El Salvador Design Report 2018-2020

El Salvador’s fourth 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... is aligned with the country’s national priorities, including fiscal 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, accountability, and human rightsAn essential part of open government includes protecting the sacred freedoms and rights of all citizens, including the most vulnerable groups, and holding those who violate human rights accountable. T.... The co-creation processCollaboration between government, civil society and other stakeholders (e.g., citizens, academics, private sector) is at the heart of the OGP process. Participating governments must ensure that a dive... included a broad, open consultation and the Government responded to the input presented by civil society organizations and the public. However, the process did not entail meaningful collaboration of civil society organizations, in part due to a lack of resources and to the electoral context in which the plan was designed. Moving forward, the IRM researcher recommends strengthening the 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... to promote an iterative dialogue with civil society to support the design and implementation of commitments.

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 initiative that aims to secure concrete commitments from governments 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 ... conducts yearly assessments of each OGP member’s activities to ensure that governments comply with their commitments. El Salvador joined OGP in 2011. Since then, El Salvador has implemented three action plans. This report assesses the design of the country’s fourth action plan.

Action plan overview

The design of El Salvador’s action plan happened during a major political milestone: the election of a new president. Nayib Bukele, the candidate representing the Great Alliance for National Unity political party, was elected in February 2019. The interviewed CSOs and public agency representatives agree that, in part, this context influenced the design of the action plan and resulted in the creation of a plan with fewer commitments, as compared with previous plans.

Unlike in previous action plans, the Government of El Salvador and the Open Government Observatory (OGA in Spanish) were not able to conduct a national-level consultation process. However, organizations outside the OGA put forward 16 commitments, 2 of which were incorporated in the action plan. In addition, the Secretariat for Transparency, Participation and Anticorruption (STPA) responded and provided feedback to 95 of the 98 proposals submitted by citizens via the online consultation. This had not occurred during previous action plans.

The 2018-2020 action plan includes commitments with clear milestones and is aligned with the country’s national priorities, including fiscal and integral transparency, environmental protection, accountability, and human rights. The action plan includes the 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... to collect files related to the armed conflict and one to strengthen the fiscal transparency portal. These represent important milestones but were not identified as part of a broad, systematic co-creation process. Unlike in previous action plans, the participation of organizations in the OGA was weak, confirming the need to strengthen the multi-stakeholder process to ensure clear and meaningful participation of its member institutions.

Table 2. Noteworthy commitments

Recommendations

The IRM recommendations aim to inform the design of the upcoming action plan and guide the implementation of the current plan.

Table 3. Five KEY IRM recommendations.