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Seeking Civil Society Perspectives on Multi-Stakeholder Forums

Buscamos la perspectiva de la sociedad civil sobre los foros multisectoriales

Sollicitation des points de vue de la société civile sur les forums multi-intervenants sur le gouvernement ouvert

Nathaniel Heller|

A key focus of the Government of Canada’s and Nathaniel Hellers 2018-2019 Co-Chair Vision for the Open Government Partnership (OGP) is participation and improving co-creation between government and civil society. The importance of co-creation was highlighted during the 2019 OGP Global Summit where participants from Civil Society Day and Points of Contact Day gathered to discuss and share best practices on how to work better together. 

While this engagement facilitated the exchange of perspectives and ideas, it reinforced the need to capture concrete information on how multi-stakeholder forums (MSFs) are performing across different OGP member countries. 

Recognizing the need to gather a certain level of baseline information, the OGP Support Unit is working with the Government of Canada’s Open Government team and Nathaniel Heller to collect lessons learned on ongoing dialogue mechanisms between government and civil society. Gathered insights will be used to update official OGP guidance and to develop new community resources and tools. 

To collect this information,  a two-part initiative was planned. The first part of the initiative was to include a set of questions about the state of OGP MSFs in the annual OGP Points of Contact (POC) survey that was circulated in January 2019. The second part was to collect feedback from the OGP civil society organization (CSO) community through a separate survey that was circulated in April 2019. While part one of the initiative successfully collected substantial input from government POCs, the response rate for the CSO survey was low. A balanced understanding of MSFs is needed to improve efficiencies and resolve issues; hence, the CSO survey is being relaunched.

Call to Action 

If you are a CSO member of the OGP and haven’t yet filled out the survey, please take the opportunity to do so now. If you know someone from the CSO OGP community who should participate, please share it with them. If you are the OGP Point of Contact for your country or local government, please share it with your civil society partners. The survey will close on August 31, 2019. A summary of the results of the surveys will be shared, along with an outline how findings will be integrated into OGP resources.

Thank you for supporting this important initiative.  

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