The Power of Partnership in Open Government: Reconsidering Multistakeholder Governance Reform

INFORMATION POLICY SERIES

Edited by Sandra Braman

The Information Policy Series publishes research on and analysis of significant problems in the field of information policy, including decisions and practices that enable or constrain information, communication, and culture irrespective of the legal siloes in which they have traditionally been located as well as state-law-society interactions. Defining information policy as all laws, regulations, and decision-making principles that affect any form of information creation, processing, flows, and use, the series includes attention to the formal decisions, decision-making processes, and entities of government; the formal and informal decisions, decision-making processes, and entities of private and public sector agents capable of constitutive effects on the nature of society; and the cultural habits and predispositions of governmentality that support and sustain government and governance. The parametric functions of information policy at the boundaries of social, informational, and technological systems are of global importance because they provide the context for all communications, interactions, and social processes.

A complete list of the books in the Information Policy series appears at the back of this book.

THE POWER OF PARTNERSHIP IN OPEN GOVERNMENT

Reconsidering Multistakeholder Governance Reform

SUZANNE J. PIOTROWSKI, DANIEL BERLINER, AND ALEX INGRAMS

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

© 2022 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

This work is subject to a Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND license.

Subject to such license, all rights are reserved.

The open access edition of this book was made possible by generous funding from the Lois and Samuel Pratt Program for Freedom of Information at Rutgers Law School and the Institute of Public Administration at Leiden University.

The MIT Press would like to thank the anonymous peer reviewers who provided comments on drafts of this book. The generous work of academic experts is essential for establishing the authority and quality of our publications. We acknowledge with gratitude the contributions of these otherwise uncredited readers.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Piotrowski, Suzanne J., 1973– author. | Berliner, Daniel, author. | Ingrams, Alex, author.

Title: The power of partnership in open government : reconsidering multistakeholder governance reform / Suzanne J. Piotrowski, Daniel Berliner, and Alex Ingrams.

Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, [2022] | Series: Information Policy Series / edited by Sandra Braman | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022007845 (print) | LCCN 2022007846 (ebook) | ISBN 9780262544597 (Paperback) | ISBN 9780262372084 (ePub) | ISBN 9780262372091 (PDF)

Subjects: LCSH: Transparency in government. | Administrative agencies—Mexico—Management—Case studies. | Organizational change. | Organizational effectiveness.

Classification: LCC JC598 .P56 2022 (print) | LCC JC598 (ebook) | DDC 352.8/8—dc23/eng/20220630

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022007845

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022007846

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To our families

Contents

List of Illustrations

List of Tables

Series Editor’s Introduction

Acknowledgments

1 INTRODUCTION

The Question of Impact

Our Argument: Two Pathways to Impact

Contributions

Plan of the Book

2 PUBLIC MANAGEMENT REFORM IN A GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE

The Roots of the Open Government Movement

Open Government Reforms in Practice

Competing Visions of Public Management Reform

The Fate of Public Sector Reform

Conclusions

3 THE OPEN GOVERNMENT PARTNERSHIP AS AN INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTION

Multistakeholder Initiatives and International Institutions

The Origin Story

Overview of the Open Government Partnership

4 PATHWAYS OF CHANGE

Evidence of the Direct Pathway of Change

Evidence of the Indirect Pathway of Change

Conclusion

5 A CASE STUDY: DIRECT AND INDIRECT PATHWAYS OF CHANGE IN MEXICO

Methodology and Case Selection

Background and Context

Mexico’s Open Government Partnership Membership: Initial Phases

Government Surveillance and Civil Society Withdrawal

Subnational and Legislative Developments

Summary and Evaluation of the Direct and Indirect Pathways of Change

Conclusion

6 EPILOGUE: LOOKING FORWARD

The Future of Open Government

Building on Prior Work

Wrapping Up

References

Index

List of Illustrations

Figure 1.1 Impact pathways for international institutions

Figure 2.1 Public management reform and associated risks

Figure 4.1 Direct pathway of change

Figure 4.2 Performance of commitments over time

Figure 4.3 Matrix of four types of commitment

Figure 4.4 The indirect pathway of change

List of Tables

Table 1.1 Open Government Partnership member countries as of January 2019

Table 1.2 Relationships between institutional design features and prevalent causal mechanisms potentially associated with the impact of membership

