This local CSO, founded in with the aim of monitoring future urban development of Belgrade and other Serbian cities, became famous for being one of the main actors in the resistance against an illegal construction in Savamala —an urban neighborhood of Belgrade.
The meeting was very productive and fruitful, and in accordance with the principles of the CitizensLab. The workflow started with a check-in session in which we decided to reflect on our story to familiarize ourselves as a group through specific practical tasks.
The first task was to collectively answer the questions asked by the management team of CitizensLab, helping them to organize their next meeting. We used this process to help us define why we are working on budgets in a transnational perspective and what connects these budgets to local issues and active citizenship.
Through this, we confirmed that our project has to be very connected to the local context in order to achieve a deep penetration of budget issues, that can underline which goals the municipal government intends to reach with the money and how.
We are distinct as we advocate for transparency of local, public expenditures in order to generate monitoring processes and public debate on the choices made at the municipal level while at an early stage. In fact, transparency ex-post can allow citizens to allocate responsibility for corruption disasters. Otherwise when transparency exists, timeliness suddenly appears as the precondition for corruption prevention and co-creation which are the main streams to increase richness — and in the wider sense of justice, trust, care of the commons, inclusion of the differences and redistribution — in our societies, generating savings and increasing social capital.
