Representatives of the Basque Government, of the Araba, Bizkaia and Gipuzkoa Provincial Councils, of Vitoria- Gasteiz, Donostia-San Sebastián and Bilbao City Councils, and a broad representation of citizens and civil society organisations met at the Lehendakaritza yesterday to start the process for the co-creation of the Action Plan for the Basque Model of the OGP Local Programme.
The Lehendakaritza’s Open Government Director, Luis Petrikorena, and the Director of Citizen Services and Innovation and Improvement of the Administration, Javier Bikandi, thanked the over forty people for coming to the session and for signing up to the initiative. This would allow work to start on preparing the Basque Action Plan of the OGP-Open Government Partnership.
The Multistakeholder Forum will be set up, as the proposal and deliberation body, to prepare and implement the action plan. The forum will co-design the action plan and will monitor its implementation and assessment. This participatory body will be created with 8 members of Basque institutions and with a further 8 from the non-organised and organised citizenry.
The Action Plan will be produced before 31 August and will include a maximum of 5 commitments to progress in open government, by embracing at least one of the five challenges defined by the OGP: improving public services, increasing public integrity, more efficient management of public resources, creating safer communities and greater corporate responsibility.
An Open Forum will also be established to extend the collaborative network and generate greater potential for interaction with the citizenry, expert agents, private initiative, etc., who will take part in the processes to monitor and assess the Action Plan.
There will also be task forces to implement commitments, where the citizen approach will be included by means of their participation in the work team.
Open Government Partnership
The Open Government Partnership (OGP) is an international benchmark organisation whose purpose is to assess and develop mechanisms to make governments “more transparent, responsible and accountable to the citizens”. The OGP was created in 2011 after a meeting of the UN General Assembly. Its Steering Committee currently comprises 22 members, 11 representing governments and 11 from civil society organisations.
The Basque Country has been selected as one of the 5 new participants in the Open Government Partnership’s (OGP) Local Government Programme.
