WHAT CHANGED AND HOW DID OGP CONTRIBUTE?
OGP Commitments Delivered Real Results
Sixty-two out of 67 countries with participation commitmentshave achieved concrete outcomes during action plan implementation, such as creating standing spaces for participation, passing new laws or regulations around participation, or involving civil society in implementing commitments.
- Inclusive participation: 40 countries (out of 67 countries) have specifically involved underrepresented groups in commitment implementation.
- Mainstreaming participation: 51 countries have institutionalized participatory mechanisms across government or within specific institutions or sectors. This includes reforms leading to required public consultation in policy-making, the adoption of participation standards or guidelines, or the establishment of standing spaces for government-civil society dialogue.
- Policy impacts: In 26 countries, there is evidence that participatory processes contributed to tangible improvements to policy outcomes, such as improved public services or better achievement of policy objectives.
OGP’s Contribution
- Institutionalized reforms: OGP encouraged governments to move from an ad hoc approach to systematized participatory processes for mainstreaming public participation across policy-making. Sierra Leone used OGP to shift parliament-CSO engagement from ad hoc lobbying to standardized processes for civil society input into legislation and oversight.
- Inclusive design: Ecuador’s process brought together over 300 public bodies and CSOs, including 84 LGBTQIA+ organizations, to co‑design the national violence prevention plans and a public monitoring body. Ireland’s OGP action plan included the marriage-equality referenda and a citizens’ assembly, framing them explicitly as open government reforms. This established a new deliberative precedent and deepened public engagement with constitutional questions.
- Resources and visibility: The visibility Ecuador gained from being in OGP helped reformers working on the country’s gender-based violence and anti-discrimination initiatives secure technical and financial backing from other funders. San Pedro Garza García (Mexico) received OGP Local and OECD recognition for its OGP commitments, which in turn strengthened domestic legitimacy and incentives to sustain and replicate these innovations.
- Platform for a plurilateral system: A new OGP thematic coalition, the Participation Action Group, was launched under the leadership of France and the UK at the 2025 OGP Global Summit. This action-oriented initiative brings together 13 European member countries to advance the frontier of mainstreaming public participation in government policy-making.
Effective institutions and public policy depend on trust. Yet a persistent global polycrisis, from climate change to political polarization, is testing governments and communities, causing people to lose trust in their governments. In a 2026 survey of OECD countries, 43 percent of respondents said they have low or no trust in their government, with over half reporting that they are not confident that people have a say in what the government does.
How can governments respond to this serious decrease in trust? Through meaningful public participation with the people directly impacted by government policies.
Public participation brings direct input from ordinary people into decision-making processes, resulting in more transparent, accountable governance, better public services, and more equitable outcomes grounded in lived experiences. It also provides legitimacy for difficult trade-offs: when people are involved in the decisions affecting them, those decisions are better understood. That same OECD survey supports that political agency is the greatest driver of trust: when people believe that national governments are open to input from the public and make well-informed decisions, they tend to have higher levels of trust.
Empowering the public through the design and delivery of policies strengthens people’s sense of dignity through meaningful engagement, strengthened accountability, and more human-centred public services. Since OGP’s launch in 2011, members have mainstreamed public participation to embed genuine, inclusive public engagement into government policy-making as a standard practice, especially through co-creation.
15 Years of Progress
OGP has helped shift participation from an experiment to an expectation. Over the past 15 years, OGP members have made considerable progress in mainstreaming public participation by encouraging collaboration to shape policies.
Through the OGP action plan process, most countries advancing public participation throughOGP have achieved concrete results, such as creating standing spaces for participation, passing new laws or regulations around participation, or involving civil society in implementing commitments.
- Public involvement: Nearly all OGP countries (61 out of 67) have involved civil society in the implementation of commitments, such as through consultations, participatory workshops, co-creation of policy, or co-implementation of reforms. Nearly two-thirds of OGP countries (40 out of 67)have involved underrepresented groups, specifically, in commitment implementation
- Legal frameworks: Over half of OGP countries (36 out of 67) have also strengthened public participation through legislation or regulation, helping ensure the sustainability of these reforms and cementing long-lasting change.
- Policy improvements: In 38 countries, there is clear evidence that civil society directly impacted commitment results, such as by shaping (or co-creating) policies, influencing decisions, or informing the direction of implementation. In over a third of OGP countries (26 out of67), there is evidence that participatory processes contributed to tangible improvements to policy outcomes, such as improved public services or better achievement of policy objectives.
This success is a result of the intentional ways in which OGP members have engaged people in policy-making. The cases that follow illustrate just a few of these successful reforms.
