Georgia as World Champion of Transparency! How to Boost CSO-Citizen Relationships

The annual Think Tank Transparency 2016 report was recently published by Transparify. Of great value, it is the first ever global rating detailing the levels of financial disclosure of 200 Think Tanks located in 47 countries worldwide.

Put simply, it highlights just how financially transparent CSOs are. The good news from the 2016 publication is the emphasis on Georgian CSOs, which it claims are operating in a very transparent way. According to the report, “Georgia is now the world champion in policy research transparency.” Seven out of ten Georgian institutions- PMC Research, ISET Policy Institute, Jumpstart Georgia, the Economic Policy Research Center, Transparency International Georgia, Institute for the Development of Freedom of Information, and the Caucasus Institute for Peace, Democracy and Development -were assessed as highly transparent.

This means that, according to transparency level, Georgian CSOs stand together with European peers Transparency International EU (Belgium), the European Center for Development & Policy Management (Netherlands), the German Development Institute (Germany), the World Economic Forum (Switzerland), and others.

So why it is important for us to be transparent?

As Think Tanks, we play a vital role in the political and policy arenas. We provide public policy research, analysis and advice. We support governments to make informed choices about various issues, and more. We need to be as reliable and as trusted as possible and that would be impossible to achieve without accountability and transparency.

The general public, our partners and donors, have the right to have easy access to information about our origin of funding and the projects we work on. On the other hand, such openness is beneficial for us, too: we become more trustworthy, our work is more respected, and policy makers and citizens listen to us more attentively when we are open.

Perhaps those who have yet to reach a certain level of transparency consider “being transparent” difficult and time consuming. However, as an organization with experience, we can definitely state that in the modern world it is easy to achieve- you need only to publish your source of funding, name of the project(s), amount of funding and project duration onto your webpage and ensure that the information can be easily accessed by visitors to your page.

For more detailed instructions on how to “transparify” your business, go to: www.transparify.org

the PMC Research Team