How the OGP is Addressing New Transparency Challenges

The Open Government Partnership (OGP) was created in 2011 to bring governments and civil society leaders together to “promote transparent, participatory, inclusive and accountable governance,” through advancing national and local level policy reforms. Since then, the issues impacting transparency and good governance have expanded dramatically. To understand how the OGP and its members (currently 74 countries and 150 local governments) are approaching new challenges, I spoke with Joseph Foti, Principal Advisor of Emerging Issues. Foti described his work as pushing the field forward, focusing on the intersection of anti-corruption and governance with technology, energy, climate, new forms of finance and more. 

One issue we touched on was artificial intelligence, which Foti sees as a potential tool for compliance. Even without machine learning, he says, we knew of particular suspicious payment patterns demanding further scrutiny. Now, machine learning is being used by major companies to flag such financial flows, and the data systems that companies maintain will allow them to use AI, as he put it, “to supercharge internal compliance mechanisms.” However, he stressed, “AI isn’t a substitute for good judgment,” and will not obviate the need for ethics and compliance training, as well as professional internal fraud monitoring.

By the same token, for governments to mobilize AI to combat corruption, they need to understand that the results will only be as good as the incoming data, and many governments, particularly in emerging markets, lack the data quality needed. To address this issue, the sector needs much more open, public, reliable data on procurement, ownership structures, and political finance, among other areas, and the data sets need to be, as he put it, “machine-readable, interoperable, verifiable, and validated.” The well-known tendency of AI to hallucinate heightens the need for verified data. From this point of view, he expressed concern about the recent US Department of Justice decision to delete existing beneficial ownership data.

We also touched on supply chain transparency for critical minerals needed for the green energy transition. In Foti’s view, different approaches are needed depending on the mineral and its source. It is relatively easy to examine US and Australian copper supplies, while cobalt, sourced elsewhere, has been linked to child slavery, civil conflict and wildcat mining. In many countries, he noted, it is difficult to have public scrutiny or to deploy open governance measures at the point of production, so it is easier to engage with the companies or purchasing governments that buy those resources. He cited efforts to engage with purchasers of Indonesia nickel seeking EU and US market access. In short, he said, there are various points in the supply chain where measures such as community consent, licensing transparency, and subsidy or tax transparency can be deployed.

Finally, I asked Foti whether he is concerned by the apparent US retreat from the transparency and good governance agenda. He pointed out that while the US was a founding member of OGP, the organization does not receive US government funds, and in his view, the US has as much to learn from other countries as it does to share. He cited some reforms that the US has adopted from others, such as participatory budgeting, open contracting innovations, and certain access to justice practices. In highlighting other countries’ achievements, he pointed out that past innovations have come from countries such as Ghana, Morocco, Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal and others. Even when there might be governance challenges in those countries, a certain ministry or agency can serve as a unique island of leadership. Moving forward, he noted that Brazil is the incoming OGP chair and that he also believes that the UK can step up in its good governance leadership.

Overall, given the complexity of new issues confronting the good governance community, he would like to move away from a “government vs. civil society” binary and be creative in finding leverage points to advance transparency. He is not confident in industry “self-regulation,” however. Even as traditional models of governance have weakened, governments still have a role to play. Foti thinks that the right infrastructure for transparency will be what he calls “nested institutions” with multiple tools and layers, mixing industry standard-setting, government standard-setting, clear regulation, third-party certification, and multi-stakeholder dialogue and oversight by civil society and labor.

Marc Schleifer

Governance, Democracy and Economic Development Expert