In the active phase of institutionalization of civil society institutions, the enhanced capacity of civil society and its role in the European integration processes of Ukraine, it is noteworthy that the analysis of civil control mechanisms in the context of execution by Ukraine of the Association Agreement is critical. The author structured the modern theoretical approaches to the understanding of civil society and substantiated the need for the active involvement of civil society in the implementation of the Association Agreement between Ukraine and the EU. The special role in this process belongs to the Ukrainian side of the EU-Ukraine Civil Society Platform whose main tasks are to prepare an impartial analysis of the Agreement execution in various spheres, to make recommendations on priority steps to accelerate reforms, to clarify the tasks and significance of the Association Agreement to general public and to establish cooperation with European civil society.
The systematization and analysis of the main forms of public control, namely: the public expertise, the public investigation, the public audit, the public monitoring, the control test, allowed the author to evaluate the implementation by the state authorities of Ukraine of 8 areas of the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement provisions for the period of January 2015 – March 2017 by means of public monitoring and, as a result, to prepare recommendations for public authorities.
At the same time, it is worth emphasizing that the Civil Society Institute uses a wide range of public control mechanisms to evaluate actions and decisions of the authorities in the context of European integration. However, CSI’s recommendations are often ignored by public authorities and local self-government bodies. This can be explained by the lack of the established tradition of interaction between them, weakness of CSI itself, as well as the authorities’ reluctance to be sensitive to recommendations. In this regard, CSI often comes up with initiatives to international partners and thus tries to affect the course of the reforms through external influence.
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