OGP: Guidelines for Assessing OGP Action Plans

The Centre for Law and Democracy is today releasing a Report – Making the OGP Effective: Guidelines for Assessing OGP Action Plans – which presents nine guidelines for assessing Open Government Partnership (OGP) Participating States’ action plans. The development and implementation of action plans is central to the whole OGP project: they contain the concrete commitments made by Participating States and hence the standards against which performance is measured. The guidelines are designed to be used by local stakeholders to assess the quality of country action plans.

Click here to read the Report

“Despite the importance of action plans, many are very poorly done and even the better ones stand to be improved significantly,” said CLD Executive Director Toby Mendel. “We hope that local groups find these guidelines useful to help them assess and then advocate for better action plans, which we see as one of the most practical ways of bolstering the impact of the OGP.”

The guidelines address a range of standards for OGP action plans, including the consultation process, the extent to which commitments are diverse, ambitious, relevant and new, the extent to which commitments are concrete, including through having clear timelines for achievement, the extent to which commitments cover all relevant actors and envisage progressive improvement, and whether plans include clear monitoring and evaluation frameworks.

These guidelines are a tool for anyone to use. CLD strongly encourages local stakeholders to take ownership of the guidelines, and to use them to assess the action plans which their countries have adopted. We are ready and willing to help with this process when requested. Otherwise, we hope local stakeholders will use the guidelines on their own, and we look forward to reading about the results.