France
Prior to OGP, the Cour des Comptes, the government audit office, had few formal mechanisms for public input. To address this, the Court committed to launching two digital platforms to bring citizens into its core work: one for public participation, allowing the public to propose and vote on topics for future audits, and one to provide a safe, anonymous whistleblowing channel to report mismanagement or corruption. In 2023, the Cour des Comptes ran an outreach campaign that led to about 20,000 registrations on the platform and an increase in the number of proposals by 86 percent. In the first two years, 29,000 citizens proposed and voted on topics for future audits, with about 30 percent of contributions focused on local issues. Meanwhile, on the whistleblower platform, members of the public also reported over 1,000 submissions of financial misconduct in 2023 alone, 70 percent of which were actionable and led to judicial investigations. What began as an OGP commitment is now reshaping how one of France’s most powerful institutions understands its relationship with the public it serves.
Ecuador
OGP helped Ecuador turn fragmented efforts on countering violence against women and LGBTQIA+ communities into a coherent national policy. The OGP process encouraged authorities to bring scattered initiatives into a national plan, embed multi-stakeholder participation at every stage, and establish a public monitoring body as an oversight mechanism. Through its action plan, Ecuadorco-created a “National Plan to Prevent and Eradicate Violence against Women (2019–2025)” and a “Plan of Action for LGBTI+ Diversities” through 16 virtual consultation sessions with almost 3,000 participants, involved more than 300 public institutions and CSOs in diagnostics and design, and conducted a participatory validation with 84 LGBTQIA+ organisations. The government also created a new Subsecretariat for Diversities and strengthened the human rights ministry’s mandate to address violence based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Thanks to the visibility granted by OGP, Ecuador also unlocked external support for this reform: the German international aid agency (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit, or GIZ), UN agencies, and the EU Spotlight Initiative provided technical and financial backing for diagnostics, indicator design, and capacity building across 23 public institutions and several municipalities.
Estonia
Estonia has long prioritized electronic governance and digital participation, but OGP helped turn that tradition into something more ambitious. During its 2014–2016 action plan, the Estonian Cooperation Assembly launched rahvaalgatus.ee, a platform allowing citizens to crowdsource, prioritize, and vote on policy proposals to send directly to parliament and local governments. This initiative quickly proved successful: in its first 20 months, the platform collected more votes than Estonia’s first e-elections. Within two years, 16 initiatives had reached parliament, with more than 30 others still gathering support. By 2022, 50,000 people had signed their support for local causes, from preserving schools and libraries to environmental protection, with several petitions leading to direct policy changes. The platform’s success has since fed back into OGP itself: Estonia now uses it as a flagship example at OGP summits and in strategy documents, reinforcing domestic political support for the tool’s further development and local rollout.
Plateau State, Nigeria
In Plateau State (Nigeria), weak enforcement of the 2015 Gender and Equal Opportunities Law left women and girls vulnerable to discrimination and violence. The state government addressed this gap by creating a Gender and Equal Opportunities Commission. This reform was born from the state’s first OGP action plan and backed by cross-party commitments from gubernatorial candidates to advance OGP at the local level. Fulfilling this promise, the new governor approved the creation of the commission, which launched in 2023 with a mandate to enforce the 2015 law. Since its launch, the commission has worked to reflect women’s perspectives in state policies and the rights of women and girls. By early 2025, it had handled over 23 rights violations and repatriated nearly 100 trafficked children. In interviews with the IRM, OGP stakeholders reported that the commission was providing free legal services to address discriminationwhile introducing gender perspectives into the Plateau State Development Strategy. This in turn helped lay the foundations for gender-mainstreaming in the state’s wider policy-making process.
Republic of Korea
In 2016, the Republic of Korea faced a public trust crisis: tens of thousands of people protested outside of Gwanghwamun Palace in the heart of Seoul, calling for the resignation of President Park Geun-Hye amid a corruption scandal. Following her impeachment and a political transition in 2017, the new government decided to create the “Gwanghwamun 1st Street” platform to create a new channel for members of the public to make their voices heard. After its launch, the platform collected 180,705 citizen suggestions in 49 days. Among these, 1,718 were integrated into government policies, with 99 reflected in national‑level agenda items. One example comes from a primary school class in Jeju Island, whose proposal for regulating disposable ice packs was selected as a pilot program and then evolved into national policy on safer refrigerant chemicals. By the end of April 2020, the platform received over 800,000 petitions and over 136 million signatures. In its next action plan, the Republic of Korea committed to strengthening Gwanghwamun 1st Street. OGP provided a platform and international spotlight that encouraged the government to treat the platform not as a one‑off transition experiment, but as a continuing policy instrument to turn public input into concrete policies.
