The OGP Support Unit reviewed IRM reports to identify the specific outcomes of nearly 800 OGP commitments. This included tagging each commitment’s qualitative IRM assessment for a predefined set of outcomes. AI tools were used for classification, but all tags were manually validated. The OGP Support Unit reviewed both policy- and country-level outcomes. The policy analysis focused on IRM results assessments published as of May/June 2026, covering national action plan commitments submitted between 2013 and 2023. Only commitments with IRM-assessed early results were included, as were only commitments made by current OGP countries (73 as of July 2026).1 Importantly, the numbers in the report are conservative estimates of OGP reform outcomes. For example, the analysis only captured outcomes achieved during action plan periods (the timeframe assessed by the IRM). Outcomes that may have emerged afterward – which happens often – were not captured, as these results fall outside of IRM assessments.
The numbers cited in the report come from two main sources: 1) OGP’s Independent Reporting Mechanism (IRM), and 2) third-party data producers. The different approaches used to analyze these datasets are described below.
You can also explore all of the compiled data used in this report here.
1 This includes Kosovo, which is a non-voting member but receives the same IRM assessments as other OGP national members.
IRM Reports
All national action plan commitments are assessed by the IRM for implementation and results. This makes IRM reports particularly useful for reviewing the results of OGP reforms over time. However, while the IRM codes levels of completion and early results, these indicators capture overall levels of change in policies and practices. It is the qualitative assessments accompanying the codings that provide rich detail on specific outcomes, such as the adoption of new laws or the disclosure of new datasets.
As a result, for this report, the OGP Support Unit reviewed the text of hundreds of IRM reports to identify specific reform outcomes, both at the policy level and at the country level. This data is presented throughout the report as the number of countries that achieved particular outcomes through OGP. A country is counted as having achieved an outcome if at least one of its OGP reforms (or action plans) achieved it. This means that a country’s achievement of any given outcome may reflect the results of multiple reforms.
To obtain these numbers, the OGP Support Unit tagged each commitment’s qualitative assessment for a predefined set of outcomes. Several of these outcome “tags” were consistent across all areas reviewed (e.g., whether new laws or regulations were passed), while others were policy-area-specific (e.g., whether a beneficial ownership register was launched). The full set of outcome tags and definitions is available here. While AI tools were used for classification, all tags were human-reviewed and validated.
The analysis covered two different areas of the report: 1) policy-level impact, and 2) country-level impact. Both are described in the box below.
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The policy-level analysis focused on commitments related to five key policy areas in the report:
- Beneficial ownership transparency
- Open contracting
- Fiscal openness
- Right to information
- Public participation
For each of these areas, the Data & Analytics team identified relevant commitments using existing thematic tags and reviewed the corresponding IRM results assessments. The following criteria were applied when selecting commitments for review:
- National only: The IRM does not assess local commitments individually like national commitments. (They are instead reviewed collectively in periodic reports.) For this reason, this analysis focuses only on national-level commitments.
- Action plans only: Although OGP has recently updated its action framework to allow for individual commitment submissions, IRM assessments have so far focused on commitments submitted via action plans. As a result, this analysis does the same.
- OGP countries only: Several countries that once participated in OGP are no longer members. Although these countries achieved important results through OGP (e.g., Denmark, Sri Lanka, United States), these countries are not included in the analysis. All references to percentages of OGP members are therefore based on OGP’s membership of 73 countries as of July 2026.
- Results only: The Data & Analytics team only reviewed commitments that achieved some level of results according to the IRM’s “Early Results”indicator, which assesses changes to government practices as a result of commitment implementation. Specifically, commitments assessed as having No Notable Results (or commitments that Did Not Change government practices according to the older “Did it Open Government?” indicator) were excluded from the analysis.
- Reform dates: Given the preceding point, the analysis only included commitments assessed by the IRM for results. Results assessments were first introduced for OGP commitments submitted in 2013, so the analysis excludes commitments submitted in 2011 or 2012. (These commitments only received progress reports at the midpoint of the action plan.) In addition, since the IRM assesses results after the action plan has concluded, many current or recently completed commitments were not reviewed. Only commitments with a published IRM results report by 31 July 2026 were included.
