Action Plan Commitments – A Brief Guide
The key achievement of the current consultation on Ireland and Open Government will be Ireland’s first OGP National Action Plan. This will set out the commitments the government undertakes to create more open and accountable government. These can apply to all authorities, from central government to local councils. Commitments should be ambitious. They should also be SMART: specific, measurable, action-oriented, realistic and time-bound. The commitments are to yield fruit within two years.
While every OGP country should use the national context to decide what commitments it wants to design to match national priorities, they should at least match one of OGP’s five grand challenges. These are:
1. Improved Public Services – what you are entitled to as a citizen and how these services can be better designed and delivered.
2. Increased Public Integrity – anti-corruption, public ethics, access to information, building trust with citizens, whistleblower protection
3. Effective Public Resource Management – improved budgeting, transparency in procurement, accountable use of natural resources and foreign assistance
4. Safer Communities – measures that address public safety, the security sector, disaster and crisis response, and environmental threats
5. Increased Corporate Accountability—measures that address corporate responsibility on issues such as the environment, anti-corruption, consumer protection, and community engagement.
Here are examples of concrete commitments from some of the other 50+ countries already in the Open Government Partnership.
Accountability: The OGP defines this as an environment in which government members will routinely explain their actions and accept responsibility for failures.
Estonia: set up an independent ethics council aimed at strengthening the core service values and ethics of officials.
Peru: create a ‘governance observatory’ (it happened and it’s called Infogob). This analyses both political success and performance. It includes information about candidates and incumbents, profiles of different parts of the country, and data that helps understand possible causes of conflict.
Canada: implement the International Aid Transparency Initiative in order to provide clear information on how Canadian aid is being spent and what it is achieving.
Hungary: all public procurement contracts published online in a computer readable form, with each contractor allocated a permanent identification code to make for easier analysis.
Argentina: create a State Map, which provides organisational diagrams of all public bodies, showing who is responsible for what.
Citizen Participation: Citizens will be actively encouraged to debate, take part in decision processes and create governments more responsive to public needs.
Finland: develop mechanisms for participatory budgeting, so that the people had a role and input in deciding how their tax money would be spent.
Croatia: the pledge – with its dedicated funding – was to set up a system of consultations with citizens to identify priorities for budget spending.
Montenegro: open an online platform to allow citizens to create and sign e-petitions.
South Africa: setup Service Delivery Improvement Forums to provide citizen report cards at community level on primary health care, water, sanitation, environmental management and housing.
Peru: promote citizen participation as observers in public contests, auctions, procurement.
Technology & Innovation: The importance of universal access to technology should be recognized, and all citizens assisted to use technologies to inform themselves and improve daily routines.
Slovakia: as with many countries, an open data portal has been set up to channel all official information to citizens. Each ministry has to provide a data-set on schedule, so people know what information to expect, and where.
The Philippines: all releases about Congressional budget allocations are being digitized and put online so the public can read about them in a timely fashion.
Ukraine: create a single platform for citizens to file petitions and information requests with government at national and local level.
Croatia: consolidate all disparate records of citizens to provide for a better coordination of services and security of personal data.
United States: develop online hub, performance.gov, to show progress of government agencies in achieving specific performance goals and provide access to the annual auditing reports of each government agency.
Transparency: Information on government activities and decisions to be open, comprehensive, timely, freely available to the public and meet basic open data standards – that is, it can be downloaded or copied and will be readable in all common computer formats.
Romania: a two-year programme to standardize open data release. Year 1 – appoint an open data official in every public institution. Year 2 – institute a standard publishing format of open data, so that all the material could be machine-readable.
Finland: an initiative for all official documents to be written in plain, simple language, with public servants to be trained in how to do this.
Brazil: carry out a study on the values, knowledge and culture governing access to public information within the public and civil service.
United Kingdom: publish evidence and databases used in policy making by government.
Croatia: improve transparency of national budget documents by providing for more accessible language and breakdowns on structure of the national debt and the impact of current spending on it.
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Example from Estonia of an Action Plan Commitment |
| Key Area: | Addressing Public Official Ethics | |
| Activity: | Creation of a database of declarations of economic interests | |
| Purpose: | Prevention of a conflict of interests and strengthening the anti-corruption attitude of public sector employees and cultivation of ethical behaviour. | |
| In charge: | Ministry of Justice | Deadline: 2014 |
| Expected result: | The created database contributes to the prevention of conflicts of interest and corruption in the public sector. | |
| Activity: | Establishment of the Public Ethics Council | |
| Purpose: | To create an independent ethics council aimed at strengthening the core service values and ethics of officials. | |
| In charge: | Ministry of Finance | Deadline: 2013 |
| Expected result: | The Ethics Council has been established and it operates regularly. The Council advises authorities and officials in matters of public service ethics and expresses opinion on the compliance of behaviour with the ethical requirements applicable to officials. | |
| Activity: | Organisation of ethics training for employees of various public sector organisations | |
| Purpose: | Increasing the awareness of the public sector target groups of the main values of the public sector and the development of skills of ethical resolution of problematic situations. | |
| In charge: | Ministry of Finance | Deadline: 2012 |
| Expected result: | The target group of public ethics training has been extended to all public sector employees. Regular training takes place under the Central Training programme. | |
There is much more information and examples from many countries, on the Open Government Partnership’s own website, www.opengovpartnership.org.
OGP Action Plans – What’s In Them?
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