The Municipalities of Polican, Patos, Shkrapar and Roskovec have the highest number of citizens who are happy with the work that they do. Those living in Himare, Rrogozhine, Kavaje, and Devoll are left unsatisfied with the work that their elected officials are doing for the local area.
This is according to a recent UNDP survey entitled ‘Local Governance Mapping’. The survey randomly selected and surveyed citizens of 61 Municipalities. They also spoke to high-level officials and engaged in community dialogue.
According to the report, the Tirana Municipality managed to collect the most revenue in recent years, mainly from increases in taxes and tariffs but failed to deliver the best results to citizens. To quote the UNDP, “Tirana which records an excellent performance in revenue collection is far from being the best performing municipality in terms of satisfaction with services.”
The capital also scored at the lower limit of “average” regarding the ease of accessing municipal administrative services.
In terms of corruption, Tirana performed “close to poor” indicating a high level of corruption, lack of anti-corruption policy, and citizen experiences of corruption. In fact, the Municipality of Tirana declared that they do not even have a dedicated anti-corruption plan, but rather that it is in the “drafting process”.
Tirana also had the largest number of complaints about the Municipality via the Co-governance platform.
Overall, a slight improvement was seen in comparison to 2016- no municipalities scored under 40/100 and 7 scored over 70/100 in terms of satisfaction. These improvements came as a result of the performance of small to medium-sized municipalities. The seven largest municipalities, each with inhabitants over 100,000 saw a decline in their overall performance.
The biggest increase in improvement was as a result of better effectiveness and efficiency with 15 municipalities scoring over 70/100. Only six municipalities scored well on rule of law and only one scored “very well” in terms of accountability.
For participation and citizen engagement, only two out of 61 managed to get a “very good score”, with 59 failing to reach that level.
While things may be improving based on the results of the previous report, the numbers show that there is still considerable work to be done to achieve a consistent “good” or “very good” across the board.
