Lithuania End-Term Report 2016-2018

Lithuania’s third 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... focused on the openness of the public sector, preventing corruption and promoting 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 improving civic participation. While the action plan addressed major open government issues in Lithuania, the commitments themselves were limited in scope and most saw low levels of completionImplementers must follow through on their commitments for them to achieve impact. For each commitment, OGP’s Independent Reporting Mechanism (IRM) evaluates the degree to which the activities outlin... More. However, the Office of the Government did establish a multi-stakeholder forumRegular dialogue between government and civil society is a core element of OGP participation. It builds trust, promotes joint problem-solving, and empowers civil society to influence the design, imple... during the second year of the action plan and, for the first time, created guidelines on how to improve public consultations in Lithuania.

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 (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)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 ... carries out a review of the activities of each OGP- participating country. This report summarizes the results of the period from May 2016 to August 2018, and includes relevant developments up to September 2018.

The Office of the Government is the lead coordinating institution for Lithuania’s participation in OGP. Aside from OGP-related activities, it assists the Prime Minister in implementing policies and coordinates the work of the ministries. A significant number of the commitments were carried out by the Office itself and the ministries. To gather the expertise for drafting and implementing the commitments, the Office of the Government also formed a working group of public officials, academia and civil society.

Lithuania’s third action plan largely continued the themes of the previous two, namely increasing access to 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..., increasing civic participation, and reducing corruption. While several commitments sought to address important open government issues in Lithuania (i.e. to encourage greater civic participation or reduce corruption in the healthcare system), the limited implementation time and scope of activities inhibited them from opening up government in a major way. Although the third action plan aimed to address national issues, it largely focused on capital-based institutions and public officials. Though they could set the tone for the others, activities had no major links to Lithuanian regions or local public sector institutions.

The third action plan had nine commitments, none of them starred. One of them – to create a public consultation mechanism – for the first time offered specific guidelines for public sector institutions on how to organize public consultations and thus address the problem of low civic participation in Lithuania. As the guidelines had to be tested, more citizens had the chance to participate in the decision-making process compared to previous action plans in Lithuania.

The Office of the Government did not publish a self-assessment report for the second year of implementation but planned to deliver it by December 2018.

At the time of writing this report (September 2018), the fourth action plan is still in the draft stage. The Office of the Government confirmed they would recommend the government to continue working on five commitments from the third action plan, namely the open data portal, consultation mechanism, e-platform for public sector’s financial data, NGO database and NGO register. This recommendation would also need support from the working group.