ИПИ Библиотека

So far, the Matra programme has been successful as a flexible programme in supporting the democratisation process in Central and Eastern Europe. Hundreds of small and medium sized projects contributed positively to social transformation albeit on a limited scale. Although the overall impact has been limited, a fair number of projects have contributed in a positive way to create new forms of co-operation between the government, the private sector and the civil society through a more customer-oriented method. These projects are called ‘diamonds’ because of their great potential to sparkle, as opposed to dull ‘coals’ - referring to the relative small amount of projects assessed as unsatisfactory or poor. Factors explaining these positive results have to be found in the favourable circumstances in the receiving countries, where at the time of the investigation, a true desire to change things took place amongst the growing civil society and parts of the government. The goal-oriented character of the programme, a good relationship between partner organisations and a realistic approach on planning the programme, are some other explanatory factors.

Relevance
Some 78 percent of the evaluated projects have succeeded in addressing key social transformation issues, in line with the objective of enhancing the citizens’ involvement in the shaping of society. The ambition level of the projects must be constantly adapted to changing transformation needs. Matra’s demand-oriented approach has proved to be suitable to identify these changing needs.

Effectiveness
As most project objectives were realistic and down-to-earth, 88 percent of the larger Matra projects and 95 percent of the KAP projects reached their planned outputs as well as their project objectives, or can be expected to do so.

Sustainability
Many Matra partner organisations are well established, have good human capacity and show a clear willingness to change. Due to the involvement of their staff in project formulation, the sustainability of project results is assured in more than half the programme. Given the context of technical cooperation projects, this result can be regarded as rather positive. The sustainability however can be undermined by external factors. The economic crisis in the Russian Federation e.g. has a negative effect on financial sustainability, as it makes partner organisations more dependent upon foreign funding to cover operational costs.

Efficiency
The average budget of NLG 400.000 is not very high for this type of projects. The contributions of local partners, both in terms of human capital and financial resources, have kept the budgets of most projects quite limited. Some of the twinning projects were particularly efficient. Yet in 38 percent of the evaluated projects time delays, budget overruns, and high fees for consultants decreased the efficiency to unsatisfactory levels. Especially international training projects were not very efficient.

Transparency
The information flows between the project partners was satisfactory, although the Central and East European partners were not always well informed about all budget aspects of the project. Only in a few cases lack of transparency resulted in implementation problems.