Table 1.3 Summary of direct and indirect pathways of impact of institutional organizations

Table 2.1 Examples of open government initiatives

Table 3.1 Open Government Partnership total funding from private foundations and bilateral aid agencies, 2013–2021

Table 4.1 Predicted effect of country processes on commitment success

Table 4.2 Open Government Partnership commitment statistics (2011–2019)

Table 4.3 The Global Open Data Index top 20 countries (2013–2016)

Table 5.1 Summary of Mexico’s National Action Plan commitments

Table 5.2 Summary of evidence from Mexican case for process-driven mechanisms

Series Editor’s Introduction

Sandra Braman

It is easy, these days, to be discouraged about political matters. Agreements—say, on climate change—are signed, but goals are not achieved. Ambitions are committed to publicly—say, on improving protections for human rights—but fully effective means of ensuring such protections have not yet been found. When it comes to openness in government, the international Open Government Partnership (OGP) has been criticized for failing, so far, to achieve all that it set out to do. In The Power of Partnership in Open Government, though, authors Suzanne J. Piotrowski, Daniel Berliner, and Alex Ingrams offer an alternative, more optimistic view via their original theoretical lens on indirect pathways of change rather than the direct pathways that have long been the standard approach of policy analysts.

The Open Government Partnership, launched alongside the United Nations General Assembly in 2011, is an effort to move those governments that commit toward further openness, what the authors note President Obama referred to as the essence of democracy in the launch speech. Rather than going the formal route of a treaty with its attendant obligations, the OGP seeks to embody lean dynamism in an effort to maximize flexibility and local tailoring in a multistakeholder manner that includes civil society organizations with full parity of representation and innovative models of cocreation between governments and their citizens. The terminology is not used, but this can be understood as a form of adaptive policymaking, with two-year cycles of iterative decision making to reset commitments and the processes that will be undertaken to achieve them in response to developments that had taken place up to that point. Rather than enforcement mechanisms, there are evaluative tools. The bargain, as the authors put it, is exchanging flexibility and weak enforcement for participation and iteration. Eight governments were committed at the launch moment, with leadership shared by the United States and Brazil. By 2019, seventy-seven countries were actively participating, as were several subnational governments, although some countries withdrew from their commitments along the way.

Direct pathways to policy impact are familiar. They focus on commitments made—the authors introduce the delicious concept of a formal policy as a commitment machine—and assume that the only thing that matters is the fulfillment of commitment goals as achieved through formal administrative processes. The direct causal chain in the case of the Open Government Partnership included joining the partnership, making commitments, implementing commitments, evaluating direct successes and failures, and repeating the steps. The Open Government Partnership commitments themselves are discrete reform projects that vary enormously in kind, from digitizing public service delivery to using mobile technology devices in schools and on. Critiques of Open Government Partnership direct pathways to change include failures to achieve goals, the assertion of trivial or already-accomplished commitments, and reliance on ambiguous claims that cannot be evaluated.

Indirect pathways involve not the things of commitments but the processes through which commitments are made and acted upon. The policy impact of indirect causal chains includes building new networks and coalitions, contributing to normative changes, and creating new opportunities and power resources for reformers both inside and outside of government. It is the argument of The Power of Partnership in Open Government that it is the indirect pathways that have the greatest potential for impact on public sector reform—even if it is much more difficult to evaluate such effects. Successes of the Open Government Partnership indirect pathways to change include clarifying, legitimizing, and globalizing new ways of achieving public sector reform and the mainstreaming of open government as a major theme for other institutions. Civil society actors have been empowered in new ways. There has been standard-setting for how governments treat data and transparency in government procurement practices. New principles have been introduced, such as beneficial ownership transparency to prevent the use of shell corporations for money laundering, tax avoidance, and corruption. Numerous linkages have been built with other international organizations and initiatives, with policy networks crossing not only the public and private sectors but also issue area boundaries.

