Project by Projects

Background

In this piece, I share reflections from rolling up my sleeves and working at the heart of Plateau State’s Open Government Partnership process. From helping shape the initial structures and action plan to building the monitoring framework and navigating the practical realities of implementation. 

I offer these lessons (for what they may be worth), to governments, civil society and development partners working to strengthen transparency, accountability and public trust. The operating environment may be in flux, and the field may have shifted its attention towards other urgent challenges, but the lessons from previous reform efforts still matter. Those lessons (some shared in this piece) help us understand what builds trust, what sustains commitment, where capacity breaks down and how institutions can carry good work through political and organisational change. 

In writing this, I am also reminded that open governance has not become less important simply because it is receiving less attention. If anything, the complexity and pressure of the present moment make transparency, accountability and meaningful public participation even more critical to the choices we make about the future.

Where it began. 

When I first became involved in supporting Plateau State’s entry into the Open Government Partnership, I carried some assumptions about how the process would unfold. I expected the government to be the reluctant party. The one that is naturally cautious about scrutiny, protective of information and hesitant to create spaces in which civil society could question its decisions. I expected civil society, by contrast, to arrive already organised around a shared commitment to transparency and accountability.

What I met was more complicated. In the earliest stages, some of the government actors appeared more invested in finding a way forward than parts of civil society. Behind the scenes, I heard about disagreements over representation on the steering committee, with seats on the committee being interpreted by some as leadership positions and, perhaps, as potential routes to future opportunity. To be clear though, none of those disagreements were brought to me directly; what reached me was indirect and therefore incomplete. Still, the dynamics were difficult to miss.

The work itself was largely voluntary. There is no automatic financial reward attached to serving on the steering committee or contributing to a technical working group. As the process continued, however, the initial positioning began to give way to the more demanding reality of the work. Those who were genuinely interested in transparency, public accountability and sustained engagement began to emerge more clearly. Over time, the more serious civil society actors took responsibility for moving the process forward.

What I learned from that early experience was a little unsettling. I, like many national level actors, had stepped into this conversation with clarity that the story is simple. Which is that governments resist, and civil society reforms. So here I was stepping into the first sub-national culture shock that Government is not a single actor with one interest, and neither is civil society. Both are made up of people and institutions responding to different values, incentives, pressures, expectations and constraints. At the subnational level, where relationships are closer and institutional boundaries are often more porous, these differences are more stark and visible.

My role (first within civil society and later as technical advisor to the government, then back to civil society), allowed me to see this process from its earliest stages up to the political transition and beyond that. 

I supported the state government in preparing its expression of interest to join OGP Local. I worked on the initial arrangements for the steering committee and facilitated conversations between state and non-state actors as they developed Plateau State’s first State Action Plan. I also developed the monitoring framework used to track the plan, the government’s delivery and civil society’s contribution. I remained close to the work until I stepped back somewhat in 2025.

A big learning for me, from that experience, is that open government becomes meaningful not simply when a plan is written or a committee is constituted, but when incentives, trust, technical capability, accountability and institutional continuity are allowed to reinforce one another. The closer you get to implementation, the more clearly you see that transparency reform is not only a policy-design challenge. It is also a problem of relationships, power, capacity and sustained collective action.

The action plan was important, but the system around it mattered more

Plateau State’s first OGP action plan covered a period from 2021 to 2023 and contained six commitments across five thematic areas. Those commitments addressed fiscal transparency through open contracting and participatory budgeting, citizen engagement, extractive-sector transparency, gender equality, and peace and security. The plan emerged through months of engagement between government and civil society, and the eventual intensive first co-creation process.

The result was not just a collection of generic open-government priorities, but a reflection of major challenges the different actors were grappling with within that context. For instance the inclusion of extractive industry transparency and peace and security reflected specific realities within Plateau State. Extractive activity created questions about host communities, environmental obligations and whether the state was receiving the revenues due to it. Plateau’s history of conflict also made peace and security an unavoidable governance concern, even though at the time it was not then one of OGP’s conventional thematic areas.

