Social consultation, criticism and assessment: A requirement of the development process

From the initial single, optional activities, over the past 10 years Social consulting, criticism and assessment has become a must-have activity in international projects implemented in Vietnam. Briefly, this is the activity of collecting and providing information and documents and on that basis, giving analytical opinions, evaluations and recommendations for correction in the proposal, development, appraisal and approval. approve and close the project.

In Vietnam, due to the way the society is organized according to the centralized planning model for many years, in addition to the formulation and implementation of policies which are the specific responsibility of the state, projects and development is run by the state. Bureaucracy, which is an attribute of large organizational systems, has become a serious problem for society when accompanied by an over-centralized public apparatus and has led to the unexpected consequence of corruption and other distortions increased. Even to an alarming level and can threaten the safety of society. Therefore, evaluation becomes an urgent need.

Moreover, because most of the organizations capable of conducting assessments in Vietnam today are state organizations or groups of experts operating under the name of a certain state organization to carry out the evaluations. The evaluation results in many cases may be biased for the local interests of the industry or the locality. This situation requires a further assessment to help managers and policy makers, projects have more sources of information to consider in the decision-making process. This activity can be temporarily called social consultation, criticism and assessment (specific terms are used depending on the purpose of the assessment) with two main characteristics: Evaluation information is collected from society and conducted by a non-state organization. A third feature can sometimes be added: these activities, unlike studies, take place over a relatively short period of time, often within three months.

Thus, assessment is a basic activity of social counseling, criticism and assessment, but instead of being the opinion and judgment of one or several experts, we collect information from the side. society. There are at least four groups of subjects commonly included in the social concept here:

– People affected by the policy or project.

Experts who have knowledge of the technical aspects of the policy or project.

– Stakeholders involved in proposing and financing policies and projects.

Policy and project managers.

With such social characteristics, the problem that arises here is how to eliminate the subjective nature in the judgments of the assessors and those who provide information for the assessment of the groups society mentioned above. These subjective perceptions are natural in every person and a good assessment can only reduce those subjective judgments but will not be able to eliminate them completely. In particular, the more expert the evaluator or informant is, the greater the likelihood of being consistent with one view. To minimize those risks, a rigorous assessment process should be followed.

In that process, the first task is to correctly define the research problem of the assessment. Problems are often many, but the research problem in a reassessment is often difficult to identify. Therefore, there must be a justification for the research problem as well as a specific purpose and objectives for an assessment.

In general, social consultation, criticism and assessment is a complex activity that requires many conditions in order to produce a good result and contribute to the development of the country. In carrying out this work, the Vietnam Union of Science and Technology Associations is an agency with many advantages because the Union has a large team of experts in many different fields, so it can carry out the work. assessment of even the most complex problems in our country today. The only problem is: 1. How to have an appropriate organizational model to mobilize the brains of experts for assessment activities without reducing their specialized capacity and , 2. how such activities comply with the scientific process of gathering social opinion.

Thus, the consulting, criticism and social assessment carried out by the Vietnam Union of Science and Technology Associations will make important contributions to the country's sustainable development in the transition period. the coming change, the period when the country transitions to an industrialized, modernized country with an extensive democracy as the social basis for development.

VUSTA