Every few months, a public project in Malta arrives fully formed. A road, a square, a "regeneration." The plans are unveiled, a consultation period opens, objections are filed, and the project proceeds largely as drawn. We are invited to react, rarely to shape. As one study of Maltese urban design put it, public participation here has been "reduced to endorsement of documents prepared by bureaucrats" (Bianco, 2016). That is not participation. It is ratification.

This matters beyond principle, because the way we plan produces worse infrastructure. The International Monetary Fund estimates that countries lose, on average, around 30% of the potential value of their public investment to inefficiency, projects that cost too much, take too long, or simply fail to fit the needs of the people who live with them (IMF, 2015). A good share of that waste is an information problem. And in Malta, that problem has a particular shape.

Our local councils are constitutionally recognised, but in planning matters they are confined to a consultative function. They can offer opinions on development permits and infrastructure projects in their locality, but they cannot decide. All decisions flow through the national Planning Authority alone. This means that elected representatives closest to residents, people who know their communities, are systematically excluded from shaping the projects built in those communities. Residents themselves know even less. The people affected by a decision are the last to be informed about it, and have no meaningful say in how it unfolds.

We know what the alternative looks like, because it has been measured. Between 2017 and 2021, Ukraine implemented open contracting reforms, requiring the disclosure of public procurement details; costs, contracts, timelines. Researchers found that this transparency alone resulted in savings of approximately six billion US dollars. In Europe, a study found that publishing just five additional pieces of information per tender would save the continent three point six billion euros (Bauhr et al., 2017). No new spending. No heavier bureaucracy. Simply putting the numbers where people could see them changed how the money was spent.

The phrase "done properly" carries weight. Openness is not magic, and a flood of raw documents helps no one. The most useful research on disclosure shows that information only works when it is accurate, accessible, and built around what ordinary citizens actually need to know, not dumped to satisfy a legal minimum. The goal is not more paper. It is clarity that lets a resident understand, in a few minutes, what is being built near them, what it costs, who decided, and how to have a say while the decision is still open.

That is the gap progettiqribek.mt exists to fill. The foundations are already in place: Malta maintains a national open data portal and a public spatial-data infrastructure, with the Planning Authority among the contributors. The raw material for transparency exists. What has been missing is a place that turns it into something a person can use, that takes projects scattered across registers, permits, and tenders and presents them plainly, near you, while there is still time to respond.

This is deliberately a "push," not a "pull." Today the burden falls on the citizen to go looking, to know which portal, which permit number, which consultation window. Proactive transparency reverses that. It brings the project to the public rather than waiting for the public to find the project. The difference sounds small. In practice it is the difference between a system designed to inform and one designed to be technically compliant.

None of this is about distrust of any particular government or official. It is about building systems that make good decisions easier and bad ones harder, regardless of who is in charge. Better information produces better projects, and better projects are ones that fit the people they are built for. progettiqribek.mt is a modest attempt to put that information where it belongs: in public, in plain sight, in time to matter.

References

• Bauhr, M., Czibik, Á., Fazekas, M. & de Fine Licht, J. (2017). Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory.
• Bianco, L. (2016). "Participatory engagement in urban design process: The case of an urban settlement in Malta." Spatium, no. 35, pp. 71–77.
• International Monetary Fund (2015). Making Public Investment More Efficient.
• Open Government Partnership (2021). "Uncovering Spending in Public Contracts: Ukraine."