We wanted to share with you all that the Open Government Partnership, Brookings and International IDEA have developed a simple method to track S4D commitments, building on OGP’s 11 years of experience in monitoring their OGP action plans.
We wanted to share it with you and make it available to those in the Coalition that are involved in monitoring and tracking S4D commitments. The more people know about it, and adopt it, including using similar terms and concepts to track progress, the easier it will be – we think – to draw some valuable (and comparable) conclusions for the second Summit. We are ourselves using this as a basis for tracking some anti-corruption commitments (OGP & Brookings), as well as electoral and some international commitments (IDEA). Given how little time is left before the 2nd Summit, we did not have time to go into an extensive consultation process on the methodology, as we thought priority had to be given to gathering valuable data in time for the 2nd Summit. The emphasis was also on making it as simple as possible, given the little time and resources many have at their disposal to do this.
- Methodological note – Here is the methodological memo that outlines the concepts and methods for commitment monitoring.
- Database – Here is a database of all S4D commitments that can be used for feeding the information gathered.
For governments, OGP has also developed a Self-assessment reporting template based on the methodology. And a template for any governments that may want to do New commitments for the 2nd Summit. . The first one can be helpful for governments when they send in their self-reports and also ensure consistency across reports. The latter might help countries generate more robust commitments for the second Summit. We are exploring with the Summit organizers if they want to encourage countries to use them. But those of you involved in cohorts may also want to encourage co-leading or participating countries to use them.
We hope those of you involved in monitoring commitments find this useful. Feel free to use and share with others.
