A Research Agenda on the Open Government Partnership

Since I joined OGP less than a year back, I’ve heard demands from many people both inside and outside of OGP for more stories on how OGP reforms are benefitting governments, civil society and citizens – and what we’ve learnt so far. Few people dispute that there is a real need and thirst for this knowledge. But where does one start to do research on an initiative of this scale, with 65 countries and counting?

In July this year, the OGP team came together to tackle this seemingly daunting question. We started with some basics – what do we know, and how can we use this to answer what we need to know to ensure that OGP is really making a difference in participating countries? The end result is the OGP Research Agenda which organizes lots of interesting research questions into three basic levels of analysis.

First, thanks to the work of the Independent Reporting Mechanism (IRM), we know whether countries are complying with the OGP process and to what extent they are completing commitments in their National Action Plans. One look at the IRM’s databases and progress reports will tell a researcher the level of detail they can find on each OGP commitment. Just look at What the IRM data tells us about OGP results and you’ll have a bird’s eye view of the variation in performance between OGP countries. But the big question mark here is why we see this variation, how OGP can provide more and better incentives to encourage strong OGP performance, and what impact this is likely to have in the long term.

To begin to look closely at these ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions, the research agenda organizes them under the ‘drivers of change’ section, where researchers would find questions like “What factors increase high-level political interest in OGP?”. And in the last section of the agenda on ‘long-term impact’, we list some heavyweight questions like “How has OGP stimulated a noticeable improvement in the quality of dialogue between government and civil society”?

For those keen on investigating either country-specific reforms or the impact of the partnership as a whole, this agenda attempts to provide a useful starting point.  To be sure, the findings generated from research undertaken on these questions will inform and improve the work of actors across the board – be it the OGP leadership and 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.... team, governments, civil society or the private sectorGovernments are working to open private sector practices as well — including through beneficial ownership transparency, open contracting, and regulating environmental standards. Technical specificat....

The agenda also attempts to ensure some degree of coordination by summarizing in an annex what we know about current research efforts related to OGP.  If you know of an ongoing study on OGP that is not mentioned, please update us. And if you have an idea for a research project that would address one or more of the questions on the agenda, please do contact me to explore possibilities for collaboration.

We hope that the research generated will build a solid evidence base for all of us to better understand both success and failures of open government reforms, as well as OGP’s contribution.

Photo credit: Flickr / Author: aremac