Lithuania Transitional Results Report 2018-2020

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 is a global partnership that brings together government reformers and civil society leaders to create action plans that make governments more inclusive, responsive, and accountable. 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 may build on existing efforts, identify new steps to complete ongoing reforms, or initiate an entirely new area. OGP’s 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 ... monitors all action plans to ensure governments follow through on commitments. Civil society and government leaders use the evaluations to reflect on their progress and determine if efforts have impacted people’s lives.

The IRM has partnered with Rugile Trumpyte to carry out this evaluation. The IRM aims to inform ongoing dialogue around the development and implementation of future commitments. For a full description of the IRM’s methodology, please visit https://www.opengovpartnership.org/about/independent-reporting-mechanism.

This report covers the implementation of Lithuania’s fourth action plan for 2018-2020. In 2021, the IRM will implement a new approach to its research process and the scope of its reporting on action plans, approved by the IRM Refresh.^[1] The IRM adjusted its Implementation Reports for 2018-2020 action plans to fit the transition process to the new IRM products and enable the IRM to adjust its workflow in light of the COVID-19 pandemic’s effects on OGP country processes.

Action Plan Implementation

The IRM Transitional Results Report assesses the status of the action plan’s commitments and the results from their implementation at the end of the action plan cycle. This report does not re-visit the assessments for “VerifiabilityOGP commitments should be clear and specific enough to enable measurement of their progress. Verifiable commitments include specific activities that can be monitored. Following an action plan’s subm...,” “RelevanceAccording to the OGP Articles of Governance, OGP commitments should include a clear open government lens. Specifically, they should advance at least one of the OGP values: transparency, citizen partic...” or “Potential Impact.” The IRM assesses those three indicators in IRM Design Reports. For more details on each indicator, please see Annex I in this report.

General Highlights and Results

Lithuania’s fourth OGP action plan largely focused on open data availability, public participationGiving citizens opportunities to provide input into government decision-making leads to more effective governance, improved public service delivery, and more equitable outcomes. Technical specificatio... and the environment of NGOs. Four of the action plan’s six commitments were carried forward from the previous action plan (2016-2018), in particular those that were unfinished by the end of 2018. Though narrower in scale compared to the previous action plan, the fourth plan saw greater levels of implementation and thus achieved more tangible results that might shape the public sector’s work beyond 2020. This is especially the case with 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... initiatives and efforts to invest in NGOs’ capacities.

Commitments to open data saw stronger results at the end of the action plan than others, partly because they were started during the previous action plan (in 2016) and had significantly more time to be finalized. Notably, under Commitment 1, the Information Society Development Committee developed Lithuania’s first centrally managed open data portal (https://data.gov.lt) which provides public sector data in a single platform and free of charge. As of March 2021, the portal includes more than 1,150 datasets from 28 public sector institutions, covering sectors such as agriculture, infrastructure, health, business, education, employment, and culture. The government aims to expand the portal to include data from more public sector institutions in the future. Under Commitment 2, the Ministry of Social Security and Labour created an NGO Fund to finance NGO projects. The fund will start operating in 2021 by opening competitive calls for project proposals from NGOs.[2] Lastly, under Commitment 3, the Ministry of Finance launched Lithuania’s first large-scale open data portal (http://www.lietuvosfinansai.lt) on public spending. The new portal includes, for the first time in one centralized location, all public finances from the national and municipal levels and with data available in open format.

COVID-19 pandemic impact on implementation

Although the COVID-19 pandemic had a major effect on the public, non-governmental, and private sectors in Lithuania, it did not significantly impact the implementation of the fourth OGP action plan in 2020. According to the Office of the Government, while it became more challenging to organize OGP activities during the pandemic,^[3] online events gathered larger numbers of attendees and so it remained relatively easy to engage with interested stakeholders.^[4] According to a senior advisor at the Ministry of Social Security and Labour, the pandemic caused the action plan’s timeline to shift to autumn 2020, which led to slower implementation of its commitments.^[5]

Although not directly related to the OGP action plan, the COVID-19 pandemic enabled other public sector bodies to place transparency and digitalization at the core of their activities. For instance, the Public Procurement Office (PPO) published aggregated data on all public procurement contracts to acquire products and services to curb the health crisis.[6] Now, using different filters, one can look for a variety of contracts based on a specific interest, such as procuring organization, supplier, contract value, and product type.[7] As noted by the President of Lithuania, Gitanas Nauseda, even in times of crisis, public procurement procedures must continue to be transparent and open to public scrutiny.[8]

[1] For more information, see: https://www.opengovpartnership.org/process/accountability/about-the-irm/irm-refresh/

[2] Aurelija Olendraite, the Ministry of Social Security and Labour, interview by IRM researcher, 21 October 2020.

[3] Ibid.

[4] These included three working group’s meetings (5 December 2019, 14 April 2020, 17 September 2020), one public consultation from 11 November – 12 December 2019, and one international conference on 21 May 2020. The other public consultations were organized to develop the fifth OGP action plan.

[5] Aurelija Olendraite, the Ministry of Social Security and Labour, interview by IRM researcher, 21 October 2020.

[6] Contracts to curb COVID-19, Public Procurement Office, https://vpt.lrv.lt/sudarytos-sutartys-kovai-su-covid-19

[7] Ibid.

[8] The President: transparency is essential in the fight against COVID-19, the President of Lithuania, https://www.lrp.lt/lt/ziniasklaidos-centras/naujienos/prezidentas-kovoje-su-covid-19-butini-skaidrus-ir-kokybiski-viesieji-pirkimai/33928.