Knowledge and Learning for What? - Open Contracting experience
World Bank Institute's Governance of Extractive Industries experience and learning from our work on contract transparency led to creation of the Open Contracting Program.
Open Contracting works at two levels – at the global level, OC aims to facilitate the creation of global principles and data disclosure standards that governments and regulatory bodies can use to help redefine contracting norms in favor of greater transparency and accountability; and at the country level, Open Contracting seeks to reinforce good practice on the ground and enhance disclosure and effective monitoring, with a focus on citizen engagement, largely through multi-stakeholder coalitions with representatives from across government, the private sector and civil society.
Our learning journey began with coalition building for contract monitoring. A need to share results and broker knowledge lead to capturing and sharing stories, experiences and results through a variety of mechanisms. These include:
•Learning by doing approach
In parallel we piloted and tested projects including the use of innovative approaches.
We also realized the need to expand and work not just at the country level but broaden our scope globally. This was the beginning of the Open Contracting Partnership and work on establishing OC as the new norm through global principles, a data standard and global advocacy.
All the learning and knowledge that was being captured both at the country and global levels needed to be packaged, measured and also generate ownership by the different stakeholders involved to allow for further learning and uptake.
The Open Contracting has focused on documenting stories and generated qualitative data. However, since 2013 it focused on also obtaining quantitative data that can help complement the existing stories and is applying M&E approaches such as Outcome Harvesting (OH) which has helped to unpack the change process and how our interventions are causing results on the ground. Based on an initial use of OH, the open contracting team is now finalizing an M&E system that pulls from Outcome Mapping, OH and Most Significant Change among other approaches. This new M&E system will be piloted in different countries and will focus on building stakeholder ownership and emphasize the learning aspect and not just a tool for reporting or upward accountability.
