Action plan – Curridabat, Costa Rica, 2023 – 2024

At-a-Glance

Duration

Apr 2024

Date Submitted

9th June 2023

Foreword(s)

Curridabat is part of 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 alliance since 2020 and has an ad hoc Institutional Commission and a Political Commission of the Municipal Council that coordinate efforts to promote open government initiatives. Curridabat has made significant efforts to institutionalize instances of active listening and direct communication with the organized communities of the canton mainly through the Head of Culture of Peace and the Human Development Centers, representatives that systematize the rationed demands of citizens to address them from listening and participation. For Curridabat, the systematization of citizen demand is at the center of planning, a maxim that allows one to act from science, data, and real experiences of people, and not from political occurrences.

Open Government Challenges, Opportunities and Strategic Vision

This subsection details the Open Government Strategic Vision in your local area that should guide the commitments for the action plan period.

What is the long-term vision for open government in your context and jurisdiction?

For the Municipal Strategic Plan, the principles of open government are fundamental in the frameworks of the experiences to be improved, being these in no particular order:

• Quality relationships
• Trust in the inhabited place
• Productive project
• Access to desired destinations
• Contact with nature
• Nutritious food
• Diverse physical exercise
• Aesthetic dignity
• Soil regeneration
• Water balance
• Sweet institutional culture

Each experience seeks to sensitively bring municipal services closer to people, living beings, and planetary systems, comprehensively improving performance indicators of ecosystem services and people’s satisfaction with life. To this end, we have developed Territorial Intelligence tools that instrumentalize the data of the spatial physical context for decision-making, training, and capacity-building tools to enhance the skills, competencies, and capabilities of the population and regulatory and financial tools that promote transformative changes that regenerate the territory and the social fabric.

What are the achievements in open government to date (for example, recent open government reforms)?

Since 2012, Curridabat has had Human Development Centers that bring socio-educational services to the communities to overcome the structural barriers of academic, laborTransparent workforce data and increased representation of workers in labor policy-making lead to policies that better protect workers’ rights and remove barriers for underrepresented groups in the ..., and social exclusion. Curridabat has developed a Cantonal Art and Culture Policy through a participatory design and construction process. Curridabat has developed participatory public space design processes that have formed a portfolio of projects that include urban facilities, nature-based solutions to address flooding and urban heat, as well as vehicle traffic calming projects. Although the Yo Alcalde application is currently being re-engineered, the application has been one of the main tools for the management of citizen demands for ordinary municipal services.

What are the current challenges/areas for improvement in open government that the jurisdiction wishes to tackle?

From the Municipal Strategic Plan 2023-2027 the following medium-term goals are derived from open government practices:

• Recognition of the social model of inclusionOGP participating governments are working to create governments that truly serve all people. Commitments in this area may address persons with disabilities, women and girls, lesbian, gay, bisexual, tr... in a transversal manner in institutional practices.
• Evidence of the impact data of municipal services in the productive project of the people.
• Increased participation of adolescent women
• Structuring of human development services through communication and listening spaces.
• Atlas of strategic experiences with geo-referenced results.
• Permanent communication campaigns on data and projects related to the experiences of water balance, soil regeneration, and biodiversity in municipal and local media.
• Satisfaction surveys updated and applied biannually for each of the municipal services according to criteria of simplification, digitalization, innovation, sweet professionalization (essential skills and knowledge), and customer service.
• Knowledge management platform accessible to everyone in the municipal corporation under principles of open government, 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, and accountability.
• Organizations, citizen networks, and institutions of the canton create social mobilization events to map, convene -add demand-, and raise awareness about harassment in public spaces towards historically vulnerable populations.

What are the medium-term open government goals that the government wants to achieve?

The main contribution of open government tactics and strategies is that they produce management bridges between citizens and local government, both for the generation of data and for the consequent decision-making.

How does this action plan contribute to achieving the Open Government Strategic Vision?

The first Open Government Action Plan of Curridabat aspires to transform the institutional culture on issues of transparency, territorial intelligence, accountability, access to information, citizen science, openness, participation, and co-responsibility promoted by the Municipal Strategic Plan 2023 -2027. The commitments and Action Plan are aimed at deepening the governance dimension of citizenship, attending to the feelings that connect and create the identity of the place, also evidencing the benefits of contact with nature in citizen experiences; in this way, the open government strategies act as transforming agents of service behavior, communication, and institutional response to achieve the medium and long term changes proposed in the institutional planning instruments.

How does the open government strategic vision contribute to the accomplishment of the current administration’s overall policy goals?

The main contribution of the tactics and strategies of open government is that they produce management opportunities between citizens and local government, both for the generation of data and for the consequent decision-making.

Engagement and Coordination in the Open Government Strategic Vision and OGP Action Plan

Please list the lead institutions responsible for the implementation of this OGP action plan.

• Municipalidad de Curridabat

What kind of institutional arrangements are in place to coordinate between government agencies and departments to implement the OGP action plan?

An open government commission has been institutionalized by the Municipal Council that coordinates with the institutional areas the necessary actions for the implementation of the action plan and commitments. In addition, the areas of planning, social management, and citizen service processes have been strengthened.

What kind of spaces have you used or created to enable the collaboration between government and civil society in the co-creation and implementation of this action plan? Mention both offline and online spaces.

Long-term planning (Cantonal Plan for Local Human Development) is carried out jointly with central government agencies that have a presence in the Curridabat territory, and the spaces for monitoring and updating the instrument are opportunities for reflection and rethinking.

What measures did you take to ensure diversity of representation (including vulnerable or marginalized populations) in these spaces?

Representation of municipal areas involved in processes of participation and management of citizen demand that work with historically vulnerable populations.

Who participated in these spaces?

Areas of Human Development, Social Responsibility, Planning, Art, Culture, Recreation, Sports, NGOs, Legal Area, Finance, Road Management, and Culture of Peace, among others.

How many groups participated in these spaces?

10

How many public-facing meetings were held in the co-creation processCollaboration between government, civil society and other stakeholders (e.g., citizens, academics, private sector) is at the heart of the OGP process. Participating governments must ensure that a dive...?

• 3 meetings with citizens
• 10 Institutional meetings

How will government and non-governmental stakeholders continue to collaborate through the implementation of the action plan?

Through structured working groups for the follow-up and execution of the Cantonal Human Development Plan 2024 – 2034.

Please describe the independent Monitoring Body you have identified for this plan.

Universidad de Costa Rica

Provide the contact details for the independent monitoring body.

TBD

What types of activities will you have in place to discuss progress on commitments with stakeholders?

Self-assessment and internal evaluation workshops, citizen evaluation, and third-party evaluation of the results of each proposed action. Annual auditsInstitutional and legal frameworks are necessary for providing assurance of the integrity of financial information and of compliance with budgetary rules and procedure. Technical specifications: These... by the Office of the Comptroller General of the Republic, among others.

How will you regularly check in on progress with implementing agencies?

Internal processes for evaluating the performance of the areas and instruments for evaluating the progress of the institutional planning instruments, namely the Municipal Strategic Plan, the Annual Operational Plan, and the Cantonal Plan for Local Human Development.

How will you share the results of your monitoring efforts with the public?

Publication of open access maps open dataBy opening up data and making it sharable and reusable, governments can enable informed debate, better decision making, and the development of innovative new services. Technical specifications: Polici... library Yo Alcalde App as a management tool for citizen demand Open data portal for databases, budget, and studies carried out Citizen Science Portal, which makes geographic, economic, environmental, and social data accessible, among others.

Endorsement from Non-Governmental Stakeholders

• Willy Calderón, Executive Director, Arquitectura Solidaria