Happy New Year to you all!

I use this opportunity to announce an event that Think Tank Fund  will co-organize in belgrade February

Think Tank Fund together with the Human Rights Governance Grants Program and Foundation for Open Society Serbia from the Open Society Foundations, European Fund for the Balkans, Balkan Trust for Democracy of the German Marshall Fund and the National Endowment for Democracy is organizing:

Balkan Peer Exchange

Enhancing Analysis and Research-Based Advocacy in an Era of Open Data

February 21-23, 2012

Belgrade, Serbia

This event aspires to bring a representative group of think tanks and advocacy organizations as well as donors to address these issues and open new avenues for future cooperation. Its organizers do not have any pre-conceived ideas to float and impose at the event. It is not our goal to spearhead establishment of any networks, regional platforms or anything similar. Likewise, while we expect participants to suggest new ideas and forge new partnerships throughout the event, the organizers do not consider the event as a direct laboratory for designing new projects that they would later underwrite.

The overall objective of the Peer Exchange is to provide a space for representatives of 50 think tanks and advocacy organizations (with established track records in policy relevant research) and a dozen of donors active in the region and offer them a space for peer-to-peer exchange of practices, positive and negative lessons learned and brainstorming on new innovative ideas.

Specific objectives:

-            Sharing opinions / analysis on relevant topics such as EU integration, governmental transparency and accountability, economic policy, social and integration policies

-            Exchanging relevant experiences and good practices on topics specifically linked to these types of organizations (access to information, fiscal transparency and abuse of state resources, political system and transparency of government decisions, quality standards for policy-relevant research)

-            Presenting and promoting good practices of policy research designs / monitoring and advocacy

-            Providing participants with general awareness, knowledge of basic tools and language to formulate and communicate their ideas on how to use data / analysis for effective communication and impactful advocacy to be able to search and identify tools and partners for their implementation.

We hope you will find this event interesting and useful to your organization and apply to participate. Also, feel free to further post this information on your web-site or share it with all of your contacts you would find interested in participating at this event.

Detailed information on the event and on-line application form is  available here www.balkanfund.org/balkanpeerexchange.

The deadline for applications is 12 pm on January 16, 2012. The event will take place in Belgrade, Serbia in February 21-23, 2012.

European Policy Center (EPC) and Open Society Institute Brussels Office invited me to attend the following workshop ‘Building democracy in the Western Balkans: top-down and bottom-up approaches on Tuesday, 1 March 2011.

Given that I will chair the following panel ” Parliamentary democracy and the accession process: a mutually beneficial relationship?” I use this opportunity to invite you to suggest questions that you would like me to ask to the top EC officials, members of the European Parliament and some notable thinkers from the region that will be presenting at this panel. Respecting that EPC organizes this event under Chatham House Rule and does not disclose the list of speakers, I will also stop short of disclosing their names.

With deadlocked parliaments in Albania and Macedonia, hardships in creating the Federation government in Bosnia and Herzegovina, recent re-shuffle of the government in Serbia and aftermath of Kosovo’s elections, this panel is worth of your questions . Everything I get before 9 pm tomorrow evening (Feb 28) in the comments or by e-mail will be used to shape the discussion.

Thanks in advance.  In return, I will report the key points of the discussion on this blog (again in line with Chatham House Rule .

On Wednesday, May 5 the New York Times brought a very interesting opinion piece contributing to the debate on how much and if policy does matter*. In a style close to one of a Weberian disciple, David Brooks , NYT columnist found very interesting examples in comparing the life expectancy and other human development indicators  of Swedes that migrated in the USA a century ago with those who stayed in Sweden.

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“There is a pathos in television dialogue: the rapid exchange of monologues that fail to find the issue, like  ships passing in the night; the reiterated preface, ‘I think that…,’ as if it mattered who held which opinion rather than which opinion is worth holding; the impressive personal vanity that prevents each ‘discussant’ from really listening to another speaker”.

Sounds like all the political talk-shows you have recently witnessed on a local TV stations in Belgrade, Zagreb, Sarajevo,…. Skopje or Tirana ? Or the columns you try to regularly follow in the daily newspapers in each of these places?

I though the same.

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During my visits to Macedonia, Kosovo and Albania in the last two weeks, I witnessed several interesting personal and organizational stories about the ‘individual transfers’ from policy sphere into into politics. These stories were as much related to the links between the two ‘worlds’ as they were about the personal dilemmas I witnessed in ‘policy research people’ over there. What happened when one changes the ‘policy jersey’ for ‘a political dress’?

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