By Toby McIntosh
The Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is planning to create a detailed methodology for assessing the implementation of national access to information (ATI) laws.
The “ATI Maturity Model” is aimed at helping government do self-assessments of their ATI regimes and how well they work, according to officials of the OECD, the Paris-based intergovernmental organization with 38 developed country members.
The evaluation of whether ATI laws are being implemented has proven to be a challenging assignment.
The official international measurement effort is conducted by UNESCO as part of the Strategic Development Goals process. Goal 16.10.2 calls for the creation and implementation of ATI laws.
On implementation, the UNESCO survey asks four questions: whether request statistics are kept, if reports are issued, if training is conducted and if appeals statistics are kept.
Both UNESCO and the OECD have documented that many countries don’t keep such basic data.
The ATI Maturity Model aims to greatly expand the number of questions asked about implementation, according to OECD officials who spoke to EYE and presented the concept during a Sept. 25 webinar. There’s a “real difference between what is written in the law and what is actually happening,” said Emma Cantera, an OECD policy analyst, at the webinar.
Alessandro Bellantoni, head of the Open Government Unit, said in a later interview that “in the Maturity Model we can get much more in details in terms of all the processes,” including awareness-raising and capacity-building, measures for accessibility, proactive and reactive disclosure in practice, and monitoring and evaluation.”
Use of the model will be voluntary, but Bellantoni hopes it will become “an informal standard” and will have an impact in terms of “shaping” governments’ ambitions. OECD is looking into scoring the responses.
OECD officials declined to release documents describing their ATI Maturity Model, saying that the outlines first will be shared with an existing “Experts Group.” In mid-2024, a public consultation will be conducted, officials said, with hopes of finalizing the ATI Maturity Model in 2024.
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Building on Findings From Previous Survey
The biggest problem, Bellantoni said, is data collection.
The OECD survey revealed that only 64% of respondents collect data on the implementation of the ATI law. And “only a few countries conduct some form of evaluation of their ATI laws,” the report added,
Those findings resulted from a 2020 OECD survey of 51 countries that included 30-40 questions about their ATI laws and implementation. (See mainly Section 3 of the report issued in December of 2022, The Protection and Promotion of Civic Space: Strengthening Alignment with International Standards and Guidance.)
The OECD in November will release more data from the 2020 survey, officials said at the webinar. The report has been approved within the OECD and sent to governments, but OECD officials declined to release it while it goes through the “publications process.” (The OECD does not have its own ATI policy.)
UNESCO also has reported on data collection gaps. The results from its most recent survey are still not published, but the report on an earlier survey showed that out of 91 surveyed countries and territories with ATI laws, only 40 (44 percent) provided data on ATI requests for 2020, according to UNESCO’s summary of the survey results. (See EYE article.)
UNESCO’s methodology has drawn criticism, particularly in this report by several civil society organizations, SDG 16 Data Initiative Report 2022: Are we on track to meeting the 2030 agenda? The report identified “a number of reasons why it is hard to use these data to log comparative progress on implementation.”
The OECD effort aims to gather more information on implementation and could go further, into the utility of ATI laws.
The more ambitious challenge, Bellantoni said, is to assess the impact of ATI laws on broader policy goals. This level of analysis, raised in the 2022 OECD report, “implies having quality data on both the demand side of the law (the number of requests received and denied by subject, the average time of response, the number and reasons for denial/refusal, among others) as well as the supply side (responsiveness, capacity and awareness from implementing and oversight institutions).”
Other Scoring Systems Exist
The arrival of Sept. 28, now celebrated as International Day for Universal Access to Information (IDUAI), is usually is accompanied by the release of a few reports by civil society organizations evaluating implementation of national laws in their countries.
CSOs started celebrating Sept. 28 as Right to Know Day in 2002. UNESCO made the date the IDUAI in 2015, a designation proclaimed by the UN General Assembly in 2019. This year, UNESCO is sponsoring a one-day roundtable in Oxford, UK, focusing mostly on access to information and the internet.
Several models exist for assessing ATI laws and their implementation that were designed for use by civil society organizations. Other systems are home-grown.
The Access to Information Program in Bulgaria has produced evaluations every year since the adoption of the Access to Public Information Act in 2000.
One assessment methodology was created by the Freedom of Information Advocates Network (FOIANet).
The Centre for Law and Democracy has developed an evaluative methodology which has been used in Pakistan and Afghanistan. CLD also runs The RTI Rating that uses 61 indicators to assess the strength of national legal frameworks for accessing information.
There is no census of how many independent evaluative reports on ATI have been done over the years, but their annual numbers are limited (a dozen?). Their production is constrained largely by the cost and complexity of the task, as well as the paucity of official data.
In Nigeria this week saw the release of transparency rankings by the Public and Private Development Centre in collaboration with BudgiT, Basic Rights Watch, Right to Know and Media Rights Agenda was released. “No fewer than 175 Federal Government Ministries, Departments and Agencies do not actively respond to requests made through the Freedom of Information Act,” according to an article in Punch.
Maybe a few more reports will pop up this week.