Sierra Leone
Sierra Leone created institutionalized mechanisms to bring people closer to the work of parliament. One new avenue for participation is the parliamentary–CSO joint oversight committee, which now hosts regular meetings between parliamentary staff and the CSO network ParlCSOnet. As a result, the committee has shifted from ad hoc lobbying to routine dialogue, which has standardized the role CSOs play and allowed them to comment on draft bills and oversight issues. Parliament also created a fully equipped CSO desk to facilitate dialogue between CSOs and members of parliament and runs half‑yearly forums and training for members of parliament on CSO roles. Parliamentary actors now explicitly reference OGP as a model that enables oversight, representation, accountability and transparency, which helped justify dedicating space, staff, and procedures for CSO engagement and committing publicly to reforms like changing standing orders around budget debates. The second edition of the African Open Parliament Index notes that Sierra Leone moved up in its rankings on dimensions of transparency, civic participation, and public accountability.
Ireland
In 2015, Ireland set a new global standard for inclusion: it became the first country to legalize marriage equality through a national referendum that changed the language of its constitution to allow marriage “without distinction as to sex.” The referendum, which stemmed from a citizens’ assembly that recommended the referendum and endorsed the “yes” vote, illustrates the power of public participation. Though the citizens’ assembly and referendum took place outside of the action plan process, Ireland included these effects in its 2014–20216 action plan, alongside reforms on pre‑legislative scrutiny and access to environmental information. By framing these other reforms in the context of the referendum process, the government helped disseminate this public participation model internationally via the OGP network, amplifying the domestic recognition that this was a democratic innovation rather than an ad hoc response. The use of a citizens’ assembly and referendum established a new deliberative precedent for constitutional change, later used for other issues in Ireland like abortion, and is widely seen as having deepened public engagement with constitutional questions.
San Pedro Garza García, Mexico
In San Pedro Garza García (Mexico), residents once struggled with slow, opaque municipal services. In 2020, the city launched an AI-powered chatbot called “Sam” to receive reports from citizens about potholes and other public service issues. This first iteration of the tool saw early success, but struggled to respond to requests in a timely manner and did not allow people to follow up on their reports. To address these challenges, the city transformed the system in 2022 by training staff to respond to requests, sending feedback to members of the public with photos of how their requests had been resolved, and creating a performance dashboard to allow the public to track progress. As a result, Sam’s response time was cut in half, from 5 to 2.5 days. Between April 2024 and 2025, residents filed 67,715 reports, more than triple the 2020 baseline, with 84 percent of reports receiving a timely response from the government.
Looking Ahead
Institutions, as well as the policies and services they produce and provide, must reflect the diversity of the people they serve and listen to those most in need. As OGP members explore new frontiers of reform, centering this idea is essential to building on the past successes in mainstreaming public participation in government policies and practices. One way to do this is by deepening the quality and impact of public participation so that decision-making reflects and improves lived realities.
Governments can do this by building the legal, institutional, and cultural enablers that make inclusive participation normal rather than exceptional. OGP is supporting these efforts via the Participation Action Group, led by France and the UK, which was launched at the 2025 OGP Global Summit with 13 European members to advance the new frontiers of mainstreaming public participation through collective action, as well as the Mainstreaming Participation Accelerator program with the Institute for Public Finance and People Powered.
OGP members are already working on ambitious reforms to continue improving public participation into a governance norm through the Open Gov Challenge. In Quezon City (the Philippines), the local government is helping build the capacity of CSOs that belong to the People’s Council, to increase their participation in city governance. The city committed to allocating more funding to the People’s Council, involving the body in the accreditation of new CSOs, and creating a program to identify the needs of CSOs and provide capacity training. This initiative won last year’s Open Gov Challenge award.
Nuevo León (Mexico) is also advancing public participation through an initiative that also won an Open Gov Challenge award. Though the city currently uses public forums and multi-stakeholder bodies to discuss public policies and propose recommendations, citizens cannot easily participate and it is difficult to track the outcomes of decisions made. To address this, the government committed to developing a digital platform to centralize information about these bodies, provide real-time monitoring of their decision outcomes, and allow citizens to vote and provide feedback on initiatives.
Brazil is rebuilding and expanding citizen involvement in federal policy-making, which also won an Open Gov Challenge award. Since 2023, the government has made considerable progress in implementing its Federal Strategy for Social Participation and Popular Education, drawing on its deep-rooted tradition of engaging the public in policy-making, enabling federal and state institutions to use citizen participation as a tool to address social and political exclusion. The strategy includes activities such as hosting over sixty conferences at the local, state, and national levels, re-establishing spaces for public engagement on key issues, and launching a national digital platform for public participation called Brasil Participativo. By bridging digital innovation, the strategy demonstrates the leadership of the national government in coordinating efforts across ministries, civil society, and the general public to advance participatory spaces and expand mechanisms for dialogue, political education, and reduce structural inequalities that limit civic engagement.
Looking ahead, governments should work to make participation the default rather than the exception: every OGP member should make concrete progress towards establishing institutionalized mechanisms for meaningful, inclusive public engagement across government, not just in individual action plans. Success means participation is embedded in legal frameworks and administrative culture, with OGP members recognized as global leaders in demonstrating that institutions that collaborate with their people govern better.