Civil Society wants transparent governance

The IRM conducts a biannual review of the activities of each OGP participating country, Drayton said in a release.

Trinidad and Tobago Government became a member of OGP in 2012 and the former People’s Partnership government approved a national action plan in October 2014. Drayton said the progress of implementation of the plan over the period 2014 and 2015 was limited with a need to strengthen the engagement between government and civil society.

He said that TT first plan contained good first steps on “Open Data and Natural Resource Governance,” although most commitments saw limited progress in the first year. The next action plan by the current administration, he said, “should focus on institutionalising civil society participation in the process and address additional priority topics like government procurement, corruption and open budgets.” As part of OGP, countries are required to make commitments in a two-year action plan. TT’s first plan contained 13 commitments under the themes, public service delivery, access to information, governance, and natural resource governance.

Countries participating in OGP follow a process for consultation during development of their OGP action plan and during implementation.

The PP government, Drayton said, conducted limited consultations to develop TT plan over a two-week period, with most activity concentrated in four days. The plan’s commitments reflect limited external involvement of non-governmental participants.

He said that although lack of engagement continued during the first year of implementation, civil society expressed a growing interest in participating in the implementation of the commitments.

His recommendations include the current administration establishing an effective stakeholder consultation mechanism to develop the next plan and to oversee commitment implementation with a wide spectrum of participation, following the OGP guidelines.