Co-responsibility, transparency and public innovation: Colombia's three priorities in Open Government for 2023
By: Diana Dajer, Citizen Participation Manager of the Foundation
Corona @dianadajer and Juan Carlos Fernández, Open State Coordinator of the Corona Foundation, @fernandezjca
Colombian citizens feel a strong distrust of the state, and their perception of corruption remains high. According to the OECD , only 2 out of 10 people trust the national government. Furthermore, in its April 2023 survey, Invamer found that 74% of the national population believes corruption is worsening, making it one of the most pressing problems.
From May 8 to 12, the world celebrates Open Government Week, a way to encourage collective action at the global and local levels to build more transparent, participatory, innovative, and accountable public institutions. Over the last decade, the Colombian government has made progress in creating public policies and institutional capacity to be more transparent and foster collaboration with citizens. For example, through its affiliation with the Open Government Partnership in 2011, and by developing, implementing, and evaluating concrete actions to strengthen Open Government through four action plans to date, as well as with the creation of CONPES 4070 of 2021 on Open Government. However, much remains to be done for Colombia, at both the national and local levels, to consolidate and sustainably implement an ambitious and sustainable Open Government policy that includes opening up all branches of government.
Collaboration and commitment to improving the services the State provides to citizens are essential to addressing distrust in Colombia and combating corruption. Greater participation with real impact on public decisions, increased transparency and access to public information, and greater accountability—in short, a strengthened and consolidated open government agenda—are urgent priorities for the country.
With a view to creating the V Open State Plan that the Open Government Alliance of Colombia began a few weeks ago, there are three priorities to strengthen the open State in Colombia in this four-year period.
1. Shared responsibility in the design, implementation and evaluation of public decisions
CONPES 4070 of 2021 on Open Government highlights co-responsibility in public decisions as a central element of Open Government. Co-responsibility transcends the institutional opening of channels for citizen participation, generating a vision of the public sphere in which citizens, the private sector, and academia are co-participants in the design, implementation, and evaluation of public services and the creation of shared value. This concept breaks with the vision of a welfare state, emphasizing the agency of citizens as subjects of rights and duties, as well as the need to forge inclusive public policies from the design stage to decision-making, fostering forms of participation that go beyond consultation, moving toward deliberation and citizen involvement in the implementation of decisions made.
As the aforementioned CONPES document shows, the country has made several regulatory efforts in this regard, such as Laws 1757 of 2015 and 1909 of 2018, concerning citizen participation and guarantees for the opposition. These laws include, among other things, provisions on accountability, social oversight, and public hearings for investment projects. However, the mechanisms created by these laws have limited implementation, low citizen participation, and are insufficient to foster shared responsibility in public affairs. For example, the 2022 Bogotá Cómo Vamos citizen perception survey shows that 72% of the population does not participate in citizen participation spaces, and only 14% believe that the government responds effectively to citizens' needs.
However, at the local level, various efforts are underway to promote co-responsible governance of public affairs, for example, by adopting methodologies that allow for the participatory creation of public policies. A successful example is the adoption in Yumbo of the youth public policy, which includes homicide prevention measures created collaboratively by various community stakeholders thanks to the territorial dialogue initiatives developed by NIMD, the Smurfit Kappa Foundation, the Yumbo Business Alliance, and the Corona Foundation in 2022. This methodology allows citizens, the public and private sectors, academia, and social organizations to work together to identify a pressing problem in the area and create a participatory public policy to generate a structural solution that can then be adopted by local authorities. Similarly, in Yumbo, the open government policy was created collaboratively with citizens in 2022, thanks to a partnership between the public and private sectors.
Furthermore, Demolab , the Bogotá City Council's public innovation lab , created jointly by the Council and an alliance of citizen organizations and the international community, such as Extituto, Ideemos, Fundación Avina, Diseño Público, Fescol, NIMD, and Fundación Corona, exemplifies how the public sector can collaborate with other sectors to innovate in local public decision-making and foster citizen deliberation on various social issues. In this context, this year the Bogotá City Council is facilitating a Traveling Citizen Assembly to assess the city's performance over the past four years, informing the development of the next district plan. This methodology, institutionalized in Bogotá City Council Resolution 550 of 2020 and recognized by the OECD as a best practice for institutionalizing deliberative democracy, uses a lottery system to engage citizens in dialogue on topics of interest to the city.
As these examples show, there are many opportunities to foster co-responsible governance of public affairs in Colombia. With this year's local elections approaching, these cases can inspire candidates to develop government plans, accountability reports, and public planning and budgeting processes that go beyond mere consultation or information dissemination, to promote co-responsible citizen engagement in public affairs and thus create a truly open state.
2. Transparency in the fight against corruption
If citizens have access to quality public information, we will achieve better oversight and social control of any project of collective interest. Likewise, transparency fosters a culture of institutional responsiveness within the public sector, where accountability to citizens and open data through easily accessible mechanisms, using clear language, become the norm.
