Reflecting on the Third OGP Summit

For the past several weeks friends and colleagues have been asking me whether the third global OGP summit held in Mexico City at the end of October was a success. Initially, I was somewhat stumped. When you are on the organizing team of an event with over 2,000 guests, including 50 Ministers, a lot of time is inevitably spent in back rooms rather than participating in the debates, workshops and panel discussions that made up most of the agenda. Now that we have had some time to process the outcomes of the summit and debrief with our government and civil society partners in different parts of the world, I have a shortlist of four areas where I think we did well, and two clear areas for improvement. I welcome feedback on this list so that we can effectively learn the lessons of Mexico and apply them to the regional OGP events in 2016 and the next summit in France in 2017.

The first area of improvement was the clear progress made in recognizing that without space for civil society, OGP’s theory of change is  redundant. At our second summit in London, I felt a general squeamishness from those present to bring up examples of where civil society was being effectively silenced, even in some OGP countries. In contrast, in Mexico we received a clear message that the basic freedoms outlined in the Open Government DeclarationThe Open Government Declaration is the declaration of commitment to upholding the principles of open and transparent government, approved by the founding countries of OGP in 2011. Countries are requir... must be protected for OGP to work. This message was reiterated in the Steering CommitteeThe Steering Committee is OGP’s executive decision-making body. Its role is to develop, promote and safeguard OGP’s values, principles and interests; establish OGP’s core ideas, policies, and ru... meetings and in the opening plenary where it was made clear that imprisoning people for political reasons has no place in OGP countries and should be urgently addressed.

This development was backed up by what I felt was a renewed respect and engagement with OGP’s accountability mechanism. The opening plenary was littered with statistics gleaned from the Independent Reporting Mechanism’s work, and several sessions across the three days saw refreshingly honest conversations between government officials and their civil society counterparts on progress made (or not). If OGP can become a place where independent reporting is seen as much as a learning tool as well as an opportunity for accountability, then I believe we will continue to see an improvement in the ambitionAccording to OGP’s Articles of Governance, OGP commitments should “stretch government practice beyond its current baseline with respect to key areas of open government.” Ambition captures the po..., scope and implementation of OGP national action plans.

The third positive development was the new actors who attended the summit, most notably the large number of local government leaders from around the world and Mexico. It has been apparent for some time that local governments are a major missing link if we want transparency, accountability and participation reforms to make a difference in people’s lives. Now we have a Steering Committee approved pilot program to bring 6-10 local governments into OGP, with further expansion possible once we have a better understanding of what OGP can bring to those reformers, and what it is we have to learn from them. The presence of over 60 members of parliament was also important, as we seek to build on promising legislative openness work in Georgia and other countries who are proactively seeking to involve parliaments in OGP.

Finally, the link with the new UN Global Goals has the potential to be a major success now that 40 governments and 89 civil society organizations have signed a declaration saying they will use future OGP action plans as a means of implementation. For OGP this is a tool to encourage more sector commitments, where an open government approach is used to drive better outcomes in health, education and other areas covered in the 17 goals. The Government of Mexico provided admirable leadership to secure 40 government signatures, but this will remain a qualified success until all OGP countries have endorsed the declaration and commitments start appearing in action plans. The first OGP action plan published after the declaration, from the United States, made an important start to this work by including access to justiceAccessible justice systems – both formal and informal – ensure that individuals and communities with legal needs know where to go for help, obtain the help they need, and move through a system tha... More reforms under the banner of the OGP-Global Goals link.

There are of course areas where OGP events can be improved. Questions remain about how to best encourage more diversity of formats and end the tyranny of the panel discussion. We also need to do a better job of broadening our audience, and of speaking in a more inclusive way that avoids alienating people with jargon and needless complexity. In addition to those perennial conference questions, two specific areas for improvement stood out for me from Mexico.

First, we need a far greater focus on stories and examples of impact. Too many interventions remain at the conceptual and theoretical level, without enough evidence to support claims of how open government can make a difference. These stories of impact do not automatically need to be several million dollar longitudinal Randomised Control Trial based studies, but it is necessary for researchers to help us understand when, how and why a particular OGP commitmentOGP commitments are promises for reform co-created by governments and civil society and submitted as part of an action plan. Commitments typically include a description of the problem, concrete action... may have (or have not) had a desirable impact on society. IRM reports are useful starting points for this work but generally come too soon after implementation to evaluate impacts. Now is the time to look back at the hundreds of open government reforms made via OGP in 2011 and 2012 and improve our understanding of whether they actually made a difference.

Second, OGP must be constantly self-aware and seek the input of those outside of the open government bubble to ensure we resist hyperbole and stay grounded in reality. We need to continually ask ourselves whether we have the right balance between open government as a public relations opportunity and getting things done. OGP should be a place that politicians come to claim credit for real achievements – that is central to the idea of creating incentives and support networks for reformers around the world in often difficult contexts. However, if those politicians lack credibility on open government reforms with their own people it risks distorting those carefully crafted incentive structures.

I’m sure many of you that attended the summit have your own lists and we would be delighted to hear from you. Please fill in our survey by December 4th to ensure your feedback is included.