Public consultations – A win-win situation all round

Three years after the successful completion of a project on the effectiveness of public consultations and two years after the reform in Bulgarian law-making process which made the structured public consultations a mandatory legal requirement for draft legislation to be proposed, the Applicant focuses its efforts in establishing how and to what extent the environment for citizen participation in governmental decisions and policy decision-making in our country has changed. At the end of 2016, Bulgaria introduced an entirely new legislation in the field of formulation, implementation and monitoring of regulatory measures related to the introduction of mandatory impact assessment and mandatory structured public consultations, which was the largest change in Bulgarian rule-making made since the beginning of the 1970s until today. This was the reason this change to be defined as regulatory reform because it grounded the decision-making within the public administration and in area of legal regulation on new fundamentals related to the insertion into the legislative process of a new port of expertise through the impact assessment and to reflecting the "pulse of society" in it through the mechanism of public consultation. The good practice in the EU suggests that more radical changes as those need at least two years from their entry into force in order to sufficiently demonstrate their effects and their impacts to be evaluated. It is exactly the time and place where the current project comes proposing to assess the consequences of regulatory reform related to the introduction of compulsory public consultations but also committing to the cause of continuing the reform through further improvement of the practices of their implementation , with the expansion of the toolkit used by the administration to engage citizens, civic organizations and the general public in formulating, implementing, monitoring and evaluation of policies and legislation.

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