By Toby McIntosh
Inclusion of a provision on access to information in the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals is now considered likely and attention is focusing on how to measure progress toward achieving the goal.
Supporters of Goal 16.10 are optimistic that it will be included in the final document, scheduled for adoption by the General Assembly in September. The goal states that all UN members should “ensure public access to information and protect fundamental freedoms, in accordance with national legislation and international agreements.”
“The proposed Goal 16 target on access to information now appears safe, rather surprisingly so,” according to a recent article by Bill Orme, the UN representative for the Global Forum for Media Development. “This is a major advance.”
“Unless everything goes really really bad, 16.10 is set,” commented another activist close to the process.
Work on Indicators Under Way
The breadth of draft Goal 16.10 could allow a variety of potential factual “indicators” to measure accomplishment of the goal. The overall draft UN document setting new development targets currently includes 169 goals, and observers said that each one will likely be measured by only a few indicators.
Supporters of 16.10 now are promoting the use of a metric to gauge the existence of right to information laws and the success of their implementation.
What it should look like and who should do it remain open issues, although in all probability the main actor will be the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), only UN agency mandated to deal with issues of freedom of expression, along with press freedom and freedom of information.
Although approval of the goals is expected in September, the decisions about the indicators have been put off until March of 2016. However, work is actively continuing on developing indicators with the realization that discussions of targets and indicators are inevitably interrelated. The inclusion of a new World Bank tool assessing RTI implementation is considered a possibility.
First Indicators Discredited
Several early indicators floated for 16.10 appear to have been dropped after being undermined by poor evaluations.
One of the ideas was to analyze the “percentage of actual government budget, procurement, revenues and natural resource concessions that are publicly available and easily accessible. Orme tagged the proposal “poorly conceived on several levels, from the philosophical to the mathematical. A second metric, aimed at assessing press freedom, was to measure the killings and kidnappings of journalists.
Both were found wanting in a somewhat haphazard UN vetting process, as described in Orme’s article.
Rated by UN Statistical Commission, the proposed measurement of available budget information was deemed “only feasible with strong effort, in need for further discussion and somewhat relevant.” The journalism metric was considered “difficult even with strong effort, in need for further discussion and somewhat relevant.”
Alternative RTI Measurement Sought
With these initial suggestions disfavored, other alternatives are being explored.
Principal among them, and recommended by the UN-supported Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), would assess: “Existence and implementation of a national law and/or constitutional guarantee on the right to information.”
Supporters of 16.10 also would like to see implementation of RTI laws made part of the equation.
Existing measurements by UN agencies are considered the favored first choices as indicators. Although no RTI measurements are currently done by the UN, UNESCO works in the area, producing its Media Development Indicators among other things, and is considered the likely host for any metric. A UNECO official pointed out that UNESCO assessments are linked to multiple data sets that are generated by other organizations, including civil society bodies, making them a largely international, multi-stakeholder exercise.
Informal discussions what should be measured are under way and expected to continue for some months.
World Bank Has Implementation Tool
While the ultimate metric may consolidate a number of data sets, and hinted by the UNESCO official and other observers, the World Bank, which has prepared a multi-faceted system to measure implementation, would like to see included its method of assessing the implementation of RTI laws,
The near final methodology is described in a working paper, “Right to Information: Identifying Drivers of Effectiveness in Implementation,” by Stephanie E. Trapnell and Victoria Lemieux.
The Bank is just completing a piloting phase in which the RTI indicators were tested in six countries.
Results are in for just three of them. Jordan was rated “weak,” South Africa “moderate,” and Uganda “weak.” The bank uses general descriptive phrases, eschewing numerical ratings. It’s thought that the UN, too, will prefer to avoid country-to-country comparisons.
The Bank relies on in-country experts to answer objective questions about implementation and provide documentary evidence. Peer reviewers will evaluate their findings.
With a few tweaks, the system is ready for use, at a cost of approximately $5,000 per country, according to Bank officials. The Bank plans to use it in countries where they have RTI-related projects, such as Bangladesh.
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