This book uses the Open Government Partnership as its case, but the analytical approach presented is valuable for those working with any type of policy issue. A number of concepts used in discussion of the Open Government Partnership have been around for a while, such as multistakeholderism, policy networks, and legal globalization (harmonization of laws and regulations across national boundaries irrespective of differences in political and/or legal systems). Here, they usefully coalesce within the more comprehensive theoretical framework the authors offer. In an interesting way, the authors reverse the causal directions embedded in international regime theory. In the influential formulation by Stephen Krasner, policy regimes arise out of agreements—whether formal or informal, explicit or implicit—on underlying principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures for policymaking in a specific issue area that develop before formal law is put into place. In the case of the Open Government Partnership, according to these authors, there are commitments to formal laws and explicit government practices that came first but have had their most valuable contributions in the building of a global open government regime, a reversal of the causal flows of international regime theory. There is also a surprising resonance, although at quite another level of analysis, with Gilbert Simondon’s theoretical work on how influence flows interpersonally in ways quite other than those visible in the networked relationships that currently receive so much attention. And the authors recognize that the real world intervenes, with deep appreciation for the contingencies that create policy windows in which successes are achieved as a result of a particular confluence of factors that could not have been controlled deliberately but can be taken advantage of when they occur together. The detailed analysis of the origin story is fascinating—would that we had the same for the Internet Governance Forum.

Much to their credit, the authors take on the challenge of thinking through what may happen to the successes of the indirect pathways given the rise of tyrannical populism in four of the eight original signee governments and given the pervasive consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. On the populism point, the authors suggest that there has as yet been no pushback on Open Government Partnership–related initiatives by such rulers because the diffusion of norms via indirect pathways has been so successful. An alternative reading might be that they haven’t bothered because there has been so little success via direct pathways that it hasn’t been considered worth their trouble to intervene. Open Government Partnership–related initiatives have looked at informational matters related to the pandemic, but it is argued here that it is too soon to tell what the long-term impact on openness commitments of this health crisis may be.

With its seminal insights, this book is rich for those who already have scholarly or policymaking depth in the areas of policy reform and international policymaking and should, from this point on, be considered foundational. At the same time, it is so thorough and clearly written and does such a good job of introducing major strands in the diverse literatures brought together in this interdisciplinary work that it is also a primer for those new to open government and to public reform. The authors offer large intellectual moves that we have needed as we struggle to understand how to most usefully analyze and make policy in what continue to be turbulent times.

Acknowledgments

This book could not have been written without guidance, inspiration, and sound advice from many people in the authors’ academic communities, researchers and policy professionals in the field of open government, the MIT Press, and family and friends.

The generous and continuing financial support of the Lois and Samuel Pratt Program for Freedom of Information at the Rutgers Law School made this project possible. This funding enabled all aspects of the project, including research assistance, travel, writing workshops, copy editing, and support for open-access publishing.

The research assistance we received from numerous outstanding students associated with the Transparency and Governance Center at Rutgers University was invaluable. Our thanks go to Fangda Ding, Rebecca Porter, Gabrielle Rossi, Kayla Schwoerer, and Claire Newsome for all their help. Jonathan Wexler served as an able, and at times entertaining, copy editor and reader on various chapters and the book proposal.

The Global Conference for Transparency Research is an energetic and stimulating venue for discussion about the most pressing topics in transparency research around the world. The idea for this book emerged from conversations among the authors at this conference and was informed by the rich environment of enquiry and debate at subsequent ones.

The authors’ own academic institutions supported us throughout the research and publication process—the School of Public Affairs and Administration, Rutgers University Newark; the Department of Government, London School of Economics; the School of Politics and Global Studies, Arizona State University; the Institute of Governance, Tilburg University; and the Institute of Public Administration, Leiden University.

