Criticize, Propose, Listen: How a Mature Civil Society Works

In recent years, I’ve noticed that I try to avoid the word “activists” myself. In the public discourse, it now sits somewhere alongside “grant-eaters” and “Soros puppets.” Yet at heart, activists are simply people who openly and voluntarily fight for change.

That is exactly what the DOZORRO program of Transparency International Ukraine has been doing every day for 10 years in public procurement.

I am convinced that a strong state is possible only if there are people willing to drive systemic change within it. All the most important changes in our country have always come from the people: the Orange Revolution, the Revolution of Dignity, last year’s Cardboard Maidan. The public procurement reform after the Revolution of Dignity and the creation of Prozorro were the result of cooperation between civil society, including TI Ukraine, businesses, and the state.

So why does this word no longer feel like a good way to describe ourselves? And what do people who dislike being called activists actually do?

We criticize the government

One of the most important, and earliest, functions of civil society is to identify where change is needed. To notice that eggs for the army were bought at UAH 17 apiece, and drums and chairs for a school shelter at exorbitant prices. To point out that having so many exceptions to procurement rules is unhealthy, and that some ideas are risky. 

Civil society must criticize the government. In general, constructive criticism is the foundation of any healthy relationship. For example, I value the fact that my wife and I don’t always agree on everything. And I’m grateful that she can tell me frankly when I do or say something wrong, even though I don’t always find that criticism easy to accept in the moment.

The partnership between the state and civil society works in much the same way. Criticism can be unpleasant for both sides, but it is necessary if we want to grow.

What matters is the kind of criticism. It must be constructive and well-founded. I could simply say that money is being siphoned off in construction procurement. 

Or I could say that, last year alone, our experts helped prevent the inefficient spending of over UAH 1 billion in budget funds. We found potentially inflated prices in the budget estimates for reconstruction procurement, and contracting authorities adjusted contract values in response to our requests. In the course of this work, we found that the problem actually lies not in the procurement itself but at the stage of project design and preparation of the preliminary budget estimate. No one bears real responsibility for ensuring that prices in estimates match market prices. This potentially creates a corruption loophole open to abuse. When rapid inflation, wage issues, and a reasonable profit for contractors are layered on top, it becomes clear that the problem is more complex and deeper than it may seem at first glance. There is no simple fix here: a wide range of stakeholders will have to work out a solution, and it will take a long time.

If you didn’t follow all of the previous paragraph, don’t worry: construction is a fairly complex subject involving many stakeholders. But constructive criticism means highlighting not just the symptom of a problem but also its context, the range of stakeholders it affects, and many other factors. You have to get to the bottom of it, and that is rarely easy.

We criticize, and we propose

The next important function is to propose changes that solve the problems identified.

This is roughly where I begin to sense my first misgivings about the word “activists.” Activists certainly see problems and fight for change. But as I see it, they don’t always specify exactly what changes are needed and how they can be achieved.

In the spring, we identified a problem: in more than half of coal procurement procedures on Prozorro Market, contracting authorities unlawfully required excessive documents from suppliers. This allowed contracting authorities to screen out unwanted suppliers, sometimes because of quality concerns but, in some cases, probably to gain some advantage for themselves. As a result, they may have been overpaying by around 40%. Before publication, we shared our findings and recommendations with the Market administrator, who decided to close the coal category. 

However, this addressed only one specific manifestation of the problem. Such documents may also be required in procurement of other goods on Prozorro Market. And the core problem is that businesses cannot challenge this before the Antimonopoly Committee, while the State Audit Service will not detect violations promptly because it does not monitor procurement on the Market. So we successfully advocated for complaint review and monitoring of high-value procurement through Prozorro Market in the new Law on Public Procurement, which will take effect next spring.

In general, this is an internal rule of our program and our organization: if you criticize, propose how to fix it. Preferably in detail and with several options. And by now you’ve probably figured out that solutions are rarely simple.

We listen and try to hear

Another thing I sometimes catch even myself doing is using generalizing terms such as “the government,” “activists,” “the public,” or “contracting authorities.” Behind these words, we often forget that they are simply people.

Another of our rules when monitoring procurement is to always contact the contracting authority first. First of all, we have to understand that our work affects their lives. A complaint we file with the prosecutor’s office can cause a lot of trouble for someone who is not actually corrupt but simply made a mistake or overlooked something. That is why it’s important to check everything a hundred times and give people a chance to correct the situation.

I’ve already mentioned that our requests save billions. More than three-quarters of the savings we achieved this year came from contracts adjusted after our requests. Humane communication often produces better results than criminal proceedings. And it is certainly faster.

I also always remind myself that the people we interact with may have difficult jobs: the authorized person responsible for procurement at a school somewhere in frontline Kharkiv region; an auditor with KPIs and legal limits on what they can inspect and how; or an MP who has to read a dozen draft laws that Parliament will consider tomorrow. 

Of course, it’s unlikely that 100% of the people who fall under the label of “the government” or “the state” are saints. But it’s equally unlikely that every one of them is corrupt or a bad person. That is why, in our interactions, we always try to listen and genuinely hear, rather than simply impose our position. This is yet another thing that, unfortunately, I don’t associate with activists.

We provide tools rather than doing other people’s work

Finally, an important conclusion we have reached through years of experience: civil society should not substitute for the authorities. When we launched DOZORRO in 2016, our main goal was to create a portal that would allow people to oversee what their money is spent on and how.

Over time, however, we realized that truly effective oversight requires expertise. And ideally, it shouldn’t be ordinary people who oversee how the state spends their money. That is the job of specialized bodies, and they do in fact perform it: the State Audit Service, the Accounting Chamber, and law enforcement when overpayments are involved.

So the best thing civil society can do is not to try to take over this function but to help strengthen the capacity of these bodies.

Admittedly, we could hardly offer auditors any meaningful advice if we hadn’t spent years digging into procurement ourselves. But it would be good not to keep doing this forever. So we study their processes more closely and propose improvements. For example, in just a year and a half, the State Audit Service, following our recommendations, more than doubled the share of monitoring exercises launched before the contract is signed, that is, at the stage when there is the best chance of correcting a violation before the contract is concluded. 

A separate area of our work is building tools that help the state. We administer the BI Prozorro public analytics module, which makes it possible to analyze procurement data from various angles. A contracting authority can use it to set the estimated value of a procurement more accurately and avoid overpaying. Auditors can use it, for example, to select potentially risky procurement, and specialists at the Ministry of Economy’s procurement department can use it to analyze the overall efficiency of procurement and propose data-driven legislative changes.

And, of course, we still help a great deal: we research, advocate, and criticize. But help should not turn into doing someone else’s job.

I have worked at DOZORRO almost since the project was launched. Over these 10 years, I have grown not only along with this program within TI Ukraine as an organization but also, it seems, along with Ukrainian civil society as a whole. 

It all began when we saw that the country needed change, and together we developed and promoted it. Over time, though, we learned to do it better: to analyze more deeply, to listen to different stakeholders, to take into account contexts from other sectors, and to build capacity rather than do the work for others.

Some people still call us activists, and not in the most flattering sense of the word. Fortunately, though, people who have worked with us directly tend to choose the words “experts” or “professionals.” The nicest description of our organization I’ve heard so far is “a CSO done right.” That is roughly how I see Transparency International Ukraine, including our program within it, and all the partners who have grown, developed, and worked alongside us over these years.