ONE’s new Transparency and Accountability Policy Team has a full agenda, spearheading the organisation’s efforts to push for more open, transparent and accountable governance in order to accelerate progress on poverty reduction. Ultimately, our aim is to drive progress towards open development, a world in which people in developing countries have the information and resources that they need to hold their governments accountable and to make well-informed decisions to improve their lives.
As a stepping stone towards that, we are pushing for more transparent and accountable financing for development, so that resources (including but not limited to aid) are spent effectively to deliver improved results in health, agriculture, infrastructure and other issues that are key to the fight against poverty and towards prosperity. Transparency can turbo-charge accountability, encouraging innovation, incentivizing behavior change, transforming political dynamics, and helping to ensure that resources are invested wisely to tackle poverty.
To do this, we’re working on a number of fronts, pushing for natural resource revenue transparency, budget transparency, and aid transparency and encouraging donors to invest more in building the capacity of civil society organisations and other oversight institutions such as parliaments so that they can make use of the information that transparency will unleash, in order to hold governments to account.
- On natural resource revenues, we’re working with partners such as the Revenue Watch Institute, the Publish What You Pay Coalition and Global Witness, supporting the battle to make sure that Cardin-Lugar legislation is implemented in the US and that EU legislation makes it onto the books.
- On budget transparency, we’re working with partners including the International Budget Partnership, engaging with the Global Initiative on Fiscal Transparency as it seeks to develop and implement global norms on budget transparency and adding our energy to the Global Movement on Budget Transparency, Accountability and Participation.
- On aid transparency, we’re working with partners including Publish What You Fund and Transparency International, pushing to ensure that agreements reached at Busan are monitored and implemented and that the most is made of potential of the World Bank’s Open Aid Partnership.
- And on civil society and oversight institutions, we’re talking to the World Bank to try to make sure that a planned Global Partnership on Enhanced Social Accountability is appropriately governed and suitably ambitious.
To drive progress on these various issues, we’re focused on the G8 in the US, the G20 in Mexico, and the Open Government Partnership. We’re also exploring the potential of new technologies as transparency and accountability game-changers. And, we’re thinking about how best to tackle illicit financial flows, how to boost domestic resource mobilisation in developing countries, and whether a set of post-2015 development goals might incorporate governance, transparency and accountability issues.