Abstract
The broad idea of ‘Open Government’ is widely accepted as a facilitator for rebuilding trust and validation in governments around the world. The Open Government Partnership is a significant driver of this movement with over 75 member nations, 15 subnational government participants and many others local governments implementing reforms within their national frameworks. The central tenets of transparency, accountability, participation, and collaboration are well understood within scholarly works and practitioner publications. However, open government is yet to be attributed with a universally acknowledged definition. This leads to questions of adaptability and salience of the concept of open government across diverse contexts. This paper addresses these questions by utilizing a human systems framework called the Dialogue Boxes. To develop an understanding of how open government is currently positioned within scholarly works and practitioner publications, an extensive literature search was conducted. The search utilized major search engines, often-cited references, direct journal searches and colleague provided references. Using existing definitions and descriptions, this paper populates the framework with available information and allow for context specific content to be populated by future users. Ultimately, the aim of the paper is to support the development of open government action plans that maximize the direct positive impact on people’s lives.
Highlights
Democratic governments around the world have embraced the concept of open government due to its promise of rebuilding public trust and validation
The focus of this paper is to develop a broad conceptualization of open government from the existing scholarly works and practitioner publications
A review of scholarly works and practitioner publications is described within the framework of the Dialogue Boxes (Figure 2)
Summary
Democratic governments around the world have embraced the concept of open government due to its promise of rebuilding public trust and validation. Whether the ambiguity was intentional or not, scholars and practitioners align in their concern that the current lack of definitional clarity for open government presents challenges to developing robust action plans and evaluations of their impact. While the OGP promotes the implementation of open government policies worldwide, the emerging results are not consistent across the participating countries, including changes in regulations and goals, different uses of open government implementation plans, and measurable achievements (Correa, Correa & Silva, 2014). These results are not surprising given the fuzziness of the concept and the extremely different conditions and contexts open government reforms are being carried out.
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