How can OGP members reap greater Return on Investment?

In addition to strengthening governance through more open, participatory and collaboratory practices; Open Government (OG) initiatives are expected to enable greater efficiency, innovation and competitiveness in government. Recent findings from analysis of the Independent Reporting Mechanism (IRM)The Independent Reporting Mechanism (IRM) is OGP’s accountability arm and the main means of tracking progress in participating countries. The IRM provides independent, evidence-based, and objective ... reports of OGP members show increasing difficulty in linking the implementation of OGP commitments to concrete outcomes and impacts in government and society. We believe that international governance and socioeconomic development indicators could underpin a concrete framework for governments to track the impact of their OG activities over time. This paper contributes to building a foundation for such a framework.

Specifically, it investigates: 1) the extent to which grand challenges declared and commitments made by countries cover their areas of weakness based on major governance and e-government related indicators; 2) guidelines that could be adopted to close identified gaps. We determined the strength of OGP members in the five grand challenge (GC) areas based on the available governance-related indicators and subsequently provide some measure of relative shortfall of efforts (or gap) in these GC areas based on the commitments in Actions Plans. Results show that public services and public integrity grand challenges enjoy relatively surplus attention while there are deficits of attention in other GC areas. This and other insights revealed in this paper could enable OG programme managers to make more informed decisions on how to (re- )distribute efforts across Grand Challenge areas when revising their action plans for greater impact in terms of improved governance and development indicators.