We appreciate our colleagues who provided feedback on the original idea for the work, commented on individual chapters, or offered various types of support along the way, including Sandra Coliver, Alice Evans, Joseph Foti, Stephan Grimmelikhuijsen, Frank Hendriks, Mathias Koenig-Archibugi, Milli Lake, Ranjit Lall, Charles Menifield, Abraham Newman, Tom Pegram, Greg Porumbescu, Alasdair Roberts, David Rosenbloom, Gregg Van Ryzin, and Stavros Zouridis.

We had many vital and fascinating discussions with the individuals we interviewed for the research and who made it possible for us to uncover our insights about the direct and indirect pathways of public sector reform and to make connections between ideas and processes taking shape among different sectors of society and among different countries and transnational stakeholders. We appreciate them taking the time to speak with us and sharing their insights.

This book is dedicated to our families. Suzanne is especially grateful for Richard, Douglas, and Simon Heap’s patience and unwavering support while this book was being written.

Finally, we would like to thank all of those individuals associated with MIT Press who helped usher this project along. The anonymous reviewers were exceedingly thorough and constructive with their critiques. The final product is undoubtedly better because of their thoughtful feedback. Texas A&M University’s Prof. Sandra Braman serves as the Information Policy Series editor. This project would not be the one it is today without her high level of professionalism, insightful assessments, and always helpful guidance—and we thank her for it.

1 INTRODUCTION

On September 20, 2011, at the UN General Assembly meeting in New York City, eight founding governments launched the Open Government Partnership. Representatives from Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, Norway, the Philippines, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States each endorsed a declaration of shared principles and presented action plans containing their governments’ specific commitments. The new multilateral initiative aimed to harness the recent wave of attention and energy surrounding open government to secure concrete commitments from governments to promote transparency, empower citizens, fight corruption, and harness new technologies to strengthen governance (Open Government Partnership, n.d.).

The Open Government Partnership boasted several unique elements for an international institution. Although initiated largely by joint efforts between the United States and a collaboration of foundations and aid agencies, more than half of the founding governments were in the Global South. Brazil served alongside the United States, both as inaugural cochairs. The Open Government Partnership embraced multistakeholder participation, giving civil society organizations full parity of representation on its Steering Committee and promoting innovative models of cocreation between governments and their citizens. The partnership eschewed one-size-fits-all standards, instead encouraging governments to make flexible, voluntary commitments that fit local context and could generate a race to the top (Weinstein, 2013). The Open Government Partnership also sought to avoid the lumbering bureaucracy of many traditional international institutions, aiming instead for a lean dynamism often explicitly compared with a start-up company. The combination of these features was appealing: As of the official launch, thirty-eight new governments had announced intentions to join, committing to develop their own action plans.

And so, with great fanfare and a speech from US president Barack Obama calling open government the essence of democracy (White House, 2011), the Open Government Partnership was officially launched.

But the new movement was not welcomed by everyone. Despite having an original approach and influential leaders to ring in its arrival, from the start, there were many eyebrows raised by the prospect of such a lightweight outfit being able to live up to the hype. The Economist (2011a) described the initiative as really nothing new or major and said its launch seemed rushed (2011b). Transparency experts said that the move smacked of cyber-optimism (Rooney, 2013) and asked: Can we expect the OGP to be anything more than feel-good window-dressing? (Michener, 2011b).

Indeed, several years later, this prognosis appeared to have been borne out. One could easily think that the Open Government Partnership was a failure—particularly in the founding countries. It appeared that in many of the founding countries, the reform movements for transparency and accountability had begun to lose their way, with other forces in government and society having more powerful, opposing effects on governance. Examples of founding countries behaving cynically in contradiction to the principles of openness seemed to abound. Indeed, many of the open government policies billed as new or inventive were just the continuation of traditional transparency programs (Piotrowski, 2017).

Of the Partnership’s eight founding member countries, six would see major democratic disruptions over the next several years. These included the election of populist leaders in the Philippines, the United States, Brazil, and Mexico; national-scale corruption scandals in Brazil, Mexico, and South Africa; and episodes of governance dysfunction like the handling of Brexit in the United Kingdom. Only Indonesia and Norway generally seemed immune from these trends.

