Good quality public services are critical to the lives of citizens and ensuring their effective delivery is an essential function of government. But governments are not alone in this; experience and evidence built up over a number of decades have shown that citizens and civil society also have important roles to play in improving, delivering and monitoring public services, and achieving positive outcomes. Open government reforms have the potential to improve existing services and unlock the ideas, knowledge, and capacity for new solutions to societal challenges.

The vision of the organizers of this workshop is that governments becoming more transparent, accountable, and responsive to their own citizens contribute to the ultimate goal of improving the quality of governance, as well as the quality of services that citizens receive. They want to see more and better quality public service commitments in Open Government Partnership (OGP) National Action Plans and Sustainable Development Goals Action Plans, which translate into concrete improvements to people’s daily lives.

This workshop aimed to catalyze ambitious public service delivery reforms; foster learning between government agencies, civil society organizations, and development partners working on improving public services; and explore how the OGP platform can be used to develop, implement, evaluate, and showcase impactful reforms.