Anti-Corruption Commitments in the OGP
By Andy McDevitt and Jose Marin, TI Research and Knowledge Department
When governments sign up to the Open Government PartnershipThe Open Government Partnership (OGP) is a multi-stakeholder initiative focused on improving government transparency, ensuring opportunities for citizen participation in public matters, and strengthen... More (OGP) they adopt the Open Government DeclarationThe Open Government Declaration is the declaration of commitment to upholding the principles of open and transparent government, approved by the founding countries of OGP in 2011. Countries are requir..., which includes the commitmentOGP commitments are promises for reform co-created by governments and civil society and submitted as part of an action plan. Commitments typically include a description of the problem, concrete action... to “hav[e] robust anticorruption policies, mechanisms and practices, ensuring transparencyAccording to OGP’s Articles of Governance, transparency occurs when “government-held information (including on activities and decisions) is open, comprehensive, timely, freely available to the pub... More in the management of public finances and government purchasing, and strengthening the rule of law” . In addition, OGP commitments are to be structured around grand challenges, one of which is to increase public integrity . Overall, while anticorruption has featured in OGP commitments toward public integrity and other areas, there is considerable scope for promoting more specific, actionable and ambitious anticorruption aims. The recent establishment of an OGP anticorruption working group is one way to work with governments to make more relevant and ambitious commitments to tackle corruption.
This short paper presents a broad typology of the kinds of anticorruption commitments that governments could take on as part of a holistic strategy to address corruption in OGP national action plans. It focuses on commitments made in the broad area of public integrity, recognising that this is one, but not the only, approach to anticorruption efforts. The paper can therefore serve as a starting point for the OGP anticorruption working group, as it assesses progress on anticorruption and begins to work toward a more robust articulation and implementation of commitments that counter corruption.
The typology covers those commitments which have already been made under the OGP in the public integrity area as well as relevant areas which have not been covered to date but which are crucial in tackling corruption . The paper includes some illustrative examples of ambitious but realistic government anticorruption commitments that have come from within the framework of OGP and beyond. The aim is to provide concrete ideas to the newly formed OGP anticorruption working group and aspiring governments on how they can ramp up their ambitions in tackling corruption.
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