The co-creation process itself it allowed the state and civil society to interpret open-government principles through the realities they were facing. Yet the quality of the plan did not take way the hard questions; 

• Who would have the authority and capacity to deliver each commitment?
• Which civil society organisations could monitor technical reforms such as procurement and public finance? 
• How would progress be assessed? 
• What would keep actors engaged after the energy of co-creation had dissipated?

These questions were key because the plan itself was ambitious. The final learning exercise later acknowledged that the effort to accommodate a wide range of interests produced a plan that was, in parts, more extensive than the available resources and implementation period could realistically support. For my colleagues in the field, this would be a familiar risk in participatory planning: inclusion expands the field of legitimate priorities, but it does not automatically expand the money, time or institutional capacity available to deliver them. 

Financial incentives opened the door, but they could not do the work

While I praise the government at the time, it would be remiss to not point out what incentivised that initial commitment. A major factor shaping government participation was the World bank assisted, State Fiscal Transparency, Accountability and Sustainability programme, better known as SFTAS. Implemented between 2018 and 2022, SFTAS used performance-based grants to encourage states in the country to strengthen fiscal transparency and accountability, domestic revenue mobilisation, public-expenditure efficiency, and debt management. The programme channelled $1.5 billion in performance-based financing across the 36 states. (World Bank)

For Plateau State therefore, progress on fiscal transparency was not only an abstract demonstration of good governance. It had practical implications for the state’s ability to qualify for and draw down resources. Commitments connected to budgeting, procurement and public financial management could help the state meet broader reform requirements while strengthening the narrative and evidence needed to demonstrate progress. Now I understand that tt would be easy to treat that financial motivation with suspicion and to suggest that the state was interested in openness only because funding was available. But working closely with the different actors at the subnational level, I learned that this would not be a complete summation of the picture. Incentives are not external to governance; they are part of governance. Political leaders, civil servants, civil society organisations, funders and communities all respond to incentives, even when those incentives take different forms.

Government may respond to financial resources, political reputation, public pressure, or the priorities of an administration. While civil society may respond to mission, access, influence, community responsibility, visibility, institutional survival or the opportunity to shape policy. Even actors who are deeply committed to public value still operate within organisations that need money, time, staff and legitimacy.

The strategic learning question is therefore not whether incentives exist, but rather what happens after the incentive creates movement. 

• Does the reform remain a compliance exercise, or does it begin to alter routines, relationships and expectations? 
• Are new practices now embedded in institutions, or do they disappear when the financial reward ends? 
• Do citizens and civil society gain the ability to use the information being made available, or does transparency remain a supply of documents without a corresponding system of accountability?

The later World Bank review of SFTAS reached a similar conclusion at the national level. It found that financial incentives clearly encouraged reform, but that political realities, institutional capacity and established ways of working also shaped whether those reforms lasted. It also noted that changes which limited how much control officials had over public money—especially in budgeting and procurement—were among the hardest to sustain, particularly where existing relationships and informal systems benefited from the old way of doing things.  (World Bank)

For funders and international actors reading this piece, a key takeaway should be that incentives can indeed create a window of opportunity. They can persuade governments to publish information, adopt systems and meet measurable targets. But they cannot, by themselves, produce the capabilities, relationships and accountability practices required to turn formal transparency into public value. That requires a broader systems approach — one that invests not only in meeting targets, but also in the institutions, people and relationships that make change possible and sustainable. 

Participation requires more than a seat at the table

The Plateau state OGP process included civil society organisations, community groups, journalists, professional associations, traditional leaders, women’s organisations and other non-state actors. The formal structure provided equal representation for state and non-state actors on the steering committee, alongside technical working groups responsible for the individual commitments. The co-creation review also recorded participation by women, young people and persons with disabilities. (Open Government Partnership)

That diversity and representation was only the beginning though. Once implementation started, the diverse actors needed to understand the substance of the commitments they were expected to advance or monitor. I found this to be especially true for the fiscal-transparency work.

It is one thing to believe that public procurement should be open. It is another to understand the procurement cycle well enough to identify what should be published, which institution is responsible, what the information reveals, where discretion can enter the process and what would constitute meaningful compliance. Similarly, supporting participatory budgeting requires more than convening citizens to express their needs. It requires an understanding of how priorities travel to enter a budget, how allocations are approved, how releases differ from appropriations, how implementation is tracked and how citizens can determine whether their participation influenced an actual spending decision.

