 Welcome to the last manual before drinks. It's just pointed out that I hate to be on the last guide before drinks, too, so I'll try to be quick. Here is case of opening up for you to gain memorabilia. So, the memorabilia is kind of a place for being well-governed. They often see as leaders of the pack. This is from the economist article, praising trust in institutions, but there's lots of this kind of thing out there. So, when the Nordics joined the OGP, which I trust most people are familiar with, and by the way, that's excluding Iceland, there was a lot of expectation that they would lead the pack. As it were, the Nordics were universally criticized for poor quality of consultations, poor ownership of coordination, and poor commitments. One commentator went so far as to describe it as a Nordic race to the bottom. And so, this is a curious thing. So, this is about research to explore why that is. Firstly, the question is, are the Nordics actually related? And that's not as simple as it might seem, because a lot of the data and a lot of the criticism they received was in the form of narrative evaluation reports, which are really hard to compare across countries. I have not taken the time to read all of the countries' reports. But what we do know is that the quality of the commitments and the national action plans are notably worse than other countries. And we know that the Nordics think of themselves actually a bit very different. Here we have this interesting equation between the Nordic model of government and the Norwegian model of government. Similar articulations are present in government documents from all the Nordic countries when they describe their activity or GDP. There's a presumption that the Nordics did open first. So, yeah, they're different. Secondly, is that a problem? It really depends who you ask. Civil society and the Nordic countries think it is. Universally, there are criticisms that the government could be more aware of. A lot of that goes for financial transparency, beneficial ownership, and by then reporting the way access to information laws and human information laws are implemented. So there's a lot of room for improvement. But there's also just this mismatch of expectations. This is one quote from the interviews. This is a government official talking about what OGP asks them to do. And here again, you see the presumption that we are already so open. This just feels like an onerous reporting process. And it's really getting in the way of doing work in government. So this is academic research. So I'm just going to real quickly bore you with a couple of academic slides before we ask what can be done. Because trying to figure out what it means and how to tweak the policy for open government, that's kind of the mission for this research. So the research question is, how do domestic factors influence the way that open government norms get interpreted in the country? And this is something we've known for a long time. Ever since human rights advocacy research, these global norms get lauded and debated and they get advanced in the global arena, then advocacy actors in country bring them all and argue for them. And they often get adopted through a variety of complex mechanisms. But they always get translated. They always get tweaked a little bit in light of national factors. So this was trying to figure out how that happens in the context of the Nordics. It's building on theory. A lot of the human rights research here, which tells us that OGP should work. But OGP modeled the theory of change for OGP and here's really closely to what the scholarship says about norm promotion on the international stage. You have something that's validated internationally. You get political leadership to sign up for it. And then you open up a space in country where people can argue about what it means and that should lead to norm adoption. It also tells us how context matters, primarily in the sense of the domestic salience of international norms and political discourse. And how significant it is both as a thing in this course and in domestic structures. How do laws and administrative institutions align. And then secondly, there's a whole host of literature on policy infusion, policy transfer and policy translation that really looks at how policies move across countries and the processes that shape them. A lot of this is in the context of the EU. And then the last boring academic slide is on methods. So this is largely using documents from governments and from the OGP and then based on the number of interviews. Most of these are in Norway. Norway was the most extreme case. So that's where most of the research is done. There's a handful of interviews in all the other countries as well. It uses process tracing, which is not just, you know, a fancy way to describe what happened, even though it is just a fancy way to describe what happened. It's a very rigorous process. And there's Daisy and her spider that are causality tests that can be mathematically modeled to try and figure out what actually caused this. So on the basis of this, what we know happened is that OGP was pitched and framed in the first instance as a way to hang out with Obama. Because it was so cool. And we see that it was framed to political leadership as an ambassadorial event. It wasn't framed as something that would lead to changes in the implementation in Norway. It was framed as an opportunity for Norway to tell the rest of the world how open Norway is. It was framed as an opportunity for Denmark and Sweden to show how open the Nordic model of government actually is. Now what happened interestingly after that is as it moved down from the Prime