Partnership for Social Development (PSD) is a nongovernmental, not-for-profit civil society organisation established in 1999 in Zagreb in the Republic of Croatia. Over the past 15 years PSD has been engaged in strategic fighting against corruption, building integrity in public administration and media sector in Croatia, SEE region and EU Member States.
Using and developing modern technological solutions and methods, Partnership for Social Development directly assists the citizens in protection of human rights, conducts researches, monitors the impact of public policies, informs, educates and motivates the public, and advocates for continuous positive social change.
In 2012 Partnership for Social Development released Croatian Public Procurement Database, Integrityobservers.eu. The Database enabled a revolutionary step forward in the analysis and monitoring of public procurement. It integrates all information and data related to public procurement procedures, collects them in real time and makes them systematic and easy to understand. The Database has been recognized by the DG Home in 2014 Anti-Corruption Report among best practices in the field and by OLAF, which enabled transposing PSD´s solutions to the Romanian public procurement system under the HERCULE II framework. By establishing this tool, unique by the fact that it analyses all data on all procedures and contracts on public procurement in real time, from kindergarten to ministries, which is a feature that no other similar tool in Europe has.
Partnership for Social Development took a step forward in capacity building for the fight against corruption and data journalism and in 2015 launched the Fairpress IRIS program, the biggest project of investigative journalism in Croatia. Fourteen investigative journalists from all over Croatia are investigating all levels of government in the Republic of Croatia with special focus on local government, state-owned companies and institutions which usually function far from the public eye.
In December 2015, PSD presented, simultaneously in six countries (Republic of Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Republic of Serbia and Romania), the Media Clientelism Index (MCI), the first cross-country comparative and country-specific report on the state of media clientelism and politicization based on empirical data. MCI measures risks of clientelistic practices, the existence of such practices as well as the potential of a society and the state to deal with issues of media clientelism, and many other issues related to the functioning of the media industry. Translation of collected data (over 400 indicators for each country involved in the measurement) into numerical value is based on Potential method (ranking) based on the graph theory according to the theoretical work of Lavoslav Čaklović, Ph.D. from the Department of Mathematics at the Faculty of Science of the University of Zagreb. The purpose of the MCI index is for it to become a practical tool in decision, deliberation and the assessment of state in the media for all actors of the media scene as well as media scene decision makers.