The Open Government Partnership (OGP) is a voluntary international initiative that aims to secure commitments from governments to their citizenry, to promote transparency, empower citizens, fight corruption and harness new technologies to strengthen governance. The Philippines is one of the eight founding countries in the OGP initiative and began formal participation in September 2011, when President Benigno S. Aquino III, along with other high-level ministers and heads of state, including US President Obama, launched the OGP initiative in New York.
The Steering Committee, made up of representatives from the government, civil society and the business community, leads the OGP process in the Philippines. The Steering Committee serves as the consultation and coordination forum on the status and implementation of action plan commitments. The Good Governance and Anti-Corruption Cluster (GGACC) of the President’s Cabinet is the coordination unit responsible for OGP activities in the Philippines, though in practice the OGP secretariat, housed in the Department of Budget and Management, coordinated commitment implementation and served as the communication center for the Steering Committee. The Integrity Initiative is part of the Steering Committee.
OGP Process Countries participating in the OGP follow a process for consultation during development of their OGP action plan and during implementation. Following recommendations from the previous IRM report, the PH-OGP Secretariat intensified efforts to create awareness about OGP. Though the consultation in the third action plan was broadened, the breadth of participation is still limited when compared to the civil-society organizations(CSOs) in the Philippines that are working on broader and strategic governance responsiveness and accountability and constrained to the immediate networks of those already involved in PH-OGP. The PH-OGP Steering Committee also serves as the permanent multistakeholder forum for OGP in the Philippines.
In anticipation of the 2016 election, the third Philippine action plan sought to institutionalize existing OGP participatory mechanisms and largely continued expanding the scope of activities from previous action plans. While general awareness of OGP remains low, the passage of an executive order (EO) on freedom of information and inclusion of new commitments on improving public-service delivery indicate sustained energy on areas with immediate impact on citizens’ lives. It was good to see that the Duterte administration passed an EO in July 2016 providing guidelines for the public’s access to information in the Executive branch.
Implementation of transparent disclosure policies at the local government level remains varied in the Philippines. This commitment is carried forward from the previous two OGP action plans, which sought to increase compliance rates for disclosure of budgets by local government units (LGUs). The commitment aims to increase the number of LGUs in compliance with full disclosure policy (FDP) and encourages CSOs to develop products using data from the centralized FDP portal. The government surpassed its target numbers for bringing more LGUs into compliance with FDP, though efforts by the Budget Advocacy Group (BAG) to produce reports and data visualizations using the FDP portal data stalled due to lack of funds. In this context, the Integrity Initiative and the implementers of an ambitious “Integrity for Jobs” (I4J) project are happy to report that 60 LGUs have joined the I4J project, have created transparency and are actively taking part in “Integrity Circles” that are composed of representatives of the LGU, business and civil society.
While the Philippine economy has steadily grown in the past five years, the country’s poverty incidence remains high at approximately 25 percent since 2012. The Aquino administration tried to address this problem with pro-investment policies aimed at improving competitiveness. The commitment to the OGP aims to bring Philippine competitiveness rankings from the bottom third to the top third in the world by 2017 in Ease of Doing Business Survey by implementing the Gameplan on Competitiveness, which includes performance-based incentive system of all government agencies concerned with business-process related services. The Duterte administration is even more courageous and wants to bring the Philippines to the top 20 countries in the Ease of Doing Business Ranking. The National Competitiveness Council, backing this dream, will have to create massive change to make this possible. The OGP will be happy to recognize such an achievement by the Philippines!
Image credits: Rawpixel images | Dreamstime.com