The challenge then was not a lack of interest. Far from it. In several thematic areas, civil society actors needed more technical knowledge to monitor government effectively. They needed to understand the systems they were being asked to oversee. Without that capacity, participation was at risk of remaining symbolic even when the intention was genuine.

I learned yet again that in the field, capacity is not a single thing that an organisation either possessed or lacked. It includes the number of people available, their technical knowledge, the time they could devote to the process, the funding available for monitoring, their ability to obtain and interpret data, their confidence in engaging public officials, and their understanding of which institution was responsible for the next step. Government actors faced their own capacity constraints. For instance a civil servant might understand what needed to happen but lack the staff, budget or coordination authority to deliver it, while a political appointee might support the reform in principle but be pulled towards competing demands that seemed more urgent or politically rewarding. So yes, capacity gaps existed on both sides of this partnership.

I call this out because, when participation/engagement begins to weaken, it can be tempting to assume that the people involved were simply not committed enough. In some cases, commitment could truly be part of the issue. But in others, like in this case, the process may not have been designed or supported in a way that made sustained participation possible. Inviting people into a technically complex reform process is only the first step; they also need the information, skills and support required to actually contribute meaningfully.

Mutual accountability became a way of building trust

As with any successful partnership, trust is key. I learned quickly that it is not a given, simply because government and civil society agreed to sit together. It needed to be cultivated through repeated interaction, credible facilitation, technical competence and visible follow-through.

On one hand, the government needed confidence that civil society was willing to contribute to the work and not only wait to identify failure. On the other hand civil society needed evidence that government was not using the OGP label to perform openness without truly changing its practices. 

Meanwhile, ministries and agencies needed confidence in the people coordinating the process, while citizens needed a reason to believe that participation would translate into something tangible and meaningful.

A neutral party helped with cultivating this trust, especially during the early stages. I was able to bring the external facilitation that helped actors move beyond established suspicions, identify a shared objective and clarify the responsibilities required to achieve it. Working alongside other technical experts (on both sides), helped create what I would now call trust-bridges.  The competence we brought helped different agencies and constituencies make sense of this complex process.

For Plateau State, the monitoring framework became part of that trust infrastructure. It was designed to move beyond broad declarations of progress by breaking the commitments into clear milestones, identifying the evidence required and distinguishing government responsibilities from those of civil society. We designed it to not only count activities, but also to track independently what government had promised and delivered, what civil society had contributed, what remained outstanding and where responsibility for the next action sat. I believe, that that improved the quality of the conversations. It made it more difficult for government to say simply that civil society had failed to play its part, or for civil society to attribute every delay exclusively to government. Both sides could see where they had moved the work forward and where they had not.

By making both progress and inaction visible, the monitoring framework created a more neutral account of implementation that either party would not have produced alone, and that helped build confidence in the process.

It was no easy task though, as this level of monitoring is demanding. Evidence must be gathered and assessed, responsibilities revisited, delays explained and findings communicated in a way that actors can use. I worked through the full framework once and fortunately, did not have to return to it with the same level of intensity. That experience was another lesson. That a monitoring framework may be well designed, but it does not maintain itself. Mutual accountability also requires its own dedicated resources.

Still, at that formative stage, the framework demonstrated what each party had agreed to contribute. It reduced the risk that accountability would become a permanent exchange of accusations and instead helped create a shared record of movement. 

So you see, trust did not happen because everyone had suddenly decided to trust one another. It was gradually cultivated because parts of the structure made trust less risky.

Subnational politics is closer, not simpler

People approaching subnational reform from the outside often assume that the main institutional gaps will be visible and technically solvable. There may appear to be a few missing structures, unclear roles or coordination problems. The instinct is to fill the gaps, place the right people in the right positions and expect the process to work.

I made versions of that assumption myself. What became apparent on the ground is that there is politics in places where you may not have expected to find it.

There is politics around who receives an invitation and who gains a steering-committee seat. There is politics around who speaks confidently in the room and whose contribution is treated as authoritative. There is politics around which institution leads a commitment, which individual receives recognition and who does the less visible work between meetings. There is politics within government, between political appointees and civil servants, across ministries and agencies, and within civil society itself.

