- Funding Programme
- Year
- 2023
Strengthening the Innovative Capacity of the Public Sector of Bulgaria
The European Commission assisted the Bulgarian administration in developing an effective legal, methodological, and technological framework for strategic planning. The project supported the rollout of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP) investment C10.I10, "Instrument for better strategic planning". It was also part of Bulgaria’s medium-term fiscal plan priority 7.3: Strengthening justice, governance, and financial integrity.
Context
Addressing citizens’ needs in innovative ways can improve the public’s satisfaction and trust, as also proved by the 2024 OECD Survey on Drivers of Trust in Public Institutions. Bulgaria has introduced public sector innovations to boost economic development, improve its research system and digitalise public services. However, those efforts have remained fragmented and insufficient to address the country's challenges and accelerate social and economic convergence with more advanced economies. The State Administration acknowledged the need for greater efforts to expand its innovative capacity. To this end, this project assisted the Bulgarian administration in developing an effective legal, methodological and technological framework for strategic planning.
Support delivered
The recommendations provided by the OECD under this project were used in the drafting of a Law on Strategic Planning, serving as a general legal framework for strategic planning. The law outlines clear requirements for the strategic documents: their types, their content, development, monitoring and evaluation, as well as the responsibilities of key stakeholders. The draft law was put to public and interinstitutional consultations in early 2024. However, due to government changes and elections, it was not adopted by the Council of Ministers in 2024. Finally, the project reviewed and mapped all existing strategic documents by policy areas. This effort contributed to the formulation of both short and long-term recommendations for aligning the existing strategic documents with the revised methodology. This will simplify the set of strategic policy objectives and ensure better synergies between related policy domains.
Results achieved
The project results are directly linked to the upgrade of the Monitorstat information system, which will support and structure the process of developing and monitoring of strategic documents. The revised methodology developed specifies the format requirements for strategic documents, including goals, indicators and data sources, forming the basis for the upgrade of Monitorstat. This ensures complementarity between the IT tool and the methodological framework and guarantees a uniform standard for the national strategic documents. The strategic documents to be uploaded in the IT system will be based on the review, carried out under the TSI project.
More about the project
You can read the documents related to the project here: