Remote social expertise of national projects

When implementing national projects, the Russian government aims at monitoring their achievement of national development goals, identifying changes in different ways. Thus, there is a need for social expertise that would allow to assess social effects of projects and to obtain feedback necessary for ‘smart’ management. The article presents some results of testing the methodology of remote social expertise developed by the Center for Sociology of Management and Social Technologies of the Institute of Sociology of the Federal Center of Theoretical and Applied Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences. This methodology was designed to verify the fulfillment of the ‘social contract’ between society and the state in the framework of project decisions and to assess the extent to which these decisions refer to the interests, requests and needs of the population. This type of expertise allows to increase the reliability of data, since it implies questioning direct participants and beneficiaries of project decisions. The study aimed at testing the developed methodology of remote social expertise and obtaining objective information on the status of national projects, including problems accumulated in them. The expertise focused on 12 national projects. The methodology was tested in four regions of Russia with different levels of social-cultural modernization. The analysis of the data obtained proved the heuristic potential of the developed methodology as expanding the diagnostic, analytical and prognostic capabilities of assessing large projects.