The team of the Transparent Cities program has presented a handbook Municipal Transparency: Best Practices, which contains new ideas and tools to improve authorities’ openness in Ukrainian cities.

The handbook is designed to help local self-government agencies to adopt successful experiences of other cities in their own, following specific examples.

Program experts have analyzed the implementation of transparency indicators by city councils of the Transparency Ranking of 100 Biggest Ukrainian Cities. They identified several best practices for each of the 86 indicators.

In certain cases the practices are not perfect, but they do demonstrate a variety of options how the recommendations can be implemented. Thus, city councils will be able to learn about the experiences of other municipalities and identify the best options that work in the context of their cities’ needs and resources.

The handbook has been developed in accordance with the methodology of city transparency ranking. The recent changes in the methodology were related to clarifying the terminology in accordance with the requirements of current legislation, excluding outdated indicators and adding the Investments and Economic Development sphere.

“Sharing best practices is useful for all city councils. That’s especially true for small ones, since they don’t always have the funds to develop extra services or engage experts in a specific field,” explains TI Ukraine’s COO Anastasiia Mazurok. “This cooperation is precisely what helps each city council to make its work more transparent and the lives of local people more comfortable without spending too many resources.”

The collection of best practices of transparency will be regularly updated to reflect the changes in legislation and in the methodology of city transparency ranking. That way, both municipal authorities and social activists will always be able to find relevant examples of information sharing from city councils across the entire country.

The presentation is held with the financial support of the European Union (EU) and the UNDP Project “Civil Society for Enhanced Democracy and Human Rights in Ukraine” funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark.