The politics of aid transparency: from open data publishers to users [1571] Members : #OER17

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Wed, Apr 5 2017, 1:30pm – 2:50pm

Authors: Elise Dufief

Room: Seminar 3

Theme: Policy & Practice

Type: Presentations

Description

There was little talk of open data or transparency when the Millennium Development Goals were adopted in 2000. Aid providers soon realized, however, that they needed to account for how they were using their growing aid budgets. Developing country governments developed national plans to meet the Goals, and increasingly demanded better data, and better and more transparent aid, to help them do so.

As a result, a flurry of new commitments to aid transparency, open government, open budgets and open data more broadly emerged. These now include a vast variety of actors from international organisations to bilateral governments, partner county country governments. all have pledged to provide more and better data on their development operations, realesing public datasets left for analysis.

This presentation will question the nature and motivations behind these commitments. What drives the UN and for example the Nigerian government to adopt transparency and openess commitments? By providing an analysis of the information released, it will also look at how these commitments are being implemented at the international and national levels.

We argue that the rhetoric around transparency and open data plays a major role in the construction of and participation to the international development community. However, to reach full accountability, more needs to be done to connect data publishers to data users.

Through primary data collection, interviews and case studies, this paper will investigate the politics of aid transparency and analyse specific tools developed to encourage use of the data by citizens to hold their governments to account as well as the challenges faced in doing so, hereby demonstrating the limits of the transparency agenda.

Gaventa and Mc Gee, 2013, “The impact of transparency and accountability initiatives”, Development policy review 31: p3-28.

Keijzer, Niels, 2016, “Open Data on a Closed Shop? Assessing the potential of transparency initiatives with a focus on efforts to strengthen capacity development support”, Development Policy Review 34(1), pp 83-100

Yu and Robinson, 2012, “The New ambiguity of open government”, UCLA Law Review Discourse, 59, pp180-208.

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