Public Participation in Open Digital Government

As the the Open Government Community, Connected by Data amongst them, meet in Vitoria-Gasteiz in Spain this week, they will reaffirm a commitment to the Open Government Declaration, with it’s central focus on supporting civic participation. In the new Vitoria-Gasteiz Declaration they will also highlight the need to link open government with broader global agendas, including the governance of “artificial intelligence, data, and emerging technologies”, providing renewed backing for the idea that “public participation in civic life” must extend to the public decisions about data and digital.

Where are we building from: mapping participatory practice

At the end of 2024, we kicked off a small research project for the Open Government Partnership to explore how the participation principles of open government might be embedded in the governance of digital technologies, and to map examples and organisations providing inspiration, ideas and support in this space.

The report, provided to the OGP Support Unit, painted a mixed picture. Although we found a growing number of organisations addressing participatory practice around digital technology, the field was limited in scale and scope - particularly compared to the rapid digitisation of both public and private sectors.

We wrote:

In a future world where the participatory governance of digital technologies becomes the norm, rather than an exception, we should hope to find that any project which defines digital policy, digitises public services, or regulates the use of data and digital technologies, would demonstrate how broad publics and affected communities have, at multiple touch-points had opportunities to input and guide decisions. … In practice, the vast majority of recent and current digital projects and reforms provide only limited space for public participation, often relying instead on expert and industry leadership and engagement.

Compared to other fields such as spatial planning or environmental regulation, examples of formalised public engagement mandates in digital are scarce, even though decisions about digital design and regulation can have far reaching and sustained impacts on a population. Furthermore, early models of open multistakeholderism in Internet and digital governance, enabling forms of voluntary public input and co-production, have been increasingly supplanted by tighter government-led regulatory agendas, or government-industry collaboration.

We also explored the substantially changing landscape for thinking about digital governance, writing in early 2025 that:

Since this work was commissioned in late 2024, the world has seen dramatic shifts in the global order, not least with a second Trump presidency in the United States presaging a slide towards authoritarianism and retreat from global institutions, the rolling back of many open domestic government measures in the US, and the take-over of the US Digital Service as the vehicle for operating the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Whilst the rapid consolidation of authoritarian government in the United States is following a path witnessed in many other countries, with dramatic and disruptive cuts to the public sector, the strategies deployed by DOGE of accessing and exploiting agency data, shutting down digital systems, and pushing rapid adoption of artificial intelligence in place of public servants, all outside of normal processes or mandates, puts in sharp relief the powerful role of digital technology in the modern state, and the critical challenges around its governance. In a context where many states are also reliant upon US-produced and governed private sector ICT systems and cloud platforms, models of digital governance that were previously backed by an assumption of a robust US rule of law, are drawn into question. 

Taking this into account, we must address a context in which participatory governance of digital technology is both more important than ever, but also in which the weaknesses of voluntary models of participatory engagement are put into sharp relief. Whilst participatory governance can be deployed as a means to direct digital developments, and provide checks-and-balances on the mainstream models of centralised digital power generally adopted in current approaches to artificial intelligence, digital public infrastructure and e-government, we also need to consider and examine models of participatory digital governance that re-architect the balance of power between institutions and actors. For example, work on data trusts, digital sovereignty and Public AI all seek to relocate where power lies: shifting points of control from cloud services to state-controlled or publicly managed spaces.

In a related vein, observing the rapid pace at which authoritarian or adversarial actors can co-opt data and technology in violation of data protection rights and frameworks, not least to target particular marginalised groups, and the comparatively slow operation of oversight and redress mechanisms, raises critical questions about how to design agile, robust and powerful participatory processes in future. 

This work also takes place in the context of, depending on your viewpoint, dramatic progress in the capabilities of artificial intelligence with transformative potential and/or a significant capital-driven hype cycle pushing for large-scale disruptive adoption of algorithmic tools in both private and public sectors. Whilst e-government introduction has always responded to substantial drivers from the private sector, the current AI wave appears qualitatively different both in terms of the apparent capacity differential between public and private sectors, and the framing of a race between states to attract AI-related growth, including through providing public data resources to feed AI development and driving AI adoption through public investment, procurement and creation of relaxed regulatory environments or special zones. 

At the same time, and across the Open Government Partnership at national and local levels, past waves of digitisation are incomplete and unfolding at different speeds. We should not allow ourselves to be wholly distracted by AI, and forget that participatory digital governance also involves questions of connectivity, digital inclusion, data governance and digitisation of hundreds upon hundreds of distinct government services. A full discussion of participatory digital governance needs to take in both participatory engagement in and oversight of macro-level digital policies and practice, and local co-production of individual digital services, or the embedding of community-centric models of technology development.

An ecosystem approach to participatory digital governance.

Looking across promising practices or opportunities for public engagement suggested in our interviews, or uncovered in the literature we identified five broad clusters of participatory activirty:

• Public involvement in setting digital strategy and policy
• Co-design of digital public services
• Public engagement in technology regulation
• Alignment of foundational technologies with public interest
• Public input to oversight, audit and redress

However, deployed on their own (e.g. an isolated participatory audit; or an alignment assembly with no connection to rule-making) participatory activities of these forms tend to have low power or influence. Rather, we need to be moving towards an ecosystem of methods: where participatory input to digital policy and strategy gets implemented through co-design of services, and monitored through participatory oversight, audit and redress.

The report goes on to look at a vision for participatory practice in each of these areas, and to suggest potential OGP SMART Commitments, some of which may make it into future versions of the Open Government Guide.

Developing the participatory digital governance field

During our research we captured information on almost 60 organisations working on aspects of participatory digital governance along with selected reports and documents about their work.

We concluded the report with a reflection on ways forward, writing that:

Creating a static map of organisations involved in participatory digital governance has proven challenging. Whilst many organisations may frame their work in terms of a more democratic technology environment, this often translates into organisational advocacy for public interest or human rights-based approaches to technology, rather than a direct emphasis on advocating for, or supporting, public participation in shaping digital governance. From the public sector side, whilst consultation on digital-related policies may be quite common, forms of engagement that reach towards ‘involve’ on the IAP2 spectrum, at least in relation to digital governance in general, appear rare. As such, a generic mapping exercise risks over- or under- mapping potential stakeholders and cases.

This raises a number of potential routes forward. One is to seek to build the field of participatory digital governance per se, articulating a clear vision statement for participatory digital governance and engaging diverse organisations around this. An alternative route would focus more on narrower areas of digital governance such as AI Strategy, Technology Procurement, or Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI), and articulating the current participation deficit in each, using this to identify both generalist participation-focussed, and specific issue-focussed, organisations that might be brought together to develop specific participatory digital governance agendas and action. This approach may, long-term, lead to the emergence of a participatory digital governance field, but would rely more on pop-up convening and collaboration in the first instance.

We’re looking forward to exploring some of these ways forward with the OGP Community in Vitoria-Gasteiz this week.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to interviewees who contributed to this work, including Leonida Mutuku, Joshua Olufemi, Maria Luciano, Emma Thwaites, Joe Massey, Veronica Cretu, Javier Ruiz and Mark Irura, and to everyone who completed the mapping survey or suggested potential examples. And apologies for not publishing any outputs from the project until now!