Building Change Trust Open Government Partnership Seminar

The Open Government Partnership – a Path to Transparency, Accountability and Participation in Northern Ireland?

The Building Change Trust is hosting a seminar on the potential implementation of the Open Government Partnership in Northern Ireland. 

This seminar forms part of the Building Change Trust’s Creative Space for Civic Thinking theme, the aim of which is:

“To enable the Northern Ireland Voluntary, Community and Social Enterprise sector to better facilitate meaningful participation of individuals and communities in decision-making processes that impact upon their lives.”

There will be a keynote input by Tim Hughes from Involve, who is Coordinator of the UK Open Government Partnership Civil Society Network, there will be additional contributions from TASC Ireland, Amnesty International's Patrick Corrigan and Professor Rick Wilford from Queen's University Belfast, as well as, a range of local academic and VCSE Sector Representatives. 

If you would like to register for this event, please do via this link - https://bctopengovernment.eventbrite.co.uk

Background:

The Open Government Partnership is an international framework of government commitments to transparency, accountability and participation. The UK is one of the founding nations and there are now over 60 member countries, now including ROI since 2013. One of the initiative’s key features is that it functions in each country through a joint and equal government – civil society partnership.

In the UK there is a UK civil society network that participated in the development of the second UK national action plan (2013 – 2015).

Currently however, the OGP has little impact in Northern Ireland due to the fact that the commitments made are almost entirely at central government level and hence only apply in England and to some extent Wales, with one commitment applying in Scotland.

However there is no reason why this cannot change and OGP as a movement is interested in ‘making it local’ as a next step in its evolution.

For this to happen in Northern Ireland, one key step would be the mobilization of local civil society, in particular, the voluntary, community and social enterprise sector.

The purpose of this seminar is therefore to raise awareness of OGP within the VCSE sector and to gauge interest in forming a working group that would further consider OGP’s applicability and potential in NI and identify possible actions.