Modernizing Public Governance (NO0033)

The Government will consider various measures to promote a more implementation-oriented and result-oriented administration. These measures will aim to strengthen
interaction and coordination across agencies and sectors and across administrative levels.
This will help in ensuring that central government agencies are better managed, and that
they make greater use of ICT than they do today.

21. Modernising public governance

Commitment Text:

 […] The purpose of this initiative is to clarify objectives and priorities, clarify roles and responsibilities, reduce unnecessary reporting, and promote better leadership and more efficient central government agencies, among other ways, by means of better exploitation of ICT and by better interaction and coordination across sectors and administrative levels.

COMMITMENT DESCRIPTION
The Government will consider various measures to promote a more implementation-oriented and result-oriented administration. These measures will aim to strengthen interaction and coordination across agencies and sectors and across administrative levels. This will help in ensuring that central government agencies are better managed, and that they make greater use of ICT than they do today.

Responsible institution: Ministry of Government Administration, Reform and Church Affairs

Supporting institution(s): None

Start date: Not specified                 End date:  15 December 2013

Editorial note: The text of the commitments was abridged for formatting reasons. For the full text of the commitment, please see http://bit.ly/1QlVIja.

Policy Aim

Improvements of public services and eGovernment services have been a priority for the Norwegian government for many years, as is represented by the creation of the Directorate for Administration and Information and Communication Technology (ICT) within the Agency for Public Management and eGovernment (Difi) in 2008.^{[Note 113: ”Om Difi,” Agency for Public Management and eGovernment (Difi), accessed October 11, 2016, https://www.difi.no/om-difi. ]} This commitment is vaguely worded, but seems to mirror that general ambition to improve the efficiency and impact of public governance, generally and through the use of ICT.

Status

Mid-term: Unable to tell from government and civil society responses
This commitment was vaguely worded, which made it difficult to assess its potential impact or level of completion. Better management and greater ICT use would certainly matter, and the IRM researcher recommends commitments around this topic be written in clear, measurable language in future action plans.

End-of-term:  Unable to tell from government and civil society responses
The Ministry of Local Government and Modernisation (KMD) has described several initiatives conducted in 2015 that are closely related to this commitment, including the activities described in the three-year government strategy for better governance and public leadership. Activities include improving the decision-making frameworks for including evidence in decision-making processes and clarifying project and position descriptions in order to “improve leadership.”^{[Note 114: Program for bedre styring og ledelse i staten 2014-2017 available at https://www.regjeringen.no/globalassets/upload/kmd/apa/program_for_bedre_styring_og_ledelse_i_staten.pdf.]} Given the vague wording of the commitment, the IRM researcher is unable to determine to what extent this fulfills the commitment.

Did it open government?

This commitment was entirely internal to government in that it committed government to “consider” measures to “strengthen interaction and coordination across agencies.” Given the lack of a public-facing element in the commitment, the IRM researcher was unable to find any evidence that this commitment had any meaningful impact on government openness.

Carried forward?

This commitment has not been carried forward in the Norwegian government’s third national action plan, which is available on the OGP website.^{[Note 115: ”Norway’s third action plan Open Government Partnership (OGP),” Ministry of Local Government and Modernisation, accessed September 4, 2016, http://www.opengovpartnership.org/wp-content/uploads/2001/01/Norway_2016-17_NAP.pdf.]}