The Global Data Barometer’s political integrity module was born out of a collaboration with Open Government Partnership (OGP) and Transparency International (TI). The module has 12 indicators spanning across all the GDB pillars—governance, availability, capability and use.
OGP promotes transparency, participation, inclusivity and accountable governance within the countries they work with. We recently had the opportunity to chat with Joseph Foti, the Chief Research Officer at OGP, who shared that the collaboration with the GDB allows the OGP to address some gaps in scope and knowledge between policy and practice.
Q: Can you provide a brief summary of the work that you do?
Open Government Partnership is an international initiative made up of more than 100 governments, and thousands of civil society organisations around the world. The OGP works on several levels, with the most important being national and local governments. Governments make two year action plans, with concrete commitments, which they commit to develop with civil society, and are verified by an independent reporting mechanism, or IRM.
Open Government Partnership promotes transparency, participation, inclusivity and accountable governance within the countries they work with.
Q: How does the GDB matter for the work that you’re doing?
We were interested in this round of the Global Data Barometer for a few reasons, one is we had a tremendous gap in data on some very basic policies and practices that are important to our members. Take, for example, data on public contracts. Currently, there is no rigorous, cross-nationally comparable source that can tell you whether governments publish contracts. Similarly, there is no rigorous source on whether lobbying data is disclosed, globally.
In addition, the GDB is important for us because it tracks both whether there are disclosure policies in place. More importantly, it also follows through to see if the policy is being implemented. For instance, with asset disclosure by elected and appointed officials, the World Bank evaluates existing laws but does not track implementation. Over the years we have suspected that there could be a disconnect between policy and practice but we did not have the evidence. Now, based on the preliminary findings from the GDB, we have growing evidence that shows that of all the policy areas evaluated, almost every OGP member has asset disclosure laws on the books. However, less than half of those published the information, which is what we suspected. I think there was a big push 10 years ago to get everyone to pass these laws. But, it’s not in the interest of most politicians to implement the law. So, instead of repealing the law, they just ignore it. Hopefully, with this data , we can help make lack of implementation harder to ignore.
Q: What are some of your early reactions to the data that has been collected by the GDB?
From our perspective, the data is very good and we are looking forward to understanding the emerging trends. From the preliminary data, we have noticed that many of our member countries don’t have lobbying laws, which is a problem because you want to be able to know about who influences decision making. So we know that, with lobbying in most of our countries, we fundamentally have a legal problem. That’s very different from the problem in asset disclosure, which I just discussed, where the majority of countries have good laws on the books, often written by the best advisors or consultants, but they’re not publishing the data.
We were interested in this round of the Global Data Barometer for a few reasons, one is we had a tremendous gap in data on some very basic policies and practices that are important to our members. Take, for example, data on public contracts. Currently, there is no rigorous, cross-nationally comparable source that can tell you whether governments publish contracts. Similarly, there is no rigorous source on whether lobbying data is disclosed, globally.
Q: What are some compelling examples of data availability, data governance, data capacity building, or data use in your area?
We have a great example, from Colombia, where a young man, Jimmy, wanted to find out if COVID funds that his government had received were used correctly. He was able to find that there was some money that wasn’t spent and that there was evidence of irregular spending. This case highlights the importance of spending and budgeting data. It also highlights that we need to be intentional about data users, an important element of the GDB as it reviews the extent to which there is an environment where people want to use available data. Please find this and other OGP stories to be found on December 13 here.
Q: What do you think is currently missing from the data ecosystem in your area?
I’m really excited about the interoperability lens that the GDB brings to the table, because it is important. A positive example has been Croatia, they have company ownership data, politically exposed persons data, company ownership data, and contracts data. Now, a lot of this data is still in pdfs, but it is structured. So, watchdog organisations have been able to combine the data to see where there are large expenditures being misappropriated by politicians and to track bidding processes, ultimately identifying where there is an appearance of conflict of interest. While not perfect, we would want most of our member countries to move in this direction. When identified, you would want to track enforcement actions when the law is violated, highlighting that the interoperability angle is important, because you need to be able to apply the information where it is needed.
Q: How do you think the political integrity module makes a difference in the work that you do?
We call it political integrity for a reason. The goal is to nurture democracy, and not just to limit corruption. For example, when we look at lobbying at the OGP, we approach it as a right to participate in government decision making—to inform, observe, and influence. People should lobby, organisations should lobby, and everyone has a right to inform decision-makers about their interests and opinions. But they don’t have the right to bribe or to do so anonymously. Getting that balance right is really important.
Q: What are some of the features of the Barometer you are looking forward to?
What I would love to dive deeper into are the use cases, because we need to show these cases to governments. If we go to Kenya, Nigeria, or South Africa, they want to know what the other countries in the region are doing. Ideally, this creates some form of competitive environment where each country aspires to improve or catch up with the other, and civil society groups adopt and adapt the strategies that have worked in their countries. This is the same in Asia, North America or Europe. So real-world use cases are vital in highlighting the feasibility of open data models for better politics.
Photo cred: Open Government Partnership