Local Governance in the Crosshairs – LOCALGOV

Since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, life in Central and Eastern European countries has been characterised by a series of cumulative crises. The “Local governance in the crosshairs” project tries to understand the effects this has had on local democracies. In order to analyse the quality of democracy and governance at the local level, we employed both a bottom-up and top-down perspective in the current project. 

The bottom-up approach deals with various channels of democratic interactions between citizens and local governments and is covered by the individual activities of project partners at the national level. The top-down approach considers the relation between the local and state level of administrations and decision-making in times of crisis and the results of the collaborative research are presented in a regional report. 

The participants of the project are four civil society organisations (CSOs) active in Czechia, Poland, Romania and Hungary respectively. All four organisations carry out activities related to transparency and anti-corruption as well as promote public participation in decision-making processes. We believe that self-governance at the local level is a cornerstone of democracy for it is the platform which is easiest for citizens to engage with. The project also builds on the results and experiences of our previous research project on cooperations between local level advocacy groups and local governments.