The Regulatory Impact Assessment (RIA) has proved to be an effective policy-making tool and has been integrated into policy and legislative processes in an increasing number of countries. Over the last few years, the Government of Georgia has embarked on the process of institutionalizing RIA as an integral part of policy-making. In coordination with other Donors, the USAID Good Governance Initiative (GGI) hired the ISET Policy Institute to provide support to the Ministry of Justice of Georgia (MOJ) in its efforts, culminating with the realization of the Government Decree on RIA (published on the 17th of January 2020).

The institutionalization of RIA gave rise to the need to accelerate capacity-building efforts in different government institutions, to put them in the condition of abiding by the new legal requirements. Therefore, as the next step, the MOJ requested additional assistance to organize extensive RIA training for public servants from all the country's Ministries, as well as Parliament and the Administration of Government.

The ISET-PI team – who played a crucial role in the adaptation of the RIA methodology to the Georgian context – was tasked by GGI to develop and deliver a new, “hands-on”, RIA training concept, designed to match the needs expressed by the MOJ as well as aimed at providing public servants with the practical and theoretical skills and knowledge required to apply the RIA methodology (more precisely, to develop standard RIAs) in routine policy development work.

The training activities started with a pilot that, due to the emergence of the COVID-19 crisis, was delivered online.

The objectives of the pilot were twofold:

1. to provide civil servants with theoretical and practical experience about how to develop a standard RIA;

2. to test the viability and appropriateness of the proposed approach and provide lessons to further perfect the training concept and scale the training up, to address the need of the country.

The pilot training program was successfully completed on June 19th and more training activities modeled on the basis of experience matured during the pilot are expected to take place in the near future.