Recommendations for Improving the OGP Draft Co-creation Guidelines

7 November 2016

The Centre for Law and Democracy (CLD) has prepared a Note on the draft co-creation guidelines prepared by the Open Government Partnership (OGP). The draft guidelines aim to strengthen the OGP’s current consultation requirements. The Note recognises the importance of this objective and the contribution the draft guidelines make to achieving it, while also putting forward a number of recommendations to further strengthen the guidelines.

Click here to read the Note
Click here to read the draft co-creation guidelines

“We very much welcome this important initiative”, said Toby Mendel, Executive Director of CLD. “Consultation on the OGP national action plans remains far too weak in many OGP Participating Countries and further guidance from the OGP as to what is expected will be very useful. CLD has prepared this Note to try to help ensure that the final guidelines are as robust as possible.”

Some of the key recommendations in the CLD Note are as follows:

• The guidelines should be more inclusive in terms of key stakeholders and, in particular, not focus exclusively on civil society.
• Consideration should be given to using the three chronological phases of the national action plans (NAPs) as the primary organisational structure for the guidelines, because this is how activities are actually undertaken. Consideration should also be given to using ‘development’, ‘implementation/monitoring’ and ‘assessment/reporting’ as those three phases (rather than ‘development’, ‘implementation’ and ‘monitoring’).
• More attention is needed throughout the guidelines on the obligation of governments to engage a wide range of stakeholders in these processes.
• More thought needs to be given to the key question of the composition and role of the multi-stakeholder forum, in particular its role as a decision maker for NAPs.

CLD calls on the OGP to continue to improve the draft guidelines in accordance with these recommendations.

For further information, please contact:

Toby Mendel
Executive Director
Centre for Law and Democracy
toby@law-democracy.org
+1 902 431-3688
www.law-democracy.org
twitter: @law_democracy