There are also practical constraints that can be misread as politics or indifference. For instance people may lack basic things like transportation, or more substantial things like organisational funding. Or a technically capable person may be carrying several roles. A civil society organisation may be balancing voluntary accountability work against the need to keep its own institution functioning. A ministry may support a commitment but have no dedicated budget line through which to implement it.

This is why values, priorities, incentives and motivating factors matter so much. They influence who comes to the table, who remains after the first burst of enthusiasm, who is willing to challenge a decision and who is prepared to carry the work when there is no immediate reward. At the same time, proximity creates strategic advantages. At the subnational level, it can be easier to identify the actual decision-makers and distinguish them from those who merely hold formal titles. Blockers are more visible too. It is easier to determine whether a commitment has stalled because of political resistance, limited technical understanding, absent funding, weak coordination or simply a failure to assign the next task.

It is also easier to see when a reform is producing tangible value. Plateau’s first action plan recorded meaningful progress in some areas. The state’s open-contracting platform was expanded to cover procurement in four ministries—Works, Education, Health and Agriculture—that together accounted for more than 70 per cent of the state’s capital budget. Citizen participation in budgeting was expanded from the state’s three zones to all 17 local government areas and 324 wards. The citizen-engagement commitment also contributed to the development and adoption of a state monitoring and evaluation policy, described in the final learning exercise as the first of its kind among Nigeria’s subnational governments.

These achievements do not mean that the reforms were complete or that every form of participation was equally meaningful. They do show that subnational open government can change the reach and structure of public processes. Open contracting becomes more consequential when it covers ministries responsible for most capital expenditure. Participatory budgeting becomes more tangible when engagement reaches local government areas and wards rather than remaining at the level of broad zonal consultations.

Local context can produce reform that a generic framework would miss

The extractive-transparency commitment is another example of what becomes possible when an action plan is shaped around local contextual realities. Plateau proposed a forum to improve transparency in the implementation of Community Development Agreements, Environmental and Social Management Plans, and the 13 per cent derivation principle within the extractive sector. The intention was to make it easier to determine whether host communities were receiving promised benefits, whether environmental obligations were being met and whether the state was receiving the revenue due to it.

That commitment received first place for Africa and the Middle East in the 2021 OGP Local Innovation Awards. The recognition was significant especially because of how specific that commitment was. It connected transparency to the experience of host communities, the conduct of mining companies, environmental protection and state revenue.

This was my lived experience of the difference between designing reform at a distance and developing it through close engagement. A generic framework might have focused on publishing more extractive data. The Plateau commitment asked what transparency needed to accomplish within a particular political, economic and environmental context.

The result was an Extractive Transparency Forum that had been constituted by the end of the first action-plan cycle, although it had not yet been formally launched. For me, I left with an important lesson that good ideas, strong commitments and even formal structures do not automatically become working institutions. 

For my colleagues in the field, I extend this learning to say that innovation may create the possibility of change, but implementation requires continued political attention, administrative follow-through, resources and the people willing and able to continue the work beyond the initial successes.

Political transition must be designed for

Political turnover is one of the most predictable risks in public-sector reform, yet I am surprised by how often it is treated as an unexpected disruption. I have seen plans that identify a change of administration as a risk without creating any real mechanisms to preserve the work when that change occurs.

In Plateau though, we recognised the transition risk early and tried to address it directly. As the election period approached, potential aspirants were brought into the conversation and asked to commit (on live television too!) to preserving the OGP forum regardless of who eventually won. The intention was to separate the value of the structure from the political identity of the administration under which it had been established.

I am happy to share with you that that strategy worked! Following the transition, the state retained its OGP structure. Some focal persons and political champions changed, while others remained involved because the value of the process continued to be recognised. I was among those whose involvement survived the transition.

This continuity did not mean that implementation was unaffected by politics. The first plan’s final learning exercise noted that election-related political activity diverted government attention during much of the implementation period. It also recorded constrained funding and a decline in civil society engagement after the co-creation phase. The plan’s implementation was indeed a case of mixed fortunes rather than uncomplicated success. Yet the OGP process itself endured. Plateau State subsequently entered a second action-plan cycle for 2025 to 2027, retaining collaboration between state and non-state actors and building new commitments around climate action, digital governance and public-service delivery. The second plan also continues to recognise earlier priorities and achievements, including open contracting, participatory budgeting and the extractive-transparency forum. 

