The creation of a “community of practice” around transparency and accountability is a major goal stemming from a meeting of “an enthusiastic group of funders, civil society organizations, and researchers from all over the world,” according to the convening body, the London-based Transparency and Accountability Initiative (T/AI).
Attention will be focused on how to make transparency efforts effective and a series of follow-up meetings are planned.
The announcement from T/AI says the 50 people who met for three days in Cape Town, South Africa, Feb. 17-20, achieved two goals:
- We started building a safe space for T/AI practitioners, funders and researchers learn collaboratively and on an on-going basis in ways that improve their planning and impact. This is because, for example, all can share and reflect on our experience candidly.
- We formed “practice groups” around five priority issues and developed learning plans to make concrete progress in each issue.
Five Goals
The five goals are:
- The transparency-participation-accountability nexus: how to better understand and leverage the connection between transparency, participation, and accountability
- The issue of context: how to analyse the context of interventions to understand how and why they do or do not transfer successfully to new contexts
- Methods and learning from failure: how to choose the right methods, metrics, and approaches to analyse interventions, evaluate impact meaningfully, and learn from both successes and failures
- Incentives for learning: how to shape funding relationships and institutional structures to promote learning within and across organizations
- Learning how to learn: how to embed learning methods and processes at the core of our organizations and networks
Future Activities Outlined
T/AI is planning to support “regular web-conferences and online discussions, both for specific groups and for the whole community” in the coming year, according to the announcement. It also says:
Activities will include convening case clinics to support individual CSO’s approaches to link transparency, accountability and participation on the ground; collation of information about alternative methodologies for learning, monitoring, and evaluation, webinars and small face-to-face meetings to discuss what contextual factors matter or how supply and demand side interventions can be linked for T/A impact (see link) as well as a communication platform for the community.
We know that building a community will take long-term commitment, beyond a one-off meeting. T/AI is committed to help move forward the agenda set by the community. We are optimistic, among other reasons, because a number of members have come forward to provide joint leadership in taking the community through its first year.
We believe that thinking and doing as a community and placing learning at the core of our practice will far exceed the effectiveness of T/AI or any single organization’s attempt to produce knowledge alone. This has the potential to be transformative and strategically strengthen the field.
If you are a civil society organization, funder, or expert working in transparency, and Accountability and are interested in joining our community or following our work, please let us know on this form. You can also sign up below to be included in the meeting’s newsfeed. Your input will help shape where we go in the next phase.
Other Materials
A variety of materials were produced at the meeting and plans for future meetings are under way.
One such upcoming session, to be held in The Hague, will be a roundtable on the question: “Is there potential to increase effectiveness by better linking supply & demand-side approaches?” according to a summary.
Describing the challenge, it states:
Many of the field’s interventions have been designed to strengthen the demand or supply of transparency and accountability, meaning that they either target the civil society or state drivers of change. Yet, collective experience and a growing body of research suggest that sustainable, scalable transformation calls for bridging state and civil society drivers of change.
The reports on the Cape Town meeting include a one-page summary and a longer presentation.
A full list of the names of all attendees is not given, but the attending organizations are listed and the names of some researchers. There were 18 representatives from seven listed funders, 21 representatives from 20 CSOs, and 14 academics and researchers.
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