New IRM Analysis: Civic Participation Commitments in Latin America

Este blog está disponible en español aquí.

Civic participation is one of the three open government values that all action plan commitments should address.  But it can also be a particularly challenging area of open government reform.  Some stakeholders have raised concerns about weaknesses in OGP participation commitments, particularly around open washing and naïve interventions.  In response to these types of concerns and questions, the IRM has begun investigating participation commitments in more detail.

This discussion paper is the first document in this series.  Using a sample of 88 “civic participation” commitments from Latin America, it investigates several questions:

1. How much additional influence do citizens have to observe, inform, shape, and engage in decision-making as a result of OGP commitments?
2. Were participation commitments with higher levels of potential public impact actually completed?
3. Did the commitments improve or deepen existing participatory processes or did they open participation in policy spaces that were previously closed?
4. Did participation commitments have a higher or lower potential impact if they used technology?

The results show that the majority of commitments had some form of two-way communication, but a minority of commitments had a direct means of public influence. Additionally, an increasing level of potential public impact is not correlated to completionImplementers must follow through on their commitments for them to achieve impact. For each commitment, OGP’s Independent Reporting Mechanism (IRM) evaluates the degree to which the activities outlin... or incompletion. The findings also show that most commitments focused on improving already existing participatory areas. Finally, while the data is inconclusive, technology-oriented commitments often seem to have a significant potential impact.

The paper’s goal is to provide some useful points of departure for OGP stakeholders to support governments and civil societies, to advocate for and to design participation commitments, and to carry out a future research agenda on civic participation within the OGP.

You can download the paper in English and in Spanish.  In addition, the author will discuss his findings on a webinar on 25 March, 2015.  More information is available here.

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) 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 ... is a key means by which all stakeholders can track OGP progress in participating countries. The IRM produces independent progress reports on action planAction plans are at the core of a government’s participation in OGP. They are the product of a co-creation process in which government and civil society jointly develop commitments to open governmen... commitments for each country participating in OGP, as well as technical research papers on the aggregate results.