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New Approaches, New Opportunities: Expanding the Reach of Local Open Government

Nuevas estrategias, nuevas oportunidades: Un mayor alcance para el programa de OGP Local

Nouvelles approches, nouvelles opportunités: Élargir la portée du gouvernement ouvert local

OGP Support Unit|

For the Open Government Partnership (OGP) to be successful in making governments more transparent, accountable and responsive to citizen needs, it’s imperative that we engage leaders at all levels – including at the local level. This inclusive approach enables us to leverage innovation, bring open government practices at the level where citizens most directly interact with their governments, and hear from more voices (including women who interestingly hold more leadership positions at the local level.*)   

We have already seen great success at this level. Through the OGP Local Program, which launched in 2016, Austin, Texas has reduced inequality with dedicated equity and citizen engagement analysis. In Sekondi Takoradi , Ghana and Madrid, Spain we’ve seen inspiring results on how citizens voices can help shape action plans and budgets. 

Since 2011, we have also seen 60 countries make locally relevant commitments in their national action plans. These 332 commitments account for nearly ten percent of the total commitments made. Strong examples of national efforts to promote open local government can be found in Argentina, Estonia, Italy, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Mexico, and many others!

To build on these successes, OGP began a process to evaluate and build a new local strategy earlier this year. With input and oversight from an OGP Steering Committee Local Taskforce, we spoke to over 90 stakeholders in 27 countries including current OGP Local members, government and civil society leaders working at both national and local levels, and networks working on local governance.  

Now, we are broadening this effort to include all of you. To start with, we invite you to take a short survey to tell us what you think about the new strategy outlined briefly below, give us inputs on design, and to let us know how to best engage with you moving forward. We also hosted five webinars to provide some more detail on the new strategy, what we hope to achieve, and start a dialogue to inform our design processes. The webinars are available in English, Spanish, and French

In May 2019 at the OGP Global Summit in Canada the OGP Steering Committee endorsed a strategy with three key pillars. 

  1. Supporting strategic national-local integration to support effective national government and civil society strategies to foster local open government through national initiatives, including the OGP national action plan processes. 
  2. Enhancing the OGP Local program by redesigning the current program to be more flexible, scalable and inclusive
  3. Developing a collaborative platform for learning that provides easy access to knowledge resources, learning opportunities, peer and expert networks to those working on open local government.

The strategy envisages the following key shifts:

We are committed to building out this work’s components in a way consistent with the values of open government and complementary to the partnership’s ongoing efforts. For current OGP local participants that developed action plans in 2018, changes will take effect only after their current cycle ends in August 2020. For locals developing action plans in 2019, we will work with you on a transition plan in the coming months.  We plan to formally launch this strategy by 2020.

We look forward to hearing from as many of you as possible to benefit from your insights and experience as we continue this exciting journey.  We’ll keep posting regular updates and questions to help guide us as we go along. If you have any questions or suggestions please contact: patrick.kazyak@opengovpartnership.org.

*According to the Wilson Center, on average, “women make up 29% of regional assemblies and 27% of municipal councils at the subnational level. We see slightly less representation in national legislatures with women making up 21% of lower houses and 23% of upper houses. The gap exists. From this data we can tell that there are more women at the subnational level.”

Comments (2)

Kalaya Puvanant Reply

To access Open Government in my Country “Thailand” please contact directly to our PM,the reason is prior to we never know anything about OGP. But Luckily Our Prime Minister General Prayut Chanocha is an Outstanding leader who can understand and realize the great value of OGP to the public. He has ordered every responsible office for related data of OGP to flow and inform all information to the public as their mission through PR chanel.
Whereas, still many government official could not follow his initiatives or could not get it’s philosophy..
Therefore; if OGP has new approach to provide precious tools for all kinds of corruption prevention trough means of open information to public.
Welcome to Thailand, workshop for ASEAN countries leaders will be the Most Appropriate tools for us.
So that Leaders will get the ownership of Open Data for their Citizen AS National Agenda.
Thanks for listen.

Jhon Esteban Reply

En Venezuela hay varias Alcaldias que pueden estar interesadas en Gobierno Abierto

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