Reasons for skepticism could also be found in the initiative’s structure and goals. Member countries commit to no set standard of action; instead, they design their own National Action Plans composed of individual commitments whose number, scope, focus, and design are up to individual governments. Many governments made commitments that were minor, vague, irrelevant, or concerned policies already underway. Further, as long as countries adhered to the formal procedural guidelines, there was no express requirement that the commitments be implemented. Even the goals of open government itself were criticized for their ambiguity, with Yu and Robinson (2012) arguing that the term ‘open government’ has become too vague to be a useful label, creating risks that governments may be able to take credit for increased public accountability simply by delivering open data technology (182). Many individuals involved with the Open Government Partnership raised concerns over the prevalence of commitments that seemed to value flashy technology over real progress toward accountability. Other analysts criticized the open government movement for its apparent neoliberal tilt (Bates, 2014; Pozen, 2018) or as a back-door strategy for democracy-promotion and opening markets (Michener & Bersch, 2013, 240). Meanwhile, disagreements over the relative merits of reforms based on open data or freedom of information (Noveck, 2017) threatened to open rifts in the open government advocacy community.

The inclusion of civil society organizations in the Open Government Partnership’s governance structure led to growing tensions between them and governments both globally and in specific countries, especially around issues of freedom of association and other human rights. The membership of certain countries became controversial, and after civil society groups successfully demanded more stringent membership rules and sanctions, several governments announced their withdrawal—including Tanzania, formerly a Steering Committee member. Tensions erupted within countries as well, with civil society coalitions in both Mexico and Guatemala announcing their refusal to continue cooperation with their governments in the cocreation process. According to Civicus (2016), the participation environment for civil society organizations was seriously undermined in nearly a third of all Open Government Partnership members in 2016.

Surveying this landscape in the late 2010s, one might see the Open Government Partnership, and the open government movement overall, as a failure, rife with internal conflicts and overwhelmed by a world turning toward illiberalism, populism, unrepentant corruption, and hypocrisy around transparency. One might see the Open Government Partnership as another traveler on the well-worn path of so many international initiatives toward empty rhetoric, window-dressing action, and ultimate irrelevance.

However, this is not a book about the failure of the Open Government Partnership. Instead, this is a book about the often-overlooked ways that voluntary, flexible, participatory, and iterative international initiatives can shape domestic public sector reform. Looking beyond the headlines and beneath the surface, we argue that existing approaches neglect the full breadth of mechanisms through which an institution like the Open Government Partnership can have meaningful impacts.

Should the partnership be understood as a commitment machine, impactful only to the extent that it induces member governments to commit to meaningful reforms and actually follow through on them? This commit-and-comply focus is the standard approach in most research on international institutions and, indeed, in how many stakeholders have sought to assess the Open Government Partnership. We call this the direct pathway to impact.

But we argue that this approach is too narrow and that instead, we must understand the Open Government Partnership as involving participants in a process that both evolves over time and has its own causal effects, even independent of commitments themselves. This indirect pathway to change is composed of process-driven mechanisms and is distinct from the direct pathway of change that comprises more traditional compliance mechanisms.

In this book, we show that while the direct pathway of change has received the most attention, its mechanisms have been frequently stymied or have yielded disappointing results. Yet we argue that the indirect pathway instead highlights the most promising potential to drive reform and is, in many ways, the most instructional for understanding new processes by which international actors influence the ideas and practices used in the quest to transform government.

Our book is motivated by the question of how international initiatives can and do shape domestic public sector reform. We study this question in the contexts of a specific initiative—the Open Government Partnership—and a particular arena of governance—the cluster of transparency, accountability, participation, and technology-based reforms known collectively as open government. In the remainder of this chapter, we introduce the reader to these specific contexts and then review the relevant pieces of literature, crossing usual disciplinary boundaries between international relations and public administration. Finally, we present our argument, emphasizing the importance of the indirect pathway of impact, and discuss the types of evidence we draw on in this book to demonstrate.

