Skip Navigation

Argentina Progress Report 2015-2017

Six months into this action plan, a change in government revitalized the open government agenda in Argentina. The new administration expanded both civil society participation and the thematic reach of the commitments. The future challenge is translating the renewed enthusiasm into results for greater government openness.

The Open Government Partnership (OGP) is a voluntary international initiative that aims to secure commitments from governments to their citizenry to promote transparency, empower citizens, fight corruption, and harness new technologies to strengthen governance. The Independent Reporting Mechanism (IRM) carries out a biannual review of the activities of each OGP-participating country. This report covers the first year of implementation of Argentina’s 2015–2017 action plan.

Argentina began participating in OGP in October 2012. The chief of the Cabinet of Ministers, within the Undersecretariat of Management Technologies, was responsible for OGP during the development of the second action plan. After the government changed hands in December 2015, the new administration established the Coordination of Open Government, which became part of the new Undersecretariat for Public Innovation and Open Government. This agency belongs to the Secretariat for Management and Public Innovation of the also newly established Ministry of Modernization.

OGP PROCESS
Countries participating in OGP follow a process for consultation during development and implementation of their OGP action plan. Due to the change in government, Argentina’s action plan includes commitments developed by both the previous and current administrations. The plan underwent a consultation process for each of the two phases of commitment development. This report covers the first consultation process for commitments assumed by the previous administration.

Although there was an open call for participation during the development of the plan, the government did not offer information about the process in a timely manner. The government provided participants with a timeline of awareness-raising activities and a summary of consultation results.

The government did not publish its self-assessment report on time, and the self-assessment was not available until after the writing of this report.

COMMITMENT IMPLEMENTATION
As part of OGP, countries make commitments in a two-year action plan. Argentina’s action plan contains six commitments. The following table summarizes the levels of completion and the potential impact for each commitment. After the first year of implementation, Argentina’s second action plan does not contain any starred commitments.

Note that the IRM updated the criteria for these commitments in early 2015 to raise the standard for model OGP commitments. Under these criteria, commitments must be highly specific, relevant to OGP values, of transformative potential impact, and substantially completed or complete.

This report was prepared by Inés Pousadela, independent researcher.

Downloads

No comments yet

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Open Government Partnership