The 2025 Wave of the Expert Community Scoring Tool (ECoST) forms part of the Social Tensions Monitoring Mechanism (STMM), a research framework developed by the Centre for Sustainable Peace and Democratic Development (SeeD) and implemented by UNDP Moldova. The 2025 wave was developed with the support of the “Enhancing social cohesion in Moldova through dialogue and community empowerment” project, funded by the Government of Switzerland and implemented by UNDP Moldova. The mechanism integrates three complementary components: the Expert Community Scoring Tool (ECoST), household surveys, and the eMonitor digital monitoring tool, combining expert-based assessments, public perceptions, and digital insights to analyse social cohesion, institutional trust, and community wellbeing across Moldova.

The ECoST focuses on expert-driven community assessments, bringing together representatives from local government, civil society, education, social services, and the private sector to evaluate local developments and institutional performance. Unlike household surveys, which capture individual perceptions and experiences, the ECoST provides collective, context-sensitive evaluations of structural issues, institutional capacities, and intergroup relations at the community level. This approach enables the identification of territorial disparities, governance challenges, and social dynamics that may not be visible through perception-based surveys alone, offering an evidence-based understanding of local resilience and vulnerabilities.

Complementing this, the household survey captures the perspectives of the general population on issues such as identity and intergroup relations, institutional trust, grievances, and support for reforms, while the eMonitor tool provides digital insights and thematic intelligence on emerging social trends and narratives. Together, these components offer a comprehensive picture of Moldova’s social dynamics, combining perception-based and evidence-driven analysis to strengthen early warning systems, inform policymaking, and support targeted interventions aimed at enhancing social cohesion and community resilience.

The 2025 ECoST wave provides a comprehensive and unprecedented picture of local wellbeing, institutional performance, and social cohesion across twenty urban and rural localities. The expansion into rural areas allows for the first systematic national comparison of territorial dynamics, revealing moderate overall stability alongside persistent structural vulnerabilities. At the same time, the 2025 findings allow for direct comparison with the 2024 wave, capturing early signs of improvement or decline across a range of social, institutional, and economic indicators. The data generated through the ECoST serve as an important evidence base for informing UNDP programming, government policy, and donor-supported interventions related to decentralisation, local governance reform, community development, and social cohesion.

The first iteration of the Expert Community Scoring Tool can be found in the report Understanding Social Tensions in Moldova – 2024.