Tomorrow campaigners and officials from over 60 countries will gather in London for the second annual summit of the Open Government Partnership, a voluntary multi-stakeholder initiative dedicated to strengthening the transparency and accountability commitments of its member states.
Over the past few months we’ve been involved in extensive consultations and talks to give input to the UK’s National Action Plan, hoping that the UK taking leadership in key areas will spur other countries to follow suit. We’re also organising and participating in numerous events and sessions at and around this week’s summit on topics that we think deserve attention.
What do we hope will happen this week? Following are some of the areas we’ll be particularly keeping an eye on over the coming days.
Ending secrecy around company ownership
We hope the UK and other governments commit to cracking down on phantom firms by creating open, public registers of who really owns and controls companies. This has been a major campaigning point for many of the civil society organisations involved in the process of developing the UK’s National Action Plan and we and many others will be watching keenly for announcements in this area tomorrow and Friday.
Enabling citizens to ‘Follow the Money’
We hope that the Open Government Partnership member countries will commit to opening up information about public money so that citizens can hold decision-makers to account. Crucially this should not just be spending and budgets, but also things like contracts and revenues from public assets like natural resources and land. We’ll be discussing this in our ‘Follow the Money’ session – in particular focusing on the needs of campaigners in developing countries. If you’re interested in this area, you can sign up on our recently launched Follow the Money site.
Putting carbon emissions transparency on the open government agenda
We’d like to see more OGP countries making carbon emissions transparency a key part of their open government commitments. In particular we’d like corporate carbon emissions reporting requirements to result in the publication of machine readable open databases. We’d also like to see more timely, granular, and accessible data from governments at both national and subnational levels, and more initiatives to engage citizens around progress on tracking carbon pollution reduction.
Who’s lobbying?
We think every country in the world should have a lobbyist register that shows who is lobbying whom for what, to help to safeguard against big money having an unfair influence in politics. And we think it is essential that lobbyist registers are published as open data. We hope to see announcements in this area from OGP countries, and discussion about how to improve transparency around who’s lobbying. If you’re interested in this area you can join the new working group that we recently launched with the Sunlight Foundation.
Dr. Jonathan Gray is Lecturer in Critical Infrastructure Studies at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, where he is currently writing a book on data worlds. He is also Cofounder of the Public Data Lab; and Research Associate at the Digital Methods Initiative (University of Amsterdam) and the médialab (Sciences Po, Paris). More about his work can be found at jonathangray.org and he tweets at @jwyg.
