IODC18

Public contracting is often dominated by vested interests. The large sums of money, as well as the amount of discretion and opacity involved, make it government’s number one corruption risk. Supporting and sustaining political change that can effectively challenge this behaviour is tough, but essential for sustainable impact on citizens.

Open data has a key role to enable these reforms. This panel will discuss how open data can be used to leverage political change, and present the stories where bold individuals have used open contracting data to push for changes that challenge the status quo. We will also look at building up sustainable coalitions across silos and linked data such as beneficial ownership registers or spending information to sustain a level-playing field of information that can ultimately lead to change. 

The panel will evaluate the current status of implementation of open data in public procurement, show where promising progress and impact has been achieved, and how these results can scale. We’ll also try to understand why there are few prosecutions despite evident failures in public contracting such as in Quebec or Mexico.

We’ll give insight into strategies for leveraging open data to affect political change in key sectors of interest to citizens and discuss how public procurement  is conducted in 20 years and what a radical transformation could look like. The case studies the discussion will be based upon will include breaking up a price fixing cartel in school meals in Bogota, connecting planning, spending, contract data for busting overpriced contracts in Paraguay, improving costs of medicines in Argentina, as well as well as building a healthy environment for civil society to track contracts in Ukraine.