Context
In Greece, the Secretariat General for Legal and Parliamentary Affairs (SGLPA) is responsible for coordinating and implementing regulatory governance, while the Committee on Evaluation of the Quality of Legislative Procedure provides independent advisory support. These two entities collaborate to ensure the completeness and quality of the regulatory impact assessment (RIA), which primarily serves GSLPA and the ministries involved in the legislative process. The RIA platform is a systemic approach to critically assess the positive and negative effects of proposed regulations and summarise the amended or repealed provisions. Until recently, this process took place offline and included the communication of electronic documents through email, without any versioning or changes tracking. As a result the process life cycle was lengthy, and the final output was an electronic document (PDF) with lots of information that was hard to analyse and process at the data level.
Objectives
The RIA platform aims to digitalise the legislative procedure, providing an end-to-end solution from the drafting of a law, to gathering the digital signatures of ministers and its final submission in the Greek Parliament for voting. The RIA involves evaluating the potential effects and consequences of proposed regulations or policies before they are implemented. It is useful for evidence-based policy-making, fostering transparency and ensuring that regulations are effective, efficient and in the best interests of society. It is a tool that helps strike a balance between regulatory objectives and the needs and interests of various stakeholders.
Implementation
The digital platform was developed by GRNET S.A. National Infrastructures for Research and Technology, which operates under the auspices of the Ministry of Digital Governance. It was designed as a government-to-government (G2G) service for collaborative compilation of the impact analysis report document from all the involved stakeholders. The Ministry of Digital Governance has provided the necessary resources for the initial development of RIA and fully supported its official launch after the successful piloting phase. The platform requires limited infrastructure to operate, at least at the current scale. Comprehensive user training has also been developed, with detailed instructions and educational resources. This ensures that not only those directly involved in the legislative community, but also anyone interested in the legislative procedure, can fully understand and use this solution.