Minister's offices into foreign ministries, into the line ministries, and eventually into the agencies for implementation, it was institutionalized in all of the Nordic countries as a forum. And most of the time that happened in foreign financial transparency working groups and things like that. And so it was given to people who did not have expertise for what OGP was expecting to do, which deteriorated the amount of knowledge and the amount of contact they had with the international norms. This led to a general lack of awareness. If you go out to civil society in any of the Nordic countries now and ask them about OGP, they will scratch their heads. If you talk to the people who are in charge of implementing OGP in government, many of them don't know what OGP is. Almost none of them will be able to explain what OGP is for or what it's intended to do. As a consequence of this, nobody sees the value of it. If you ask them, if you ask civil society why they don't use OGP to advocate for their favorite issues around government openness, they will tell you, but that's just a middleman. I already have the ear of the newspaper and the ear of the people who make the political decisions. So there's no clear value in that public discourse. Nobody sees a reason to engage. As a consequence, OGP has led to almost nothing. In my 30 interviews, I have only found three people who were able to articulate a change that has come from OGP and none of them were able to provide evidence of it. And that's particularly challenging when we think about the cost. I mean, we heard about how we want to measure outputs and inputs together but it's been a very significant cost invested in this, not only in the form of finances and dues paid to the OGP but in time spent not in the least in reporting. However, there is a consistent reference to some very, very slight influence on institutional cultures. Repeatedly, within some agencies, government workers tell me that open has become a word that gets used. Now they feel as though they are able to advance the pet projects by referring to, well, we're part of this open culture national thing, so it makes sense, doesn't it? And there's a small bit of salience that has been allowed even in this context. So, reflecting on why it happened, how it worked, these mechanisms that are predicted by literature were all being institutional incentives to do your daily work, to proceed with what you're doing, and to report on OGP as necessary but not to do anything else. The idea that Norway and Sweden and Denmark are all leaders in open government and should share their faces with the world is prevalent in reasoning across the board. And public discourse simply did not happen. In most countries, there was one, two, maybe three newspapers and that was to be said to be a coverage. These factors moderated significantly. Lack of positions, particularly important. We talked a lot about this morning following John and Fox keynote. And the ambiguity of open government I think is worth recalling here. It's also worth recalling that this was a deliberate strategic decision. This is a feature of open government as it's conceived as an international war. When the OGP was put together, it was a conscious decision to frame it as a big tent concept that would attract as many people as possible. And we're paying for that in some ways now in that open government can mean so many different things to so many different people, similar to open data means one thing in the startup community it means another thing to the business community to the advocates and on and on. That can frustrate expectations. It can make it challenging to measure outputs and impact but it's a price to pay for a very deliberate decision. In the case of Norway, it means that everybody I spoke to was able to say yes, we're implementing the OGP. We're so open. It doesn't really have very specific things. There's a lot of research incidentally that shows how much more effective international normative mechanisms are influencing state behavior when they use rankings and hard numbers. There's a specific phenomenon called a commensuration. It's been demonstrated pretty convincingly that if you stick a number on an assessment of government's performance it significantly motivates social pressure inside of institutions and across institutions. OGP doesn't do that and so it's particularly poorly suited to the Nordic context. That political support this is the key aspect of the OGP period change. They always get the political leadership to sign on but in the Nordic countries once political leadership signed on it was never mentioned again and it was basically cited as a reason why it wasn't pursued. This is also something that was predicted by a lot of more recent literature on policy translation. Lack of go-betweens. Go-betweens are people who move information between the people who are supposed to be implementing policy at the micro level and the international policy entrepreneurs. This was very limited in the Nordic cases and it proved to be very effective in understanding the political government when it did occur. So, last slide. What does it mean? It means that framing matters. That initial framing being an ambassadorial mechanism that persisted as information about the OGP was disseminated across institutional structures in all four countries. It mattered and it was so effective in this dissemination at least in part because it resonated with the presumption that Norway was already so good. Rankings matter. All of the government representatives as well to mention how much harder they work on their open government performance in regard to OECD evaluations because