Vienna - 7the meeting of the Regional Cooperation Council’s (RCC) South East Europe 2020 (SEE 2020) Strategy’s Monitoring Committee took place in Vienna today marking the beginning of the new SEE 2020 monitoring cycle. 

The meeting participants went through the last monitoring cycle and acknowledged the lessons learned in the process. The RCC presented the scope and timeframe of the 2019 monitoring cycle, including distribution of roles and responsibilities among national administrations, regional dimension coordinators and RCC. The session also included debriefing from the Eurostat’s Workshop on the SEE2020 Indicators.

The SEE 2020 Monitoring Committee is the main body overseeing the overall process of monitoring the SEE 2020 Strategy, proposing changes to optimize the process or modify the scope of monitoring, reviewing and endorsing the Annual Report on the Implementation (ARI) before proposing it to the SEE 2020 Governing Board for approval. This Committee’s meeting at the end of 2018 kicked off the next annual monitoring cycle, consisting of preparation, data and information collection and analysis, concluded in the drafting of SEE 2020 the ARI. The monitoring cycle includes collecting three sets of data i.e. quantitative data; activity reports from the SEE2020 regional dimension coordinators (RDCs) in the area of trade, education, anti-corruption, etc.; and perception based indicators (Balkan Barometer). The data are being collected through national administrations, international sources (World Bank, IMF, OECD and others), and RDCs. 

The meeting was held back-to-back with the 2nd Workshop on supporting the SEE2020 process of data collection, organized under Eurostat, on 18-19 December 2018, while the. The Monitoring Committee meeting was held on the afternoon of the 19th, as a continuation to the second part of the IPA2015 workshop, held in the morning of the same day.