This for me is a lesson of how to measure levels of institutionalisation. As a reform can be seen to be taking root when it can survive the departure of some of the people who initiated it. Personal relationships and individual champions remain important, but the system no longer depends entirely on them. That’s when you know you built something substantial and sustainable.

What governments, civil society and funders should take from this

For governments, the lesson I share from my experience, is that openness cannot remain a side project. Commitments need budgets, clear institutional responsibility, capable staff, evidence systems and integration into ordinary administrative routines. A published action plan is only the beginning. The real test is whether ministries and agencies change how they make decisions, and their “body language” in response to scrutiny. Additionally, it is good to recognise that civil society cannot monitor what it cannot access or understand. Inviting civil society into the process while withholding usable information defeats the purpose of co-creation. Engagement becomes credible when non-state actors have enough information, time and institutional space to challenge, interpret and contribute.

For civil society, participation carries responsibility as well as opportunity. Being invited to a steering committee or technical working group is not the outcome. The work includes intentional work to build technical knowledge, follow commitments between meetings, produce evidence, engage communities and take ownership of those parts of implementation that belong to non-state actors. That responsibility however, should not be used to obscure the structural constraints under which civil society operates. Sustained monitoring is often underfunded and unpaid. Organisations may be expected to analyse technically complex systems without the resources required to develop that expertise. Funders who value accountability need to invest not only in public participation events, but also in the slower infrastructure of civic capability.

For funders and international actors, a lesson I hope you leave with, is  that financial incentives can be highly effective, but they must be understood as an entry point and not a complete reform strategy. SFTAS demonstrated that performance-based financing could motivate states to adopt fiscal-governance reforms. It also demonstrated that the durability of those reforms depends on continued incentives, institutionalisation, bureaucratic capability and meaningful civil society engagement. 

For all other interested actors, pay close attention to the period after initial compliance and as engaged citizens and experts ask the questions that lead to constructive conversations. 

• Has the practice become part of the institution’s routine? 
• Can citizens use the information that has been disclosed? 
• Is civil society equipped to monitor? 
• Does the reform survive turnover?
• Has transparency produced an accountability loop, or merely a new reporting requirement?

What the field taught me

From a distance, open governance work can look like an orderly policy architecture: an expression of interest, a multistakeholder forum, a steering committee, technical working groups, an action plan, commitments, milestones and monitoring. Each of these elements matters, but none of them explains on its own whether reform will take root.

I engaged, and listened closely, and today I am grateful for the lessons that came from being able to sit with the complexities beneath the architecture. To learn about the financial incentive that made action possible, the civil society organisation decides whether it has the capacity to remain engaged, the technical language that excludes people expected to provide oversight, and the civil servant who understands the required reform but lacks the resources to deliver it. To sit with the political appointee managing several competing priorities and also with the community asking what a new transparency structure will change in its daily life.

I learned by doing, that progress does not happen through the work of one heroic institution. Rather through relationships among actors who may hold different interests but can still find a shared reason to move. It depends on capable intermediaries, neutral facilitation, practical incentives and structures through which responsibility can be made visible.

Plateau State taught me that open government at the subnational level is not a smaller version of national reform. The politics is closer, the capabilities and gaps are easier to see, and the distance between a commitment and its consequences can be shorter. That proximity can expose conflict and institutional weakness, but it can also make adaptation, relationship-building and accountability more practical.

The policy matters. The action plan matters. The formal structure matters. But open government becomes real only when the people and institutions around a commitment can keep doing the work after the meeting ends.

That is the real calling in this field of work. It is not simply whether a government has committed to openness, but whether the surrounding system has the right levels and balance of trust, incentives, capability and discipline required to practise it.

The lessons in this piece continue to shape how I approach strategy and institutional change through Project by Projects. We help governments, civil society organisations, funders and development partners look beyond the formal plan to understand the relationships, incentives, capacities and systems that will determine whether reform can take root. Where a commitment is strong but implementation is uneven, or where actors need greater clarity about what will make progress possible.