Last week, representatives from governments and multilateral institutions, covering around a third of the world's population gathered alongside civil society, youth and private sector representatives in London for the Open Government Partnership's (OGP) Summit.
More than 1 000 delegates from 73 countries, including the 62 current Open Government Partnership (OGP) partners, attended to share their experiences, discuss progress and show how openness and transparency are making a difference to their citizens.
The summit focused on five key areas where open government has the power to deliver clear and measurable outcomes:
- Open data: radically opening up government data to boost entrepreneurship, better public services, growth and accountability.
- Government integrity: fighting corruption and strengthening democracy through transparent government.
- Fiscal transparency: joining a new global standard in the automatic exchange of information to ensure taxpayers can follow their money.
- Empowering citizens: transforming the relationship between citizens and governments.
- Natural resource transparency: working towards a common global reporting standard, ensuring that payments for extractives and natural resources are transparent and used for public benefit.
Around these five themes, governments gathered to share success stories, check that previous transparency promises have actually been kept, and set ambitious new commitments for greater openness. The United Kingdom committed itself to create a publicly accessible central registry of information on beneficial ownership. The registry will contain information about who ultimately owns and controls UK companies.
The UK also welcomed the announcement by Deputy Minister for Public Service and Administration Ayanda Dlodlo, who led the South African delegation to the summit, of the School's Connectivity Project, under the theme of Empowering Citizens. This will form part of South Africa's wide-ranging action plan to meet OGP commitments over the next two years. As Minister Dlodlo has said, "our priority through the Open Government Partnership is to meet the basic needs of the people."
The OGP Summit helped drive forward global action in a unified and collaborative manner. We want to embed OGP as a credible force for making governments more open, innovative, accountable and efficient, as well as societies healthier and more prosperous. I am therefore pleased that the growing global transparency movement made a significant stride forward as a result of the commitments made at the summit.
The United Kingdom – which handed over the role of OGP lead co-chair to Indonesia at the London summit – is determined that transparency must be beyond platitudes and empty promises. It is time to show just what powerful changes open government can deliver and what transformation open government can catalyse. We want to see transparency and innovation hard-wired into international governance and embraced by governments around the world.
The OGP's 62 member states span the whole world – showing just how global the transparency movement now is. We are all at different places along the path to greater openness. The point of the partnership is to support one another in making progress. We have no illusion that this will be easy or automatic. We are not oblivious to the limitations and current challenges and accept that at times progress will be slower than we would like.
The ambitious commitments made at the summit have the potential to effect real improvements in the lives of ordinary people. After all, this is the ultimate test of the benefits of transparency.
This is an important and epochal moment. People around the world are demanding much greater openness, good governance and accountability from their governments. Citizens are demanding that the state should be their servant, not their master, and that information that governments hold should be open for everyone to see. At the same time, new technology is disrupting established bureaucracies and creating opportunities for much more responsive government. Around the world, reforms to open up government are delivering tangible benefits: faster growth, better public services, less corruption and less poverty.
In short, transparency is an idea which is sweeping across the world, or to paraphrase Victor Hugo, an idea whose time has come – and nothing is more powerful than that.
Francis Maude is Britain's minister for the Cabinet office.