there they are compared and ranked and they feel as though they get much clearer guidance of what they should do to get there. Go-betweens. One of the interesting things I found is that in each country as information was sent down the line from the Prime Minister's office through the ministries information about what OGP actually was became less prevalent. And then after the first action plan was reviewed and they got criticism information about OGP increased significantly in the focal points of OECD. But after that that information never disseminated to people that were performing databases. And so knowledge about OGP interest in collaborating with civil society on developing action plans interest in learning from international activities was always much stronger in the institutional agencies that worked with OGP focal points anyway. Even if it was never stated as that. And the interesting thing is when they talk about institutional cultural changes this is outside of the sphere of OGP policy. And so because I happen to have an office across the guy across the hall from the guy who's the focal point for OGP I don't feel necessarily more motivated to do my reporting differently on OGP. But I use open as an idea use it as a concept to advance work that I already want to do. I think there was one more. Yeah, and so the potential for spill overs in another piece of research that I'm not presenting here there's significant evidence that participation in OGP has a very modest statistically significant effect on e-participation and collaborative decision making outside of OGP policy areas. And so I think what this suggests is that there is a certain equilibrium towards the status quo that is affected by things like institutional incentives and ideas and that there are opportunities for that to be disturbed by new ideas and by public discourse and debate over what popular broad norms mean. But that has to happen and it can be affected if you go between at specific points in diffusion inside of institutions. Otherwise, the institutions that I've looked at where democrat instructions are very well established and where there's common knowledge that we are already doing all the democratic things that will revert to the mean every time unless it's necessary. So this is one of the few instances in which I think disruption is news forward. That's something that the OGP and other international mechanisms should be actively designing with their civil society counterparts in country. How am I talking? Okay, then I'd love to ask a question in this couple of minutes because the big question for me here, I find this super interesting about your work is what the question is, what does it mean for other countries, right? I'm tempted to think that because the relationship to other mechanisms is so different and because these phenomenon are present in other established democracies that it might resonate in other countries but I would love to hear from those of you who do country-level work whether or not this resonates, whether or not you've seen similar dynamics when institutions are adapting to global norms or not. If anybody has a comment on whether or not they've seen that, I'd love to hear it. Yes. From a sort of part, should we say that we pay a double-resonance a lot? I think it's true of some of the things that the lack of principles was also quite significant to be a feature of change of government or even of the change of principle part of the change of key leaders, the political leaders in that and a lot of traction disappearing because it was certainly a thing of individuals and I think at least in the couple that we've accessed that there's been a lot of changes in the world that were more accessed of that same dynamic. So it's part of your moderating practice that's quite specific and designing the change of government or changes in individuals who have a position of evil to possess. I don't know if we do it. Yeah, one other interesting actually that ties into that quite well is there was a change of government in Norway and when the new government came in they saw a strategic opportunity to use OGP to advance their modernization agenda which we see this a lot in OGP context it often gets framed as modernization or digitization or making government more effective and so that was pushed hard by the new government but what it meant is that less people knew what OGP was and they just referred to it according to the national action plan for modernization and it was related to IRN before and it just referenced the action plan for modernization. I guess I'm not sort of on the level of the OGP label as a stick or a process trick or something. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I have a related question back to you actually and maybe it was beyond the scope of the research but is having been ordered as part of OGP in any way helping other countries do things that they otherwise wouldn't be able to do within the OGP framework and a lot of OGP is about sharing whether in aspirational terms is there anything else that I would like to ask? The Nordics? No, in other countries. Yeah, I know the Nordics think so that they've been very helpful in helping other countries. There have been a number of meetings where the Nordics have been asked to proselytize as it were so some government officials have told me how important the Nordic presentation was to join. I haven't confirmed that with France. And there is an ongoing working group between the Nordics plus Estonia and Latvia and they say that it's been really helpful for them to learn from the Nordics but there's not a lot of evidence beyond that. Fair enough. Absolutely.