Armenia End-Term Report 2016-2018

Armenia’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 improving 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 of public spending and setting online tools facilitating access to government-held information. However, many of the commitments had minor potential impact and were not fully implemented on time due to limited financial resources, technical problems, and political changes. Moving forward, the government could develop more ambitious commitments and allocate necessary resources to ensure complete implementation of the next action plan.

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 August 2016 to June 2018 and includes some relevant developments up to September 2018.

The Staff of the Government coordinates the OGP process in Armenia, which was transformed into the Staff of the Prime Minister after constitutional changes that took effect in April 2018.1 The OGP coordinator for the third action plan was the Deputy Chief of Staff Vahe Jilavyan. However, in June 2018, this role was transferred to the Deputy Prime Minister Ararat Mirzoyan. A multi-sector working group comprising 26 members, including 15 government, ten civil society, and one private sectorGovernments are working to open private sector practices as well — including through beneficial ownership transparency, open contracting, and regulating environmental standards. Technical specificat... More representative, was established in December 2016 by the Prime Minister’s Decree2 to oversee the implementation of the third action plan.

Civil society organizations (CSOs) and public were involved in the action plan development, while the participation in its implementation period was provided through OGP Working Group meetings and collaboration with CSOs in the framework of specific commitments. Most of the commitments were carried out by ministries, while one 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... was led by the Commission on Ethics of High-Ranking Officials.

The third action plan included several 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 designed to improve transparency of government spending and service provision. However, the IRM Progress Report found the potential impact of the most commitments to be minor due to their limited scope as well as low specificity of commitment language. On the other hand, only half of the commitments from the action plan have reached either substantial or complete implementation, which was explained by various reasons from limited financial resources and technical difficulties up to political changes. Moving forward, the government could develop more ambitious commitments and allocate necessary time, budget, and human resources to ensure complete implementation of the next action plan.

At the time of writing this report, Armenia has not published its end of term self-assessment report, nor its new action plan for its fourth cycle.