EVALUATION OF TRANSPARENCY AND OPENNESS OF UKRAINIAN CITIES

Abstract

A democratic society has to have an access to the public information because it wants to influence the decision of issues directly related to their interests. The issues of openness and transparency have become very relevant for Ukrainian cities due to Ukraine joining the international Open Government Partnership Initiative. This determines the need for constant analytical research and evaluation in order to improve activities in this context. The purpose of the article is to highlight the results of the evaluation of the openness and transparency of the cities of Ukraine before the war. Methods used in the research: survey, quantification, ranking, scoring, etc. The hypothesis of the study was the assumption that the assessment of the openness and transparency of the cities of Ukraine before the war will be significantly different from the assessment in the post-war period, therefore, it is necessary to carry out analytical studies in order to fix it. Presenting main material. The conducted studies of the results of the evaluation of the openness and transparency of the cities of Ukraine before the war allowed us to come to the conclusion that according to the transparency rating, which evaluates the transparency of the activity of city councils in the 100 largest cities of Ukraine and demonstrates the level of implementation of best practices, Mariupol was the leader in 2021.  The accountability rating (to what extent the declared obligations of the city authorities are commensurate with practice) also shows that Mariupol was the best in 2021. According to the results of the ranking of Ukrainian cities according to the level of transparency and openness of data within the City Competitiveness Index, Bakhmut became the best. It has been established that representatives of small businesses demonstrate better awareness of data openness issues than representatives of medium and large businesses. The average assessment of the availability of information about the budget, regulatory acts and public procurement (by size) in points shows that all organizational and legal forms of business have almost equal access to this information, and the best informed about the issues of data openness in Ukrainian cities are representatives of the construction and real estate transactions. The modern time fragment of the "Open Government Partnership" Initiative is defined. The originality and practical significance of the study lies in fixing the evaluation of the openness and transparency of Ukrainian cities in 2021 for comparison with the evaluation after the war. Conclusions. The analysis of the results of the evaluation of the openness and transparency of Ukrainian cities shows that Ukraine has achieved positive results in the context of providing public information to society. Further research consists in evaluating the openness and transparency of Ukrainian cities in the post-war period.