Over the past few years, Colombia has made progress in open data, for example, through the publication of 16 datasets on the portal www.datos.gov.co , as highlighted in the OGP Independent Review Mechanism report for Colombia's Fourth Open Government Plan, which is open for public comment until May 18. However, this falls short of the need to continue publishing easily accessible information on public budgets at the subnational and national levels, as well as on government contracting, to enable social oversight of public affairs. Similarly, there are many weaknesses within public institutions in guaranteeing citizen access to information. For instance, CONPES 4070 of 2021 notes that between March 2016 and March 2017, 2,296 legal actions were filed alleging violations of the right to petition. The work on open data, the fight against corruption and the culture of transparency carried out by Datasketch , Corlide and the Anti-Corruption Institute , civil society organizations that belong to the Open Government Partnership of Colombia, is a great example of citizen control of the public to counteract the problems mentioned.
The lack of transparency in public information facilitates corruption, which directly affects the lives of thousands, even millions, of people who are deprived of essential goods and services from the government. In turn, it erodes trust between citizens and the institutions created to effectively address collective needs.
CONPES 4070 of 2021 and the recent National Development Plan include measures for the interoperability of information systems and the formulation of a national strategy to combat corruption with dimensions such as whistleblower protection, the right to access public information, strengthening citizen oversight, transparency in contracting and public management, public innovation and the implementation of mechanisms aimed at preventing, detecting, managing and sanctioning risks and acts of corruption under a sectoral approach.
The whistleblower protection bill, which will be presented to Congress in the coming days by the Transparency Secretariat, is a crucial tool for advancing the fight against corruption. This is especially important given that the low rate of reporting of corruption cases due to fear of retaliation is one of the main obstacles to prosecuting corruption crimes. These measures, along with an index to measure and compare the commitment to open government across various state entities, should be a priority in Colombia's next Open Government Plan.
3. Sustainable public innovation
Public innovation is a useful tool for making the services provided by state institutions more efficient and effective, and for improving the quality of life for millions of citizens. The major challenges facing the Colombian state require new methods and teams capable of interpreting the multiple causes of problems and potential solutions, and responding to them with measures designed, implemented, and evaluated in collaboration with the public.
In Colombia, public innovation has made significant progress. Led by the respective mayoral offices and city councils, through partnerships with universities and the private sector, and with support from Extituto, Diseño Público, and Fundación Corona, hundreds of public officials in Bucaramanga, Bogotá, Buenaventura, and Yumbo have completed public innovation training programs and are already implementing projects within their institutions. In Buenaventura, for example, a prototype of a technological tool is being finalized that will allow for real-time monitoring of public works construction progress and the District's school feeding program. In Yumbo, a technological platform was created that allows citizens to vote for or against initiatives proposed by the administration and the municipal council. In the Bogotá City Council, through the Demolab innovation lab, a platform was created that allows citizens to select the issues on which the District Council should exercise political oversight of the Mayor's Office.
However, a challenge to the impact of public innovation initiatives in Colombia is their lack of sustainability. High staff turnover in the public sector, due to the widespread hiring of employees on a contract basis without guarantees of continuity, often prevents those who have worked on innovation processes from continuing to develop them in the medium and long term because they leave the organization. The creation of a national public innovation network, where public officials, civil society organizations, and academics working in this field can discuss and share methodologies and information to improve processes, can support collaborative work in public innovation and the sustainability of these processes. For this reason, it should be a priority commitment for the next Open Government Plan.
Another challenge hindering the sustainability of innovation in the public sector is the lack of institutionalization of innovative processes and solutions. In recent years, there has been a proliferation of innovation labs in various public agencies. However, in many cases, these labs depend on the political will of the institution's leadership, and while their solutions generate positive results in the short term, they are not integrated into the institution's core values. In this year's edition of the 17 Rooms initiative, a joint project of The Rockefeller Foundation and The Brookings Institution, which aims to create spaces for collaborative action to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the discussion on SDG 16 focuses on prioritizing concrete actions to institutionalize participatory and deliberative democracy globally. This discussion, which Josh Lerner of People Powered and Diana Dajer of Fundación Corona are co-leading, can be useful in fostering ideas and collaborations that will allow for the sustainability of democratic innovation processes through their institutionalization.
Colombia's Fifth Open Government Action Plan presents a significant opportunity to engage diverse social sectors at the national and regional levels in designing key commitments that various institutions must undertake and fulfill in the coming years to achieve more transparent, participatory, and innovative institutions. We hope that the three priorities outlined in this blog, along with their respective diagnoses and proposals, will be useful in shaping the plan and strengthening open government in Colombia in the coming years. For this plan to address the priorities and needs of the entire population, broad citizen participation is essential. We invite you to participate in the process in the coming weeks, following the methodology developed by AGA Colombia.