There are considerable responsibilities and challenges inherent in moving forward with the historic Open Government Partnership (OGP) that officially launched last September. Global Integrity’s new assessment of the National Action plans submitted to the Open Government Partnership by participating countries found cause for both concern and optimism.

On the one hand, Global Integrity found some high quality plans. On the other, according to their assessment, 13 of the 55 participating countries have no submitted National Actions plans at all, which calls into question the degree of their participation. Of the 42 plans submitted, less than 50% define metrics to measure the progress of those plans. Approximately 40% have timelines included in the plans. From the post:

Overall, our assessment shows signs of some real reasons to be optimistic – nearly 70% of the submitted Action Plans meet at least four out of the five SMART criteria. Only a handful of the total 42 plans fulfilled two or less of the criteria.

The biggest gap was in benchmarking – a little less than half of the countries outlined metrics for assessing their progress. Slightly better than benchmarking was time-bound commitments – 40% (around 20 countries) have not yet provided a timeline for their activities.

Tracking with the number of overall plans that could be improved, just more than 15% include commitments that are outside of the scope of what we consider to be “open government.” Around the same number of countries have yet to articulate how they plan to execute their activities.

When these issues are added to diplomatic challenges around South Africa’s proposed secrecy law, it suggests that all of the stakeholders in the Open Government Partnership — from the government co-chairs in Brazil and the United Kingdom to the leaders of participating countries to the members of civil society that have been given a seat at the table — will need to keep pressure on other stakeholders if significant progress is going to be made on all of these fronts.

If OGP is to be judged more than a PR opportunity for politicians and diplomats to make bold framing statements, government and civil society leaders will need to do more to hold countries accountable to the commitments required for participation: they must submit Action Plans after a bonafide public consultation. Moreover, they’ll need to define the metrics by which progress should be judged and be clear with citizens about the timelines for change.