THE QUESTION OF IMPACT

Can a voluntary international initiative have a meaningful impact on public sector reform? We seek to answer this question in the case of the Open Government Partnership, given its novel institutional design features, rapid growth in membership, and clear centrality to a new reform movement focusing on open government. Indeed, this is a daunting question in light of the design of the Open Government Partnership and the existing literature on both international institutions and public sector reforms.

The Open Government Partnership is an unusual international initiative, combining a largely voluntary, flexible, and nonbinding soft institutional design (Abbott & Snidal, 2000) with an unprecedented level of civil society participation within the organization and an iterative process that repeats every two years. There are several characteristics that make the partnership stand out as a novelty in the world of international institutions.

First, the Open Government Partnership sets no binding standard to which members must adhere; rather, it encourages flexible commitments driven by local needs and interests. The range of commitments across issue areas and policy types is enormous, including new legislation, open data portals, new venues for participatory policymaking, and sectoral transparency efforts across domains, including budgets, natural resources, foreign aid, and public service delivery. At best, this flexibility encourages innovation and alignment with local priorities. At worst, it allows countries to opportunistically make commitments that are narrow, superficial, or irrelevant to the goals of open government.

Second, the Open Government Partnership also sets a relatively low bar for membership. Although it always had eligibility criteria, these have allowed many nondemocratic countries to join the partnership, such as Azerbaijan and Jordan.

Third, the Open Government Partnership features only limited enforcement mechanisms. For the first several years, sanctions (such as being rendered inactive) could only be imposed for failing to adhere to the formal National Action Plan process and not for any broader features of open government or democratic rights in member countries. Furthermore, for the first several years, there was no penalty for governments failing to implement any of their commitments as long as National Action Plans were on time and met formal criteria for civil society collaboration.

Finally, the Open Government Partnership was initially launched as a lean, start-up model of global initiative that aimed to avoid what its founders saw as the slow, inefficient bureaucracies of traditional international institutions. Yet this model faced difficulty managing the Partnership’s complex activities and diverse stakeholders.

However, the Open Government Partnership also featured an unprecedented level of formal inclusion of civil society organizations in its governance structure. Its Steering Committee features full parity between government and civil society representatives, with one cochair from each. The partnership also encourages deep civil society participation at the domestic level through consultation and cocreation in the National Action Plan design and implementation processes. Not only are civil society organizations encouraged to formally participate within the organization and throughout the action plan development process, but the Open Government Partnership also encourages domestic reforms focusing on public participation broadly defined to include not only civil society but other actors, like companies, citizens, associations, and so on. However, while these two types of participation are closely related, in the context of this book, when we mention civil society participation, our intended emphasis is on the governance structures that emphasize partnership with civil society organizations. In chapter 3, we also describe many examples of public participation initiatives that member countries undertake as part of their broader open government reform efforts.

Finally, the Open Government Partnership also features an iterative process similar to—and, in fact, predating—the pledge-and-review model of the Paris Climate Agreement. Governments make new National Action Plans on a two-year cycle, informed (at least in principle) by experience and by the review and evaluation by the Independent Reporting Mechanism. This iterative process necessitates repeated interactions among stakeholders, continuous expectations of new commitments, and opportunities for learning and ratcheting up.

Importantly, these design features of the Open Government Partnership represent a bargain of sorts between naturally reticent governments and reformers in civil society groups, donors, and some government officials. This bargain consists of flexibility and weak enforcement in exchange for participation and iteration. For reticent government leaders and officials, the design of the Open Government Partnership is appealing on account of the flexible nature of commitments and the relatively narrow and nonbinding monitoring and sanctioning mechanisms. These same features have often been the target of critiques by reformers, especially among the more skeptical civil society actors.

In exchange for accepting these features, the Open Government Partnership was able to include the innovative design features of participation and iteration, which reformers and open government advocates hoped would be worthwhile. Yet both of these innovative features had little in the way of track records, and it remained to be seen if they might serve to counteract the possibilities for opportunism and window-dressing created by the