The Open Government Partnership Steering Committee has make it a priority to support implementation of the new United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
By Oct. 29, the final day of the OGP summit in Mexico City, 32 of the now 70 governament members of OGP, and many civil society organizations, had signed a “Joint Declaration on Open Government for the Implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.”
The Declaration commits participating governments to take advantage of the OGP infrastructure, including the National Action Plan and the guaranteed participation of Civil Society – to help achieve the SDGs.
The OGP also summarized potential activities and existing national commitments that would serve the SDG goals. For example, commitments could be made related to access to information, sustainable development data an inclusive consultative process for developing a sustainable development plan. A new publication samples such commitments from OGP national action plans.
The OGP Steering Committee also is considering the development of OGP indicators that would run parallel to the official UN benchmarks but be more complex.
“The OGP can be a powerful mechanism for deepening commitment to good governance in the context of sustainable development throughout the world,” according to a blog post by Mark Robinson and Manish Bapna, Bapna is a co-chair of the OGP Steering Committee and executive vice president and managing director of the World Resources Institute. Robinson is Global Director, Governance at WRI. A related article was written by Jamie Drummond, co-founder and Executive Director of ONE.
Bapna wrote that “open government principles are explicitly addressed in Goal 16, which aims to `build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels,’ and in other targets across other goals. Also, he said that open government is often an essential element of high quality and universal service provision. “By promoting more open, inclusive and participatory decision-making, OGP can help create the right enabling environment for successful implementation of the SDGs,” according to Bapna, “More specifically, open data, which is closely related to the transparency objectives of the OGP, has been increasingly recognized as important for development.”
Helen Clark, the administrator of the United Nations Development Programme, spoke at the OGP plenary Oct. 28, saying in her speech, “Going forward, I believe it will be useful for OGP to align its work on national action plans with countries’ plans for the SDGs. The UN development system will be looking to align its own programming with SDG objectives.
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