LIMITATIONS
While this analysis represents the most granular cross-country review of OGP reform outcomes to date, the method presents several limitations. In general, these limitations strongly suggest that the numbers in the report are conservative estimates that undercount the total outcomes achieved by OGP reforms:
- Implementation period: The main limitation of this analysis is that it relies on IRM assessments that only consider results achieved during each action plan period. For the vast majority of commitments, this means that the IRM assessed results after only two years of implementation. This influences the results in two important ways:
- Emerging results: Concrete commitment outcomes often take several years to emerge – sometimes well after an action plan ends. This means that focusing on short-term results undercounts the impacts achieved. For example, Nigeria first committed to develop and launch a beneficial ownership register in Nigeria’s 2017-2019 action plan, but it was not until 2023 that the register finally launched – six years after the initial commitment. Many other similar cases exist.
- Discontinued reforms: Conversely, some outcomes may have been reversed after the conclusion of an action plan. For example, a data portal may have been taken down, or legislation may have been repealed. However, outcome numbers are cited in the report not at the commitment level, but at the country level. This means that a country’s achievement of any single outcome may reflect the results of multiple reforms, reducing the risk of any one reversal affecting the overall results. For example, one of the 24 countries that strengthened online RTI platforms was Brazil, which achieved this outcome through four different reforms over a span of eight years, making a complete reversal unlikely.
- IRM assessments: The IRM does not produce impact analyses, for a variety of reasons. Instead, IRM results assessments are delivered right after action plans end, focusing on completion and early outcomes of commitments. This makes some outcomes difficult to identify. For example, one of the outcomes tracked for the report is whether the public shaped policies. IRM assessments sometimes discuss this, but determining whether, say, a large-scale consultation influenced a policy requires a more granular, time-intensive review than is feasible for a time-bound IRM assessment. Importantly, this means that the omission of an outcome in an IRM report is not evidence that it did not occur, which implies that the true number of outcomes is likely higher than what is cited in this analysis.
- Public participation: Given the more than 2,500 OGP commitments related to public participation and time constraints for the development of the report, the Data & Analytics team used a different approach to review assessments for participation-related commitments. Specifically, AI tools were used to tag for outcomes, but only positive, unique tags were reviewed. In other words, while all numbers cited in the report are backed up by human reviews, participation commitments that did not receive any automated tags were not reviewed. While this eliminates the risk of false positives, it creates the possibility of false negatives, i.e., reforms that did achieve outcomes but were not included in the analysis.
The country-impact section focused on analyzing outcomes in the following areas:
- Institutionalization: Administrative, executive, or legal instruments to ensure continuity of open government and OGP commitments across political cycles.
- Meaningful dialogue: Civil society’s ability to meaningfully shape and influence policy through the OGP action plan
- “Open State”: Open government practices are adopted, replicated, and scaled beyond executive offices to legislatures, courts, and local governments—ensuring vertical integration and taking a more systemic approach to reforms.
- Local-level impact: OGP reforms at the local level help members of the public and civil society shape policies and improve public services in their day-to-day lives.
IRM Action Plan Reviews, Co-creation Briefs, Results Reports and Open Government Country Journeys were analyzed using AI for classification of tags, followed up with human review and validation.
Third-Party Data
The report also cites numbers from other data producers. The data and methods used vary based on the policy area:
- Beneficial ownership transparency: Data on the percentage of countries with public beneficial ownership registers comes from Open Ownership. The 2022 numbers come from the first edition of the Global Data Barometer, republished in OGP’s Broken Links report.
- Open contracting: Data on the percentage of countries that publish contracting data following the Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS) comes from the Open Contracting Partnership. Data on countries that publish the results of all public tenders comes from the OECD Public Integrity Indicators.
- Fiscal openness: Data on trends comes from the Open Budget Survey (OBS). Specifically, the analysis refers to average OGP country scores on two components: 1) Transparency, which assesses the online availability, timeliness, and comprehensiveness of eight key budget documents, and 2) Public Participation, which assesses formal opportunities for meaningful participation in different stages of the budget process. References to publishing enough information to support informed public debate on the budget are based on the OBS benchmark of 61/100 on the Transparency component. This is the point at which the OBS considers sufficient information to be available for this purpose.
- Right to information: Data on the number of OGP countries with RTI legal frameworks comes from the global RTI Rating. Note that some of the RTI legal frameworks are not laws. Per the RTI Rating’s methodology, the focus is on binding legal frameworks, which may include executive orders or other instruments.