Results of OGP’s Early Initiatives (2016)

In 2016, OGP’s fifth year, there is an increasing appetite in the open government community to understand whether OGP is contributing to improved government effectiveness and policy making – leading to a real impact in people’s lives. Transforming the culture of governments and making them open, participatory, responsive and accountable is an ambitious project and it must be recognized that OGP commitments are often steps in a bigger reform agenda. That said, it should now be possible to start looking at the results emerging from some of the early reforms and assessing whether citizens are starting to benefit from them.

With that objective in mind, in early 2016, the OGP Support UnitThe OGP Support Unit is a small, permanent group of staff that work closely with the Steering Committee and the Independent Reporting Mechanism to advance the goals of the Open Government Partnership.... launched a call for proposals to research the results of OGP commitments, assessing their progress, and how they evolved, and examining the benefits they are bringing to different stakeholder groups. An initial set of completed and potentially transformative reforms from NAPs submitted in 2011 and 2012 was shortlisted for researchers to choose from, but room was also left for examining commitments from subsequent NAPs that have already shown sufficient progress in implementation to enable assessment of outcomes for the intended beneficiaries.

The search for these stories ended with finding seven very different reform initiatives in different regions and covering a broad range of open government topics.