects created in closed processes. There is no national direction of development agreed upon in the manner provided for by law and approved by citizens’ representatives in the National Assembly of the Republic of Serbia, so even the energy projects that we pay for with public money and about which we write cannot contribute to that direction.
In such an environment, we ask whether we can at least reconstruct the path by which a project starts from a public problem and becomes a priority for credit and donor financing and the creation of public debt.
In an attempt to help the interested public answer this question and related questions, the guide before you was created. This guide does not pass judgment on the individual projects cited in it as examples, nor is it intended to do so. It is intended as a tool for checking the public trail of decisions on the allocation of hundreds of millions of euros of public money of current and future generations, for projects in the field of local energy: what can we establish as fact based on public data, what are the assumptions and what the public cannot confirm from the available documents?
In checking the public trail, we are looking for answers to many questions, we propose to start with five questions that help us determine the origin and possible origin of the project:
A good project stands up well to good questions. Good questions help deliver good energy.
Read the full guide: