WHAT IS THE BERLIN DECLARATION?
The Berlin Declaration on Digital Society and Value-based Digital Government has reaffirmed European leaders’ commitment to fundamental rights and European values, as already stipulated in the 2017 Tallinn Declaration on eGovernment.
The Declaration relies on 7 key principles which emphasise the importance of digital public services in our everyday lives. It is aimed at taking the user-centricity principles already formulated in the Tallinn Declaration a step further, by asserting the role of public administrations in driving a value-based digital transformation of European societies.
Want to learn more about the Berlin Declaration’s principles and its policy areas? This page will provide you all the details about the Berlin Declaration.
WHAT ARE THE OBJECTIVES OF THE BERLIN DECLARATION MONITORING MECHANISM?
With the signature of the Berlin Declaration by all EU Member States in December 2020, each country agreed to a set of 22 Policy Actions to be implemented in their national frameworks by 2024. The Commission has been called upon to implement and monitor progress towards these Policy Actions and overall principles of the Declaration.
This gave rise to the idea of developing, piloting, and deploying a framework to monitor the implementation of said Policy Actions, whose key objective will be to support the Member States in identifying the progress made over time in implementing the Declaration.
Thus, the Berlin Declaration monitoring mechanism is targeted at assessing the level of implementation of the 22 above-mentioned Policy Actions (detailed on this page) taken by the EU Member States by signing the Berlin Declaration. These Policy Actions are a set of statements that the Member States have committed to achieve in their respective countries by 2024. They are clustered into 7 Policy Areas which are themselves aligned with the 7 Principles set out by the Declaration.
The main outcome of the Berlin Declaration monitoring mechanism has been the production, in 2022, of the first progress report on the Berlin Declaration on Digital Society and Value-Based Digital Government. In 2023, a second edition of this report has been published, providing a comparison between 2021 and 2022 data and results.
This report provides an overview of Member States’ performance and actions with regard to the first year of implementation of their commitment made in the declaration. It includes a description of the methodology and the key performance indicators used to conduct the monitoring activities.
In addition, it offers a country-level overview of the results for each of the 22 policy actions in the declaration, as well as an overview of the good practices in the implementation of such policy actions.
WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF THE BERLIN DECLARATION MONITORING MECHANISM?
The key benefits of the Berlin Declaration monitoring exercise will be to highlight the measures taken by each Member State to reach the Policy Actions set out in the Berlin Declaration, and to identify good practices and lessons learnt along the way.
In addition, this work is meant to support decision-makers at EU and national levels in setting their budgetary priorities and goals in the digital domain, as well as lay the ground for future funding requests and identify any gaps or areas of improvement where the Commission and other EU institutions could intervene.
WHAT HAS BEEN THE METHODOLOGY TO COME UP WITH THIS MONITORING MECHANISM?
The development and deployment of the Berlin Declaration monitoring mechanism followed a two-step approach:
- The design phase which defined the theoretical framework on which the monitoring mechanism is based, as well as its underlying indicators. More specifically, it included:
- Defining the elements to be measured, the granularity levels and how these relate to one another based on the Declaration;
- Identifying a set of secondary indicators from existing data sources to assess each of the Policy Actions;
- Defining the scoring mechanism (i.e. the methodology to aggregate the indicators);
- Validating the drafted monitoring mechanism through stakeholder consultations;
- Designing a questionnaire to collect primary data from the signatories of the Declaration.
- The implementation phase which consisted in launching the data collection through the above-mentioned questionnaire.
RESULTS OF THE BERLIN DECLARATION MONITORING MECHANISM
In the below dashboards are presented the results of the Berlin Declaration monitoring mechanism: